Isabelle Bénard

Senior Director of Product Management & Engineering
SSense

Vivek Farias

Patrick J. McGovern Professor
MIT Sloan School

Anindya Ghose

Heinz Riehl Chair Professor of Business
Stern School of Business
New York University

Saar Golde

Chief Data Scientist
Ride with Via

Szu-chi Huang

Associate Professor of Marketing
Graduate School of Business
Stanford University

Meagan Johnson

Product Strategy Lead, Retail & CPG
Element AI

Barbara Kahn

Patty and Jay H. Baker Professor of Marketing
The Wharton School of Business
University of Pennsylvania

Brad Klingenberg

Chief Algorithms Officer
Stitch Fix

Ruben Lobel

Lead Data Scientist
Airbnb

Rick Neuman

VP, Strategy / Portfolio + Merch Tech
Walmart International Tech
Walmart Canada

David Shmoys

Laibe/Acheson Professor of Business Managemet & Leadership Studies
School of Operations Research and Information Engineering
Department of Computer Science
Cornell University

Stacey Shulman

Chief Innovation Officer
Intel

Gabriel Woo

Vice President
Consumer Ventures
RBC Ventures

Isabelle Bénard is a customer-obsessed digital native. Isabelle joined SSENSE in May 2018 as Senior Director of Product Management & Engineering to lead the teams building the technology behind SSENSE retail and international e-commerce operations. She is now working on how to combine technology, fashion and culture to offer a seamless luxury omni-channel experience.

Isabelle has spent most of her career in the online retail space at pure players such as Amazon and Global Fashion Group, developing innovative products that delight both customers and internal users alike.

Vivek is interested in the development of new methodologies and applications for large scale dynamic optimization. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2007 and is the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor at MIT. Vivek is a recipient of an INFORMS MSOM Student Paper Prize (2006), an INFORMS JFIG paper prize (2009, 2011), the NSF CAREER award (2011),  MIT Sloan’s Outstanding Teacher award (2013), the INFORMS Simulation Society Best Publication Award (2014), the INFORMS Pricing and Revenue Management Best Publication Award (2015), and the INFORMS MSOM Best Publication award in Management Science (2016). His practice based work has been judged a finalist for the Pierskalla Award (2011), the Gary L. Lilien ISMS-MSI Practice Prize (2016) and the Wagner Prize (2018). He has supervised ten doctoral theses; papers based on these theses have won multiple INFORMS awards including the MSOM Student paper prize and the Nicholson prize. Outside of academia, Vivek is co-founder/CTO at Celect, and serves on several technology startup advisory boards. 

Anindya Ghose is the Heinz Riehl Chair Professor of Business at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the author of the award winning and best-selling book TAP: Unlocking the Mobile Economy which is a double winner in the 2018 Axiom Business Book Awards and has been translated into five languages (Korean, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Japanese and Taiwanese). He is the Director of the Masters of Business Analytics Program at NYU Stern. He is a Leonard Stern Faculty Scholar with an MBA scholarship (the ‘Ghose Scholarship’) named after him. In 2014, he was named by Poets & Quants as one of the Top 40 Professors Under 40 Worldwide and by Analytics Week as one the "Top 200 Thought Leaders in Big Data and Business Analytics". He is the youngest recipient of the prestigious INFORMS ISS Distinguished Fellow Award, given to recognize individuals who have made outstanding intellectual contributions to the discipline with publications that have made a significant impact on theory, research, and practice. In 2017 he was recognized by Thinkers50 as one of the Top 30 Management Thinkers globally most likely to shape the future of how organizations are managed and led in the next generation. Professor Ghose has received 16 best paper awards and nominations; the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award; and faculty research awards from Google, Microsoft, and Adobe. His opinion pieces and research have been featured on BBC, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, China Daily, The Economist, The Economic Times, Financial Times, Fox News, Forbes, Knowledge@Wharton, Korean Broadcasting News Company, Los Angeles Times, Marketplace Radio, MSNBC, National Public Radio, NBC, Newsweek, New York Times, New York Daily, NHK Japan Broadcasting, Quartz, Reuters, Time Magazine, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Xinhua TV.

He has consulted in various capacities for Apple, Berkeley Corporation, CBS, Dataxu, DFS Group, Facebook, HR Ratings Mexico, Marico, NBC Universal, OneVest, Samsung, Showtime, Snapchat, 1-800-Contacts, and 3TI World, and collaborated with Adobe, Alibaba, China Mobile, Google, IBM, Indiegogo, Microsoft, Recobell, Telefonica, Travelocity, and many other leading firms on realizing business value from IT investments, internet marketing, business analytics, mobile marketing, digital analytics, social media, and other areas. He also serves on the Board of Directors of many start-ups in the US, UK, India, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and China including Lucidity, Tamoco, Adrealm, Leverage Edu, Co-FoundersLab, Ibus Networks, ZeroWeb, and EywaMedia amongst others. He teaches executives, CIOs, and CMOs in the U.S., Asia, and Europe on how to monetize the digital economy using Artificial Intelligence. He serves as an expert witness for IT and consumer related litigation cases and is affiliated with Cornerstone Research and The Analysis Group. He has provided expert testimony in multiple trials and depositions involving Apple, Alibaba, Facebook, Snapchat, Verizon, Yahoo, Federal Trade Commission, amongst others and has experience in securities, intellectual property, antitrust and competition, copyright infringement and merger appraisal cases involving industry domain knowledge, marketing, machine learning or statistical issues. He is a frequent keynote speaker in executive gatherings and thought leading events globally on the topic of mobile economy and has given more than 250 talks to global audiences.

He is an avid high altitude mountaineer, and has climbed extensively in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Dr. Golde is the Chief Data Scientist at Via Transportation, a ridesharing company transforming the transit landscape by providing smarter shared rides. Before joining Via Dr. Golde built and led the data science practice at Knowledgent, an information and technology consultancy, now part of Accenture. Prior to that, Dr. Golde worked for Revolution Analytics (now part of Microsoft) as their first analytics solution architect, and was the chief economist of the virtual world of Gaia Online. Dr. Golde holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University, an M.Sc. in Management Science from Tel Aviv University, and a B.Sc. in Physics and Math from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Szu-chi Huang is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. She received her PhD in Marketing and a Master’s degree in Advertising from the University of Texas at Austin. She also holds two Bachelor's degrees from the National Taiwan University in Business Administration and in Business/Financial Law. Prior to her academic career, Professor Huang worked at JWT Advertising Agency as an Account Manager. While at JWT, she managed global brands such as Unilever and Estee Lauder.

Professor Huang’s main research interest is consumer motivation. Her research has been published in top marketing, management, and psychology journals, such as the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Her findings were featured in the popular press, including Harvard Business Review, Inc., Forbes, Men’s Health, Inside Marketing, Chief Executive, Quartz, and The Huffington Post. She has been awarded prestigious fellowships and awards, including the American Marketing Association (AMA) Consumer Behavior Special Interest Group's Rising Star Award (2013), AMA-Sheth Distinguished Faculty Fellow (2017), and Marketing Science Institute (MSI)’s Young Scholar (2017). Professor Huang was named one of Poets & Quants' Best 40 Under 40 Professors in 2017.

Meagan has been loyal to the retail industry for 15 years, with the bulk of her career to date spent at the Aldo Group playing a key role in their international business strategy. She was pivotal in expanding the international business beyond the standard Franchise model into digital wholesale and creating the multi-channel, multi-partner framework that is reflected in their operating model today. Meagan has witnessed the transformation of traditional brick and mortar retail first hand and, recently, while on leave caring for her second baby girl, she decided to embark on a personal journey to understand and connect with the tech behind this transformation. The thought leadership of start-up Element AI was very much aligned with her view on how to balance human and tech and how, if harnessed responsibly, tech can truly augment an existing role, product or service. In October 2018, in an effort to be a part of the change, she made the leap from industry to tech by joining Element AI as Retail Product Strategy Lead. Element AI was founded in 2016 with the unique mission to democratize AI. Only seven months after launching, the company raised a historic Series A round, which enabled them to turn cutting-edge research into scalable industry-specific software products.

Meagan holds her Masters of Business Administration from Oxford University, Said Business School, and a Bachelor of Administrative and Commercial Studies from University of Western Ontario, and has been deeply connected to McGill on multiple fronts since returning to Montreal post-MBA.

Barbara Kahn is the Patty and Jay H. Baker Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She was also the Director of the Baker Retailing Center. Barbara served as the Dean at the School of Business Administration, University of Miami (from 2007 to 2011). Before becoming Dean at UM, she spent 17 years at Wharton as a Professor of Marketing. She was also Vice Dean of Wharton’s Undergraduate program.

Barbara is an internationally recognized scholar on retailing, variety seeking, brand loyalty, product assortment and design, and consumer and patient decision-making. She has published more than 75 articles in leading academic journals. She co-authored Grocery Revolution: The New Focus on the Consumer, and authored Global Brand Power and The Shopping Revolution.

Barbara has been elected president of ACR and JCR Policy Board and selected as a MSI Trustee. She is or has been an Associate Editor at JCR, JCP, JM, and Marketing Science. She is a Fellow for both ACR and SCP.

Barbara received her PhD and MBA from Columbia University.

Brad Klingenberg is the VP of Algorithms at Stitch Fix, an online personal styling service that commits to its recommendations by physically delivering inventory to clients. Brad and his team use statistics, machine learning and human-in-the-loop algorithms to optimize the Stitch Fix client experience, the management of inventory and the selection of items for clients. Prior to joining Stitch Fix, Brad received his PhD in Statistics from Stanford University and worked as a data scientist in technology and financial services.

Ruben Lobel is the Data Science Tech Lead for the Market Intelligence team at Airbnb. The team is responsible for understanding the supply, demand and competitive forces that shape Airbnb's marketplace. This team builds data products and insights that helps Airbnb optimize pricing and search algorithms, and prioritize host and guest acquisition efforts. Previously, Ruben obtained his PhD in Operations Research from MIT and was an Assistant Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions at The Wharton School. 

Rick Neuman leads the strategy and portfolio office for Walmart International Technology, and aims to transform how our International markets leverage technology to advance their strategies and deliver world class customer experiences. Rick also leads International Merchandising technology, joining the Chief Merchants from each market to help shape their system strategy and deliver on great tools that empower our merchants to put the best products, in the right stores, at the best prices.

Neuman has been with Walmart for over seven years. Before relocating to the United States from Canada, he was Executive Vice President of eCommerce and Technology at Walmart Canada. There he helped lead Walmart.ca to one of the largest eCommerce sites in Canada, with a highlight in launching Online Grocery to many markets across Canada. He also helped transform the Canadian technology team to improve store stability / infrastructure, and associate satisfaction through Agile delivery.

He holds a Masters of Business Administration degree from the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, and a Bachelor’s of Business Administration from McMaster University in Hamilton. He is the proud father of three daughters; Emilia (10), Matilda (7), and Eleanor (1.5).

David Shmoys is the Laibe/Acheson Professor at Cornell University in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, and also the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University.  Shmoys's research has been on the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for discrete optimization problems, both deterministic and stochastic, with applications including scheduling, inventory theory, computational biology, network design, and computational sustainability. Most recently, his work has focused on issues in mobility and the sharing economy, with particular attention to the development of algorithmic tools to design and support bike-sharing systems, for which he received the 2018 INFORMS Wagner Prize, jointly with Daniel Freund, Shane Henderson, and Eoin O’Mahony. His graduate-level text, The Design of Approximation Algorithms, co-authored with David Williamson, was awarded the 2013 INFORMS Lanchester Prize.  He is an INFORMS Fellow, a Fellow of the ACM, a SIAM Fellow, and was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator; he has served on numerous editorial boards, and is currently an Area Editor for Optimization for Operations Research and an Associate Editor of Mathematics of Operations Research.

Stacey Shulman Chief Innovation Officer Intel

Stacey Shulman is an Innovation leader with over 25 years of experience who is passionate about helping companies adopt sustainable and evolving innovation practices. She is currently the Chief Innovation Officer at Intel covering the Retail, Hospitality, Banking and Education verticals. Shulman’s team focuses on incubating and normalizing emerging technology in industries. Their current focus is around robotics and automation, Distributed ledger, Spatial web, AI, Machine Vision and Deep Learning.

Gabriel Woo Vice President Consumer Ventures RBC Ventures

Gabriel leads the Consumer Ventures team at RBC. Over the past few years, Gabriel's work has included leading RBC's innovation activities across the Personal & Commercial Banking (P&CB) as well as Technology & Operations (T&O) groups. Gabriel also oversees the Artificial Intelligence research work at Borealis AI (formerly RBC Research Institute). Gabriel joined RBC as a Managing Director in the Enterprise Strategy group.

Prior to RBC, Gabriel was a management consultant with McKinsey and Company in Toronto and Greater China. Gabriel has also worked at UBS Investment Bank, leading strategic change management across the Asia Pacific region.

Gabriel was trained as an electrical engineer, and holds a M.Sc. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science from University of Toronto.

Registration/Light Breakfast

Welcome Remarks

Anindya Ghose
New York University
"How to Win in Omni-Channel Retail"

Szu-Chi Huang
Stanford University
"Living among Robots"

Stacey Shulman
Intel
"The New Role of the Retail Store and the Rise of Experiential Retail"

Meagan Johnson
Element AI
"What Disruption?: Reducing disruptions to the consumer experience through AI-driven supply chain orchestration"

Break

Ruben Lobel
Airbnb
"Marketplace Dynamics and Experimental Design at Airbnb"

David Shmoys
Cornell University & Lyft
"Models and Algorithms in Support of Modern Urban Mobility"

Saar Golde
Ride with Via
"User Experience Drives Ridesharing"

Lunch

Barbara Kahn
The Wharton School
"The Shopping Revolution: How Successful Retailers Win Customers in an Era of Constant Disruption"

Gabriel Woo
RBC
"Redefining Consumer Experience for a Traditional Incumbent: Who is your customer? What is the experience? And how do you deliver it?"

Rick Neuman
Walmart
"10 Stories of Experience Innovation from Around the Walmart World"

Break

Closing cocktail reception