Meet the Speakers

Shobhana (Shobz) Ahluwalia is the CIO at Peloton Interactive, where she leads the company’s global IT and Security strategy and operations. Her team is responsible for building and running the systems and infrastructure that help Peloton scale its products and platforms globally.

Prior to Peloton, Shobz served as the CIO of Uber, where she scaled and led the global IT strategy and operations team to support the Company’s exploding business growth. 

Shobz is a board member and advisor to the University of San Francisco’s Board of Trustees’ Committee on Information Technology Strategy (CITS), Consortium of Information Systems Executives (CISE), Zoom Video Communications and Dell. Shobz is also a founding member of Neytri, a non-profit focused on fostering, engaging, and advancing the global community of South Asian professional women.

Shobz holds an MBA with a double major in Strategy and Finance from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

Susan is a strategic, dynamic, results-driven executive with over 30 years of success in Business and Technology roles.  During her 22 year tenure at Johnson & Johnson, she is known for critical thinking, authenticity and agility across the Pharmaceutical, Medical Device, and Consumer sectors, guiding marketing, strategy, innovation and technology.  Susan is currently responsible for corporate technology solutions around the world.  Prior roles include VP of Sales, Strategy & Commercialization for Health & Wellness, Worldwide VP of Transfusion Medicine, Worldwide VP for the $2.4B JOHNSONS® Baby business and several pharmaceutical marketing roles.

Prior to joining J&J, Susan was Marketing Director at Nabisco Biscuit Company and a Private Banker at Chase Manhattan Bank. Susan holds a B.A. in Economics and German from Duke University and a M.B.A. in Marketing and Finance from the Wharton School. Susan is an “experience chaser” who loves to travel, explore and try new things.  She lives in NJ with her daughter and dogs.

As an experienced and skilled marketer, sales, and people leader, Shimona is focused on shaping the future of commerce by overseeing Shopify’s innovative commerce platform that enables high-growth and high-volume brands, like Gymshark, Huel, AllBirds, and Heinz. Before Shopify, Shimona held senior roles at various software, FMCG, and consumer research companies in Canada and Europe.

A Fun Fact: I began my career in marketing, working for a chicken company!

Anita Rao has 15+ years of experience in various Product, Data, Business, Operations, and Technology leadership roles across the Hi-Tech, Financial Services, and Payment Cards industries. She is currently at PayPal where she has led Product and Engineering Teams that delivered data products via platforms. Before that, at eBay Inc. Anita was the Chief Product Owner for Global Platform Services that included 24 SaaS and Big Data Platforms. She was also the Vice President and Head of Global Finance Systems at Visa Inc. Anita has also held senior roles at Garage Technology Ventures, and Oracle. She earned an M.B.A. from Rutgers University and is a Six Sigma Black Belt. From UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, she did the Executive Education Program. She has five patents pending in the Data realm.

Leigh is a seasoned leader and business strategist and has been with Microsoft for over 15 years as an FTE and 4 years as a strategic consultant. Leigh has also previously held the role of Chief of Staff for the Dynamics CRM, Skype and HR businesses, as well as Business Manager for the Advanced Strategies and Research Division. In addition to this, she owned PR/AR and executive communications for Microsoft’s Server Business, and led the consumer broad reach launch of Windows XP.

She joined Public Sector from the Office of Responsible AI as the Enablement Workstream owner, where she drove implementation of responsible AI across the company. This included companywide implementation strategy and planning for our engineering and field orgs, the WW RAI Champs program and internal RAI communications

Julie Chapman has spent over 22 years in the technology industry, specializing in retail. She joined Entain in 2019 as the Retail IT Delivery Director, accountable for the technology in retail bands, Coral and Ladbrokes, covering more than 2,500 shops. In July 2020, Julie Chapman was promoted to Retail CTO, accountable for all retail technology across Entain and creating the retail technology blueprint that is deployed globally.

Julie brought new ideas to Entain, championing diversity and inclusion in the gaming industry. At Entain, Julie pioneered listening groups across the division to understand the challenges experienced by colleagues and produced a strategy around diversity and inclusion. The core of this strategy is creating a welcoming environment, where colleagues are valued for their skills and a three-pronged approach to elevating women within the department centered around attracting female talent to Entain, supporting female employees, and developing initiatives to retain that talent.  

A Fun Fact: 

Before Julie started in technology I was a ski instructor and still love skiing

Bode is the Chief Operating Officer at Flutterwave. She is responsible for managing the operations of the organization including strategy implementation, organizational performance and ensuring the company meets its overall goals and objectives.

Prior to joining Flutterwave, Bode worked as an Associate Director in KPMG Professional service. Her experience covers customer advisory, development of strategy plans and models for financial institutions and organisations as well as proposing various ways to scale, improve efficiency and profits. Bode has over 18 years of experience.

Kate is currently Head of Emerging Areas at NVIDIA where she oversees ecosystem, strategic alliances and developer relations for emerging markets, segments and use cases. She works closely with partners and influencers to create disruptive AI applications with a social impact and aims to build a truly global and inclusive AI community. 

Prior to NVIDIA, Kate spent close to a decade at various semiconductor companies holding product, ecosystem and business positions in AI, computer vision, and IoT. 

A D&I and mentorship advocate, she often mentor teens on career development and startups on tech & business. She regularly advises international organizations on the power of AI to drive social good, speaking at conferences for WEF, UNECA, UNICEF and Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data.

Kate has won multiple accolades throughout her career, including Business Insider Top 100 Business Transformers 2020 and VentureBeat Women in AI Rising Star 2020.

Fun fact 

Kate enjoys learning new languages and currently speaks French, English, Spanish, Sango, Japanese and Korean

Joining Mercedes-Benz Turkey in 2002, Dr. Demet Karaali has held a series of increasingly expanding positions, including Executive Assistant to CEO & President, Head of IT for sales, aftersales and retail and CIO of Mercedes-Benz Cars and Vans Turkey.

Since 2010, Dr. Demet Karaali has been a leader in information technology management with a focus on the digitalization. As CIO of Mercedes-Benz Cars and Vans Turkey, Dr. Karaali manages all IT aspects of sales, aftersales, marketing and retail in MB Cars, Vans Turkey and providing various IT services throughout Istanbul to global Daimler locations. Dr. Karaali provides leadership for the continued development of an innovative, robust, and secure information technology environment throughout the company. Under her leadership, IT in Turkey has consistently earned recognition and awards for achievements.

Dr. Karaali received her bachelor's degree in mathematics from Technical University of Istanbul and completed her Phd at the same university in Industrial Engineering. She has completed numerous executive leadership and management training programs during her career.

Beth leads the Data Science Team at Roku. The team develops automated algorithms that provide business value, particularly in newer areas where there is high uncertainty.  

Beth is a seasoned Data Scientist and leader with 20+ years of experience in a variety of big data fields: advertising, speech, music, biology and medical. She has over 30 publications and 11 issued patents.

Fun Fact: 

Beth loves being outside and can often be found walking or running in Boston or hiking in New England.

A research and scientific leader in Artificial Intelligence, Alessandra is the Director of AI and Data Science at Shutterstock. Alessandra has over 10 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 is the Ambassador of Women in AI Ireland (a nonprofit do-tank working towards gender-inclusive AI that benefits global society) promoting a strong community of women and minorities in Ireland by providing means for growing knowledge and expertise in AI thanks to the strong support of  the government, academia and private enterprises.

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

Joanne Thurlow is Head of IT for Siemens Energy, Industrial Application Solutions – a global engineering organization providing electrification, automation, and digitalisation solutions to the energy industry. 

With a career that has spanned multiple roles, organizations, and countries starting in her home country of Canada, UK, Norway and Germany, Joanne has experienced many challenges and rewards on route.  

While the technologies have changed and evolved along the way, one thing has remained constant – success depends on the individuals, the teams and then technology. Even the smallest of teams can achieve enormous results in a rapidly changing world through the technology, methodology, and a healthy amount of resourcefulness and inspiration. This can be foundational to securing a sustainable future for all. 

Experienced Head Of Operations with a demonstrated history of working in the financial services industry. Skilled in Customer Service Management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Customer Satisfaction, and Management. Strong operations professional with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) focused in Fashion Design with Communication from Birmingham City University.

Veerle Lauwers is the Digital Strategy & Transformation Director at Coca-Cola European partners. Coca-Cola European partners is one of the largest Coca-Cola bottlers that reaches millions of customers and over 300 million consumers in 13 countries with 23,300 employees across Europe.

Veerle started her career with Coca-Cola in 2013 where she first focused on building out the Digital Shopper marketing portfolio and eCommerce this within the Retail, Away from home (Leisure, Horeca,…) and At Work/Institutions channels.  The past 3 years she has dedicated to driving digital Innovation & Transformation across the commercial, supply chain and workplace area, building a yearly innovation pipeline to validate the value of new technologies and solutions with and within the business and evolve them to scaled solutions.

She has 24 years of experience, of which 4 years abroad, as international commercial project manager. Started her career at Procter & Gamble and held both global and locally driven business partner functions for 14 years. Stepped out of corporate live for 3 years to run her own consultancy firm when Social Media platforms became relevant for brands, helping companies to get started and thrive in those new channels.

In her spare time, Veerle likes to spend time with Family and friends and play tennis.

Sara Sjöberg is currently Regional head of eCommerce in H&M, overseeing the PnL as well as digital CX in South Europe. Sara has during her 4 years with H&M set up the personalization area for the group´s 8 brands as well as successfully relaunched H&M´s loyalty program, Hello Member, that now has more than 120 million members globally. Sara´s background is in digital innovation and retail, with experience from eg launching market leading grocery ecom as well as working in digital agency.

Rozemarijn Koppenaal, Global Vice President E-Commerce for Coty. Rozemarijn is a business- and brand leader with 15+ years’ experience in the Consumer Goods industry. Today, she’s heading the worldwide indirect E-Commerce organization for Coty, out of the HQ in Amsterdam. Rozemarijn started her career in Procter & Gamble, where she was inspired for life about the power of building exceptional talent and a supporting community as a catalyst for transformational business growth. Talent- and community development also stretches out over the non-corporate part of her life, as she raises her two daughters of 5 and 7 years old, mentors actively and started supporting female-founded startups. Rozemarijn is Dutch and moved back to her home country two years ago after having lived in Switzerland for many years.

Catherine is a veteran product leader currently working at HelloFresh finding new ways to bring HelloFresh to people all over the world. She has been building products for high growth B2C companies for almost 20 years, and is passionate about meeting customer needs with the right products. Prior to HelloFresh, Catherine worked across industries like mass customization, travel and fashion.

Catherine is a strong advocate for diversity in technology, as a mentor and as a product leader.

Fun Fact

In her spare time, you can find her buying yarn she likes but may never use or trying to learn how to paint. 

With my commercial, digital and people management skills I like to take responsibility for improving the customer journey and revenue at social engaged organizations. I create results via stakeholder management, creating strong divers teams and guide them through changes. Raised in an entrepreneurial technical family, I have a passion for customers and technology. In all my jobs I was responsible for designing, selling and delivering High Tech services. Always striving for the best customer experience with the voice of the customer as the fuel for the customer journey improvement engine.

As a people manager I have led design-, sales- and operational teams and directed business units of 50M € revenue and 270 employees. I ran an ICT consultancy firm with 170M € revenue and 1.200 employees, as a member of the management board. Sectors I worked in: Industry, Government, Healthcare, Retail, Finance and NGO. I have serviced consumer, government and business clients and also drove 2-sided digital business models. Always combined the motherhood of two with fulltime working in high demanding jobs.

Carole Gendron is a Data&Analytics Strategist, AI-Artist practitioner and speaker, at the intersection of Science, Technology and Art based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

‘Techno-optimist’, Carole combines her professional experience of 20 years directing Data&Analytics teams in Multinationals in particular in Philips, with her Art practice combining classical arts and Artificial Intelligence to contribute with a unique perspective to the ‘AI for good’ conversation.

She participated to discussions around the societal and business impact of Artificial Intelligence. With a personal interest for the AI Art avant-garde movement.

She is active in the 'Women in AI' community promoting the feminine touch in AI for a Creative and Caring Artificial Intelligence (AI).

She founded HumainArt to humanize AI, creating a bridge between technology and people with AI Art to make AI accessible and comprehensive. Contributing to facilitate public debate and responsible business applications of Artificial Intelligence.

As an trans-disciplinary Artist, she exhibited in Amsterdam participating to collective exhibitions : 'Dutch Medicine' in 2019 and with AI Art to 'The magic of ART-ificial Intelligence' in 2020.

Kate is an Associate Partner at FICO in Analytics where she lives in New York City. She has previously worked at IBM as a Data & AI Specialist and holds a Bachelor of Science from The University of Texas in Mathematical Sciences and Scientific Computation. Kate loves volunteering and is a Vice Chair of Membership for the New York Junior League. An adventure seeker, Kate has hiked the highest summit in the contiguous United States and bungee jumped 5 times.

Anna Choury is a leading voice on AI ethics and fairness. Former research engineer and entrepreneur in AI, Anna has been dedicated to making a change in the way we approach technology. She is the lead author of the online course Destination AI, in partnership with Openclassrooms, Intitut Montaigne and the Abeona Foundation. Destination AI is a training course in the technological, economic and social challenges of artificial intelligence. Online, free and accessible to all, no matter their background. The french version of the course (Objectif IA) has been taken by more than 100 000 people in the first year and aims at training at least 1% of the French population in the next 5 years.

A Fun Fact:

I actually became a mathematician by chance. I was too late to enroll and the Faculty of Mathematics was the only one that accepted me after the closing date !

Over the past 15 years of her professional career Nadiia has lived and worked in Ukraine, UK, Poland, USA, Germany and gained an experience in both startup and corporate environments. She has managed to co-create a patented solution of web content experimentation for the Marketing Technology Startup Maxymiser. Throughout the company’s rapid growth, she was heading the technical delivery and services teams, located all across 5 countries worldwide. She has heavily contributed to building the startup up to the successful CX optimization SaaS leader by helping Fortune Global 500 clients to improve their conversion rates. The startup has been acquired by Oracle and has got the highest score for the online testing criterion in the Forrester Wave: Experiense Optimisation Platforms Q4 2020.

At the moment Nadiia is leading a team of Digital Excellence at E.ON Digital Technology, where she is developing and implementing the Digital Transformation agenda for the Energy Retail Business in a joint collaboration with 9 regional companies across Europe. Key focus topics including, but not limited to, Conversion Optimisation, New Digital Business Development, Customer digital self-service channels (Web/Mobile) and Conversational AI.  

Merissa Silk is an experienced product leader, passionate about using customer-centric methodologies to bring new products to market. Her career trajectory includes positions in Sydney, New York, and Monterrey, and she is currently based in Berlin as Chief Product & Tech Officer at fundingport. Merissa is increasingly in demand as a mentor for early stage startups and especially enjoys supporting female founders and other women in tech with career development and coaching.

Chryssa is working as an Android Chapter Lead in the Mobile Team at Plum fintech. She is responsible for expanding and guiding the team build an outstanding product while helping the Android engineers pursue their personal and engineering skill goals.

With more than 8 years of experience as a Senior and Lead Android Engineer at Plum fintech and ride-hailing The Beat App, has worked in many cross-functional teams with a leading role to cultivate product-oriented engineering focus on what values the most. Actively preserving and supporting teams’ Agile methodologies and practices.

She loves writing articles about building great products and great teams! Passionate advocate for supporting Women in STEM, and believes in volunteering as a way of life.

Co-Founder at Custodian, Nathalia Rus is utilising a new native & distributed graph database to build a knowledge graph around physical assets.

Siada El Ramly is the Director General of dot (Digital Online Tech) Europe – the European trade association representing the leading internet companies on European Digital Policy. She has over 20 years experience in European public affairs and in particular experience in European Digital Policy having worked for the hardware and software industries in the past. Before joining EDiMA Siada was Secretary General of the European Software Association, Director of the AHIMA global services office, Director General of the European Federation of Independent Producers as well as Senior EU Affairs Manager at Digital Europe. She also set up her own consultancy company that provides public affairs, association management and strategic advice to interest groups.

Siada holds an MA in International Studies and Diplomacy from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) - University of London and a BA in Political Science – specializing in International Relations from the American University in Cairo.

Sarah is Head of Biddable Media At Stickyeyes, a part of Reprise, the digital performance agency at IPG. Focusing on channels such as Google, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, Sarah helps to deliver best in class digital marketing services for brands such as Adobe, Hunter Boots and Kroger Bank. Sarah champions a data centric approach to marketing and works with her clients to understand the different data points they can leverage in order to deliver smooth and engaging digital journeys for their clients.

Lucie Kogelheide is an Information Technology Security Consultant at TÜV Informationstechnik GmbH (TÜViT) in Essen, Germany. A trained physicist, she chose the field of hardware security, now attacking products by performing powerful so-called “physical attacks” in TÜViT’s hardware laboratory. As a “good” hacker, she tests the security systems of smart cards and microprocessors on behalf of a customer to increase security of products in the field. 

Closely monitoring the ongoing research in the area of quantum computing she is currently especially focussing on post-quantum cryptography and preparing for the evaluation of quantum resistant cryptographic solutions, making sure they can withstand today’s attacks as well as the threats of the future.

Liz is a 2020 LinkedIn Top Voice and leader in workplace strategy, design research and former Vice President at WeWork. In 2020 she founded Thinky Space, an insights and innovation practice, working at the intersection of human-centred design, service design and architecture. Clients from Tech and Cultural sectors come with the same question– how might we leverage design research and insight to create a more engaging, vibrant experience for our people, digitally, physically, culturally?  How can we work better as a team to make a better product in the market? At the core, Thinky Space helps clients make space for thinking more creatively and collaboratively.

Liz has also been a visiting speaker at MIT, Harvard Business School, University of Michigan and a visiting professor in design thinking at Cornell University, Parsons School of Design, and the University of Minnesota. Both of Liz’s teaching and design practice incorporate ‘form follows feeling’. In order to do good work, we have to feel good about who we are.

Company Information: 

Thinky Space https://thinkyspace.com/

A Fun Fact: Liz's First job out of college was designing the concepts for theme park rides

Miriam began her career in technology, as a PC Technician for Ziff Davis PC Magazine. Miriam, then made her transition over to IPG, where she has been for over 20 years. Miriam’s ability to adapt to an evolving environment presented several opportunities that allowed her to move up within the organization, from Desktop Support Technician to Senior Technical Analyst. As the organization moved toward a global centralized technical service model, Miriam secured a lead position within the organizations, Global IT Operations division. After a series of additional promotions, Miriam transitioned into her current role as Sr. Manager of IT Governance and Communications, where she is focused on improving business processes through technology-driven services. Successfully unifying cross-functional business and technical teams to facilitate the identification of business requirements, translating business needs into engineered solutions.

A Fun Fact

Miriam co-leads IPG IT’s Global “Women in IT” program representing the North America region, executing programs focused on community outreach and unifying women leaders, creating a culture of support for Women in IT within the organization

Phenom, Prodigy, and Whiz kid are a few of the words used to describe Alena Analeigh, who at 12-years old is headed to college, but that’s only part of her story.

With a bold dream of becoming the youngest girl of color to intern at NASA, Alena has used her voice to launch The Brown STEM Girl and The Brown STEM Girl Foundation. She is also the creator of Brown STEM Girl 'STEM in the City Day' Honoring Women of Color in STEM.

Alena traditionally schooled, homeschooled and world schooled, she is an experienced world traveler which enabled her to attend school in Amman, the capital of Jordan, located in the Middle East.

At 4-years old, Alena was excited by LEGO® sets, robotics, and traveling to NASA sites. She was honored by the Phoenix Mercury (WNBA) as part of their Believe in Women campaign where she received a full-tuition scholarship.

A Fun Fact: Personal Hobby: Building LEGO® sets