Sarah Friar
CFO
OpenAI
Bio
Sarah Friar is the Chief Financial Officer of OpenAI. Before joining OpenAI, Sarah served as Chief Executive Officer of Nextdoor from 2018 to 2024, and as Chief Financial Officer of Block (formerly Square) between 2012 and 2018. Before her tenure at Block, Sarah served as SVP of Finance & Strategy at Salesforce, she held executive roles at Goldman Sachs and started her career at McKinsey in London and South Africa. Sarah currently sits on the board of directors of Walmart and Consensys, as well as on the advisory boards of HOPE Global, the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford University. She previously served as a director of Nextdoor, Slack and New Relic. She is the co-founder of Ladies Who Launch, a nonprofit that celebrates and empowers women entrepreneurs. Sarah graduated from the University of Oxford with a Masters of Engineering in Metallurgy, Economics, and Management and also from Stanford Graduate School of Business with an MBA.
Grace Beverley
Founder, TALA, SHREDDY & The Productivity Method
Co-Founder, Retrograde
Forbes 30U30
Bio
A serial entrepreneur, changemaker and digital broadcaster, Grace Beverley is an innovator by nature. Founder of activewear brand TALA, fitness tech brand Shreddy, and personal organisation brand The Productivity Method, and Co-Founder of AI company Retrograde, Beverley has a global following of over 3 million people. Grace has raised over $14m in Seed & Series A funding for TALA and Retrograde in rounds led by blue-chip venture capital funds. Beyond this, Grace is an established speaker and podcast host and was named first in Forbes 30 under 30’s retail and e-commerce list at age 23. Grace’s first book ‘Working Hard, Hardly Working’ was an instant Sunday Times No. 1 Bestseller. Her podcast of the same name has a reach of over 100 million people and hasn’t left Spotify’s Top 5 in the Business Charts.
Known for confronting big topics in an informal & accessible way, Grace is a leading voice on female funding, the representation of women in media, sustainable fashion and entry into entrepreneurship, which she has spoken about on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Bloomberg News and Vogue Business. However, despite tackling mammoth topics such as these, she’s always proving that you don’t need to take yourself too seriously to be a revered businesswoman.
Hiroshi Ishii
Professor of Media Arts and Sciences & Associate Director
MIT Labs
Bio
Hiroshi Ishii is the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. He was named Media Lab Associate Director in May 2008. He is the director of the Tangible Media Group which he founded in 1995 to pursue new visions in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI): “Tangible Bits” and “Radical Atoms.” Ishii and his team have presented their research at a variety of scientific, design, and artistic venues (including ACM SIGCHI, SIGGRAPH, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, Milan Design Week, Cannes Lions Festival, Aspen Ideas Festival, Industrial Design Society of America, AIGA, Ars Electronica, Centre Pompidou, Victoria and Albert Museum and NTT ICC) emphasizing that the development of a vision requires the rigors of both scientific and artistic review. In 2006 Ishii was elected to the CHI Academy by ACM SIGCHI, and received the SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award in 2019. He was named an ACM Fellow in 2022 for his contributions to Tangible User Interfaces and to Human-Computer Interaction.
Prior to joining the MIT Media Lab, from 1988-1994, Ishii led the CSCW research group at NTT Human Interface Laboratories Japan, where he and his team invented TeamWorkStation and ClearBoard.
Fawad A. Qureshi
Global Field CTO
Snowflake
Bio
Fawad is a strategic technology leader with more than two decades of international industry project experience involving consulting on enterprise data warehouses, big data analytics, and cloud solution architectures. He has worked across all stages of the technology life cycle starting from engineering, professional services, pre-sales, and business development. In his current role he works as Global Industry Field CTO, helping customers in multiple industries across the globe. He is passionate about sustainability and helps his clients in achieving their sustainability goals through the use of data and analytics.
Dr. Alessandra Sala
Sr. Director of AI and Data Science
Shutterstock
Bio
A research and scientific leader in Artificial Intelligence, Alessandra is the Sr. Director of AI and Data Science at Shutterstock. Alessandra has over 18 years’ experience in research and innovation gained whilst working in academic and commercial environments. Alessandra is passionate in advanced analytics, machine learning, and computational models with the focus of transferring innovation from research to products.
Alessandra chairs the AI and Multimedia Authenticity Collaboration, which brings together IEC, ISO, ITU and other standards organizations to foster a unified response to deepfake technology, addressing risks while harnessing the benefits of generative AI.
As Co-chair of the UNESCO Women for Ethical AI Platform, Alessandra is working with a strong community of women to foster diversity, inclusion and equality for women and minorities while encouraging a global ethical approach in AI. As Global President of Women in AI (a non-profit do-tank working towards gender-inclusive AI that benefits global society) Alessandra leads a community of women from 171 countries that empowers women and minorities to become AI & Data experts, innovators and leaders. In an advisory capacity, Alessandra also serves as the Governance Committee Chair at the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training in Machine Learning.
Among several awards, Alessandra won the 2024 Grace Hopper and the 2021 XV International Prize “Le Tecno-visionarie” in the AI – Industrial Research category.
In her previous appointment Alessandra was Head of Analytics Research at Nokia Bell Labs where she was leading research teams in several locations and developing a successful strategy for the Data Analytics division while driving changes across different activities like her contributions to the Nokia AI Ethics Advisory Board.
David Parry-Jones
Chief Revenue Officer
DeepL
Bio
David Parry-Jones is the CRO of DeepL, an AI company transforming global communications through the world’s most accurate machine translation. He brings a breadth of expertise in enterprise software and cloud technologies, having held senior positions at Microsoft, VMware, and Twilio. He has spent over 20 years scaling and guiding global tech companies through major transformations. David puts people at the center of his work and values customer centricity as well as company culture. By focusing on building, motivating, and retaining strong teams, he enables organizations to become high-performing businesses.
Si-Hui Tan
Chief Science Officer
Horizon Quantum
Bio
Si-Hui is a seasoned quantum scientist with over 18 years of research experience. She holds a BSc from Caltech and a PhD from MIT. At Horizon Quantum, she leads research development and oversees operations. Previously, she held research positions at A*STAR, SUTD, and CQT. Si-Hui is a prolific author in top physics journals and conferences, and was recognised as one of Singapore100 Women in Tech.
Trevor Hughes
President and CEO
IAPP (International Association of Privacy Professionals)
Bio
As President and CEO of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), J. Trevor Hughes leads the world’s largest association of privacy and AI governance professionals. Trevor has appeared at SXSW, RSAC and other privacy and technology events. He has contributed to media outlets such as the New York Times, TechCrunch and WIRED. He has provided testimony on issues of privacy, surveillance and privacy-sensitive technologies before the U.S. Congress, U.S. Federal Trade Commission and British Parliament. Trevor received his undergraduate degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and his Juris Doctor from the University of Maine School Of Law, where he is an adjunct professor and member of the Law Foundation Board.
Tech Hive Stage Speakers
Ben Colman
CEO and Co-Founder
Reality Defender
Efua Akumanyi
Co-CTO
Coding Black Females
Brendan Barry
CTO
Equal 1
Nabanita Roy
Senior Manager – Data Science, EY
Education Lead, Women in AI Ireland
Dr Sabina Brennan
Neuroscientist, ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin
Irish Times No 1 best-selling author
Fernando Dominguez Pinuaga
Vice President
SandboxAQ
Richard Skinner
CEO
Phased AI
Robert McArdle
EMEA Director, Senior Threat Researcher
Trend Micro