Rise25

Daniel Beutel is one of the creators of Flower, an open-source framework for training AI on distributed data using federated learning. Flower is one of the leading federated AI ecosystems with a large and growing community and users at many Fortune 500 companies and most top universities worldwide. Daniel previously held roles as Head of AI and CTO and has considerable experience in running and scaling engineering teams. He is a CS PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge and co-founder of Flower Labs, a startup backed by Y Combinator, First Spark Ventures, Felicis Ventures, and Mozilla Ventures (among others).

Ali Farhadi is the CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and a Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Ali has been a professor at the UW Allen School since 2012. He first joined AI2 in 2015 to lead the institute’s computer vision research team with a focus on visual common-sense reasoning and the role of actions and interactions in visual understanding. While at AI2, he co-founded Xnor.ai, the first on-device deep learning startup that was acquired by Apple in 2020. Ali led Apple’s next-generation machine learning efforts until 2023 when he rejoined AI2 as CEO in July. Ali’s research impact has been globally recognized with several best paper awards at CVPR, NeruIPS, AAAI, NSF Career Award, and the Sloan Fellowship, and he was named one of Forbes’s Top 5 AI Entrepreneurs in 2018.

Dr. Gemma Galdon-Clavell is a pioneer and global force in AI safety and auditing, ensuring that machine learning tools truly serve society. She is the founder and CEO of Eticas.ai, a venture-backed organization that identifies, measures and corrects algorithmic vulnerabilities, bias and inefficiencies in predictive and LLM tools. Eticas’ software, the ITACA platform, is the first solution to automate impact analysis and monitoring, ensuring that AI systems are high performing and safe, explainable, fair and trustworthy.

Dr. Galdon-Clavell’s impactful work – and passion for disrupting the status quo – earned her recognition as a Hispanic Star Awardee at the United Nations in 2023, an Ashoka Fellow in 2020 and a finalist at the EU Prize for Women Innovators awarded by the European Commission in 2017. In 2023 the BBC acknowledged her as one of the “people changing the world” and in 2024 she was honored by Forbes Women as one of the “35 Leading Spanish Women in Technology”, praised as “a pioneer in algorithmic auditing software”.

Dr. Galdon-Clavell is an active advisor to international and regional institutions such as the United Nations (UN), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) and the European Commission, among others. She is also a sought-after speaker, with recent engagements at high-level fora like the US-EU Trade and Technology Council (TTC), re:publica or TEDx. Her comments on AI developments have been captured in Wired, Business Insider, Forbes and Computer Weekly.

Peter Gault is the Founder & Executive Director of the education nonprofit Quill.org. Quill’s AI-powered, open source literacy tools help 3rd-12th grade students become stronger writers and critical thinkers. Quill’s AI provides students with immediate feedback and coaching on their writing, enabling them to revise their work and quickly develop their skills. Teachers are provided with free access to our research-based curriculum, and our nonprofit, open source organization works with academic researchers to design and build its technology and curriculum. Quill has now impacted nine million students across the world, with students writing and receiving feedback on two billion sentences.

Quill is explicitly committed to building Responsible AI designed for students attending low-income schools. Quill has built over 300 AI models over the past five years by creating custom datasets representing diverse students and training fine-tuned models responsive to these students’ needs.

Pelonomi Moiloa is CEO of Lelapa AI. Lelapa AI is a socially grounded research and product lab driving AI for Africans by Africans. A biomedical and electrical engineer by training, Pelonomi has spent almost a decade deriving insights from data to address complex problems.

She is mentor and trustee of the Ruth First memorial trust scholarship programme and co-director of The Ungovernable NPC which is involved in various community initiatives including the running of the Code Kamoso coding academy for girl teens and a guerilla community vegetable and medicine garden. Pelonomi is drawn to the curiosities of community and connection in how they can inform imaginings and implementations of a better future for more people.