Presenter

Lav Varshney is the Della Pietra Infinity Professor and inaugural director of the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook University. He is co-founder and CEO of Kocree, Inc., a startup company using novel human-controllable AI for discovery and creativity, and chief scientist of Ensaras, Inc., a startup company focused on AI and wastewater treatment. Lav also holds appointments at RAND Corporation and at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He was previously on the faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and was recently a visiting scholar at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He is a former White House staffer, having served on the National Security Council staff as a White House Fellow, where he contributed to national AI and wireless communications policy. He was a research staff member at IBM Research and a principal research scientist at Salesforce AI Research. His research interests include information theory and artificial intelligence. He received his BS from Cornell University and his MS and PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.