Dr Mahsa Mohaghegh is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Women in Tech in AUT’s School of Computer, Engineering, and Mathematical Sciences. She is a well-recognised leader in AI and machine learning and is also the founder of the charitable trust She Sharp. She founded She# in the hope to bring about the much-needed change in the gender split in tech and believes that we must work together to solve this!

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Jean is the VP and co-founder of the Onit AI Center of Excellence. Jean worked as a lawyer before becoming the COO and VP of Legal at McCarthyFinch, a legal AI venture that was acquired by Onit. While there, she helped build the business from infancy to acquisition and lead product and technology development. Jean was named Emerging ICT Leader of the Year 2019 and is a founding executive of LegalTech NZ.

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Heather is a growth-oriented leader passionate about bringing world-changing technologies to market and scaling social impact. She is a data-driven strategist experienced in developing and leading go-to-market, communications, and sustainability initiatives at start-ups and multi-national organizations. Most recently, Heather served as the VP of Marketing and Strategic Partnerships at Sama, a leading San Francisco based machine learning company focused on producing high quality training data for the world’s leading AI teams. Heather is an active member of Partnership on AI, including spearheading work to create guidelines for ethical data sourcing and enrichment.

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Nikki is a Creative Technologist, Designer and Artist with a background in arts, design, and AI. She has spoken and mentored in various capacities around the world on AI, Tech and Creativity and is an ambassador for the AU/NZ chapter of Women in Voice, a global network of Voice-First and Conversational AI professionals.

Kirrily is Head of Conversation and Persona Design at Soul Machines. She plays a pivotal role in shaping compelling digital interactions, by crafting engaging conversational experiences for our state-of-the-art Digital People. Her career has covered the creative direction of award-winning campaigns and television productions for prestigious companies around the world including Mediaworks, Television New Zealand, Nickelodeon Australia and National Geographic Channel. She loves rambling along empty beaches and come nightfall, watching a good movie with a single malt whisky in hand!

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Jacqueline is co-founder and chief product officer of Areto Labs, a social enterprise that uses machine learning to build more positive and inclusive online communities. A lover of words and linguistics, she spent much of her career as a journalist, copywriter and creative director, before pursuing her master’s of technological futures and investigating using natural language processing to surface microaggression in text. That work, along with successfully launching an Areto Labs Twitter probot called ParityBOT_NZ, which uses NLP to combat toxicity directed at women election candidates, convinced her to pivot her career to focus on using AI for social good.