Faculty AI Symposium

John Barnett is the Co-founder of Supermoon AI, a collaborative inbox for businesses to streamline customer and team communication. He was previously CEO and co-founder of Chroma Labs (developer of the Chroma Stories app, acquired by Twitter) and held product management positions on Instagram and Facebook. He has led the development and launch of six apps with over 450M downloads. Barnett helped create and launch both Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories, along with helping to develop and pitch the initial product concept and framing of the WhatsApp "Status" market opportunity in early 2016. At Instagram, Barnett led the creation and development of Instagram's Boomerang and Layout apps. At Facebook, he helped create 3D AR drawings, AR world effects, avatars and Neural Style Transfer for Facebook's Camera, along with the Selfie/Blur/Boomerang capture modes in the FB camera and many other creation-focused features across Instagram and Facebook. Barnett holds dozens of patents on augmented reality, the metaverse and the algorithms behind Stories on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.

Francis Chen is a senior data science manager in the business intelligence and analytics department at Michelin North America. He is passionate about extracting actionable insights from complex datasets and driving data-driven decision-making to create value for Michelin. Chen graduated from Rice University and Carnegie Mellon University with a chemical engineering and marketing degree.

Adam Kawash is a senior data scientist in the Business Intelligence and Analytics Department at Michelin North America. Adam is an experienced data scientist who uses AI and statistical techniques to solve complex business problems. His background is in the physical sciences, receiving a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics from Michigan State University and a bachelor's degree in physics from West Virginia University.

Dr. Charlotte Lawson is a board-certified emergency physician and the CEO/Co-Founder of Darby, a healthcare AI company. Dr. Lawson holds a BA in Neuroscience and an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She completed her residency at Carolinas Medical Center, the flagship hospital for Atrium Health, where she also served as Chief Resident. While in the MBA program at Harvard Business School, Charlotte founded Darby to address operational challenges she witnessed first-hand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Darby uses LLMs, among other technologies, to sort, structure and qualify unstructured data for healthcare companies, beginning with Home Medical Equipment (HME) providers. Dr. Lawson was previously an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville.

Artur Rdzanek is the Director of IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) at Dodge Industrial, Inc. For more than 140 years, Dodge Industrial has designed, manufactured and supplied reliable industrial products and solutions for a wide range of industries and markets across the globe. Rdzanek was responsible for managing the product business segment as a business manager. As a marketing, engineering and operations product team member, he developed short- and long-term strategic plans for the taper roller bearings business. In 2018, as Director of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), he was responsible for developing a cloud-based, Industry 4.0 platform. Dodge Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solutions allow users to easily monitor the overall health of their equipment so they can operate more safely, track potential issues and proactively schedule maintenance before their system goes down.

Gary M. Shiffman is a war veteran, economist and applied AI researcher. He held senior national security positions in the US government, ran a business unit for a publicly traded corporation and co-founded two software companies. He is a Visiting Professor at Clemson University's Powers College of Business, a Non-Resident Fellow at Georgetown University, a Visiting Research Collaborator at Princeton University and an Entrepreneur in Residence at NextGEN in Greenville, SC. Shiffman earned his Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University and immediately joined the faculty at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. His research, focusing on the non-random production of violence and coercive behaviors, is described in his book, "The Economics of Violence," published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. He led and performed on many DARPA programs, each related to combining artificial intelligence and behavioral science. Learn more about Gary's work at www.garyshiffman.com.

Brent Westmoreland is the IT Director of Strategy, CyberSecurity, and Innovation at BMW Group. In his 23 years at BMW, he's worked in CyberSecurity, IT Infrastructure, IT Innovation and various other roles focused on strategy, digitalization and transformation. He has been responsible for developing BMW's future mobility services like ParkNow and ChargeNow. He was also responsible for BMW's ConnectedDrive safety and convenience services in North & South America. Currently, he is focused on IT Innovation with research into LLMs as far back as 2022 and multi-agentic systems in 2024. Other focus areas include Spatial Computing and intrapreneurship, enabling all business units at BMW to innovate more effectively.