Alexandra Reilly

Marketing Manager at TechTO

Sylvie Shi

Machine Learning Engineer at Cohere

Sylvie is a machine learning engineer working on text embedding models at Cohere. She is interested in various pre-training techniques for learning a high-quality representation space, as well as applications of text embeddings, such as fast and accurate semantic search and data-efficient text classification. Sylvie graduated from the University of Toronto with a bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics, and a master’s degree in Quantitative Finance. She also holds a master’s degree in Machine Learning from Imperial College London, where she investigated uncertainties in contrastive learning under the supervision of Dr.Yingzhen Li. Prior to her time at Cohere, Sylvie spent time working on machine learning models at TD Bank in Toronto.

Elizabeth Gao

Senior Partnerships Manager at Cohere

Elizabeth is Senior Partnerships Manager at Cohere. She is passionate about sharing the latest developments and applications in Language AI with industry and communities, and working collaboratively to accelerate the evolution of how humans and machines work together. Previously, Elizabeth worked in investing and M&A in Toronto and New York. Elizabeth received her MBA from Columbia Business School and B.Comm from the University of Toronto.

Laura McGee

Founder and CEO at Diversio

Laura McGee is the Founder and CEO of Diversio, a technology company that uses artificial intelligence to help companies and investors unlock diversity for improved performance. Diversio is a two-time recipient of Fast Company’s “World Changing Ideas” award and has been featured at global events like the G20 and Davos. Through partnerships including UN Women, the Investor Leadership Network, and the Human Resources Professionals Association, Laura leads industry-level change in DEI practices. Prior to Diversio, Laura was a consultant at McKinsey & Company in their Public and Social Sector Practice. She was named Co-Chair of Canada’s Expert Panel on Women Entrepreneurs and holds Board and Advisory positions with Global Citizen, ArcTern Ventures, and the University of Waterloo. She is a C100 Fellow and David Rockefeller Fellow with the Trilateral Commission. Laura is a lawyer by training and a graduate of the University of Toronto and Western University (gold medallist). She currently lives in New York City.

Danielle Brown

CMO at Plusgrade

Danielle Brown is the Chief Marketing Officer at Plusgrade, the global ancillary revenue leader in travel, and Points (a Plusgrade company), the global leader in loyalty commerce. Her teams are responsible for Data Science & Analytics, Global Brand & Content, and Partner, Product & Performance Marketing. In her 20+ year career, she has been responsible for building and growing a number of successful marketing & business operations teams at national and global organizations. She builds deep, broad teams with wide brand/ performance/ revenue /data scopes. An expert in change management, she is also a trained negotiator and facilitator who is skilled at building consensus and driving businesses forward. Her experience stretches across the worlds of entertainment, wireless, loyalty, retail, e-commerce and tech, in both B2B and B2C capacities. An internationally accomplished speaker, Danielle relishes the opportunity to speak about all things marketing and leadership. Her true passion lies in building happy, productive, high performance teams, and in coaching and developing tomorrow’s leaders.