2017 MIT Startup Showcase Silicon Valley

Karl Koster is the Executive Director of MIT Corporate Relations. MIT Corporate Relations includes the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and MIT Startup Exchange.

In that capacity, Koster and his staff work with the leadership of MIT and senior corporate executives to design and implement strategies for fostering corporate partnerships with the Institute. Koster and his team have also worked to identify and design a number of major international programs for MIT, which have been characterized by the establishment of strong, programmatic linkages among universities, industry, and governments. Most recently these efforts have been extended to engage the surrounding innovation ecosystem, including its vibrant startup and small company community, into MIT's global corporate and university networks.

Koster is also the Director of Alliance Management in the Office of Strategic Alliances and Technology Transfer (OSATT). OSATT was launched in Fall 2019 as part of a plan to reinvent MIT’s research administration infrastructure. OSATT develops agreements that facilitate MIT projects, programs and consortia with industrial, nonprofit, and international sponsors, partners and collaborators.

He is past chairman of the University-Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP), an organization that seeks to enhance the value of collaborative partnerships between universities and corporations.

He graduated from Brown University with a BA in geology and economics, and received an MS from MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to returning to MIT, Koster worked as a management consultant in Europe, Latin America, and the United States on projects for private and public sector organizations.

Effective July 1, 2016, MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito has been appointed as Professor of the Practice of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT.

Ito, who became director of the Media Lab in September 2011, has had a long career at the vanguard of the Internet and World Wide Web, championing emergent democracy, privacy, and Internet freedom. He helped establish the first Internet service provider (ISP) in Japan, and was involved in establishing many Japanese start-ups, including Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. He invested in numerous start-ups such as Twitter, Flickr, Kickstarter, littleBits, and Formlabs prior to joining the Media Lab.

He is currently a board member of The New York Times Company, Sony Corporation, Digital Garage, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Ito’s honors include TIME magazine’s "Cyber-Elite” listing in 1997 (at age 31) and selection as one of the "Global Leaders for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum (2001). In 2008, BusinessWeek named him one of the "25 Most Influential People on the Web." In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute.

Ito briefly attended Tufts University, majoring in computer science, and the University of Chicago, majoring in physics. He received an honorary D.Litt from The New School in New York City in 2013, and an honorary doctor of humane letters from Tufts University in 2015.

His book, "Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future," (co-authored with Jeff Howe) is due out in December 2016.

Trond heads up the Startup Initiative at MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), facilitating productive relationships between industry and MIT’s startup ecosystem. He is a former Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Trond is a serial entrepreneur with Scandinavian roots, and is currently the Founder of Yegii, Inc., the insight network, and Managing Director of Tautec Consulting.

Trond is a leading expert on technology development across industries such as IT, Energy, and Healthcare. His knowledge spans entrepreneurship, strategy frameworks, policy making, action learning, virtual teamwork, knowledge management, standardization, and e-government. He wrote the book Leadership From Below (2008). Trond speaks six languages and is a frequent public speaker on business, technology, and wine.

Trond was a Strategy/business development executive at Oracle Corp. (2008-12), and a policy maker in the EU (2004-8) where he built the ePractice.eu web platform with 120,000 members. He has worked with multinational companies, with mid-caps and startups in Brazil, China, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Norway, the UK, and the US. He has a PhD in Multidisciplinary Technology Studies from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Bradley Horowitz is vice president of product for Google's social products, including Google+. He has also led product for Google's consumer application division which includes Gmail, Gtalk, Google Docs, Google Voice, and Calendar.

Before joining Google in February 2008, Horowitz was Yahoo's vice president of Advanced Development where he drove the acquisitions of Flickr and MyBlogLog, launched the Brickhouse incubator and developed new products like Yahoo! Pipes. Additionally, he was responsible for the company's initiative to open up its platform which included overseeing the Yahoo Developer Network (YDN).Previously, he was co-founder and CTO of Virage, where he oversaw the technical direction of the company from its founding through its IPO and eventual acquisition by Autonomy.

Horowitz was a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. While at the Media Lab, he worked on a number of topics related to computer vision, graphics and image processing, which resulted in a patented new technique for the recovery of structure, motion and camera parameters from video sequences.

Horowitz holds an MS in Media Science from MIT and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.

Trond heads up the Startup Initiative at MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), facilitating productive relationships between industry and MIT’s startup ecosystem. He is a former Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Trond is a serial entrepreneur with Scandinavian roots, and is currently the Founder of Yegii, Inc., the insight network, and Managing Director of Tautec Consulting.

Trond is a leading expert on technology development across industries such as IT, Energy, and Healthcare. His knowledge spans entrepreneurship, strategy frameworks, policy making, action learning, virtual teamwork, knowledge management, standardization, and e-government. He wrote the book Leadership From Below (2008). Trond speaks six languages and is a frequent public speaker on business, technology, and wine.

Trond was a Strategy/business development executive at Oracle Corp. (2008-12), and a policy maker in the EU (2004-8) where he built the ePractice.eu web platform with 120,000 members. He has worked with multinational companies, with mid-caps and startups in Brazil, China, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Norway, the UK, and the US. He has a PhD in Multidisciplinary Technology Studies from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Habib is a serial entrepreneur and an early stage investor. He is currently the Managing Director of E14 the MIT Media Lab fund focused on early stage companies out of the lab.

Prior to that he was the founding CEO Wamda, a platform of programs and networks that aims to accelerate entrepreneurship ecosystems across the Middle East and North Africa region. He also served as a Venture Partner of Wamda Capital, a growth capital VC fund. His work in the MENA region is credited with playing a key role in strengthening its nascent entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Before Wamda, Habib was based in Boston where he founded Yamli an award winning startup focused on linguistics and the Arabic language.
In 2012 he sold the technology to Yahoo! He was also the founding member of Mok3, a venture backed MIT CSAIL spinoff that developed an image based modeling software

In 2009, the World Economic Forum recognized Habib as a Young Global Leader and was named as a top innovator under 35 (TR35) by the MIT Technology review in 2011. In 2013, He was the Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum council on entrepreneurship and currently sits on the Global Future Council on Systems and Platforms.

Habib holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer and Communication Engineering from the American University of Beirut and a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Sue Siegel is CEO of GE Ventures, GE’s growth and innovation business comprised of GE Ventures, GE Licensing, and New Business Creation (NBC). GE Ventures invests in and partners with the entrepreneurial ecosystem across Healthcare, Energy, Software, Advanced Manufacturing, and Lighting and starts and grows companies via its New Business Creation unit. GE Licensing creates shareholder value through GE’s IP. She also leads Healthymagination, GE’s innovation catalyst for addressing healthcare’s major global challenges via partnerships to improve the quality, access, and affordability of healthcare.

Sue has 30+ years of combined experiences in the corporate world and in venture capital. Previously, as a Silicon Valley-based financial VC, Sue led investments and served as Board member of companies in personalized medicine, digital health, and life sciences at MDV. Before venture capital, at Affymetrix (NASDAQ: AFFX) as President and Board Member, she drove the company’s transformation from a pre-revenue start up to a global, multi-billion dollar market cap genomics leader. And previously, Sue led strategy, technology development, licensing, manufacturing, as well as new market creation & development at Bio-Rad, DuPont, and Amersham.

Sue has served on many corporate board, public and private, along with non-profit boards. She currently serves on the Boards of: the National Venture Capital Association, Stanford Hospital Board’s IT Council, University of California’s Innovation Council, Harvard Partners’ Innovation Advisory Board, the Cleveland Clinic’s Innovation Council, and USC’s Schaeffer Center for Health Policy. Most recently Sue served on President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative as a member of the Working Group to set guidelines for its establishment and served as an inaugural Board member for the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translation Sciences. She serves on the Executive Committee of Santa Clara University’s Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, is a President’s Circle member of the National Academies of Science, a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, is a member of YPO-WPO, and Women Corporate Directors. In the bestselling business book: Multipliers: How The Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, Sue was a featured “Multiplier”. She was recognized as one of “The 100 Most Influential Women in Silicon Valley”.

Sue lives in Silicon Valley with her husband and her two sons. When not working, you might find her hiking the scenic trails of Northern California.

Trond heads up the Startup Initiative at MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), facilitating productive relationships between industry and MIT’s startup ecosystem. He is a former Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Trond is a serial entrepreneur with Scandinavian roots, and is currently the Founder of Yegii, Inc., the insight network, and Managing Director of Tautec Consulting.

Trond is a leading expert on technology development across industries such as IT, Energy, and Healthcare. His knowledge spans entrepreneurship, strategy frameworks, policy making, action learning, virtual teamwork, knowledge management, standardization, and e-government. He wrote the book Leadership From Below (2008). Trond speaks six languages and is a frequent public speaker on business, technology, and wine.

Trond was a Strategy/business development executive at Oracle Corp. (2008-12), and a policy maker in the EU (2004-8) where he built the ePractice.eu web platform with 120,000 members. He has worked with multinational companies, with mid-caps and startups in Brazil, China, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Norway, the UK, and the US. He has a PhD in Multidisciplinary Technology Studies from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Habib is a serial entrepreneur and an early stage investor. He is currently the Managing Director of E14 the MIT Media Lab fund focused on early stage companies out of the lab.

Prior to that he was the founding CEO Wamda, a platform of programs and networks that aims to accelerate entrepreneurship ecosystems across the Middle East and North Africa region. He also served as a Venture Partner of Wamda Capital, a growth capital VC fund. His work in the MENA region is credited with playing a key role in strengthening its nascent entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Before Wamda, Habib was based in Boston where he founded Yamli an award winning startup focused on linguistics and the Arabic language.
In 2012 he sold the technology to Yahoo! He was also the founding member of Mok3, a venture backed MIT CSAIL spinoff that developed an image based modeling software

In 2009, the World Economic Forum recognized Habib as a Young Global Leader and was named as a top innovator under 35 (TR35) by the MIT Technology review in 2011. In 2013, He was the Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum council on entrepreneurship and currently sits on the Global Future Council on Systems and Platforms.

Habib holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer and Communication Engineering from the American University of Beirut and a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Rosalind Picard, Sc.D., is a scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, author, professor and engineer. She is best-known for her book, Affective Computing, which proposed and described how to give skills of emotional intelligence to computers -- including voice assistants, robots, agents, and many kinds of interactive technologies. While trying to create ways to objectively measure data related to emotion, she pioneered wearable technologies to monitor and analyze physiological data in daily life, giving rise to new research and inventions at the intersection of wearables, physiology, and physical and mental health. 

Picard is a named inventor on over a hundred patents, with impact that earned her recognition as both a member of the National Academy of Engineering and as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. Her contributions include wearable and non-contact sensors, algorithms, and systems for sensing, recognizing, and responding respectfully to human affective information. Her inventions have applications in autism, epilepsy, depression, PTSD, sleep, stress, dementia, autonomic nervous system disorders, human and machine learning, health behavior change, market research, customer service, and human-computer interaction, and are in use by thousands of research teams worldwide as well as in many products and services. 

She is founder and director of the MIT Media Lab’s Affective Computing Research Group, where she teaches and mentors students in research. Her research and engineering contributions have been recognized internationally, also with election as a fellow to the IEEE, the ACM, the AAAC and the APA. Picard is the recipient of the 2022 International Lombardy Prize for Computer Science Research, which is described by many as the “Nobel prize in computer science". The Lombardy prize includes an award of a million euros, which Picard donated to research. 

Picard has co-founded two successful businesses, Empatica providing FDA-cleared biomarkers, a platform for clinical trial data collection from wearables, and the first FDA-cleared smartwatch to detect seizures, and Affectiva, providing Emotion-AI technologies (now part of Smart Eye, AB). She serves on the Board of Directors of Empatica. 

Picard interacts regularly with industry and has consulted for many companies including Apple, AT&T, BT, Harman, HP, i.Robot, Merck, Motorola, and Samsung. Her group's achievements have been featured in forums for the general public such as The New York Times, The London Independent, National Public Radio, Scientific American Frontiers, ABC's Nightline and World News Tonight, Time, Vogue, Wired, Forbes, Voice of America Radio, New Scientist, and BBC programs such as "Hard Talk" and BBC Horizon with Michael Mosley. 

David Mindell is an engineer and historian. An expert in human relationships with robotics and autonomous systems, he has led or participated in more than 25 oceanographic expeditions. From 2005 to 2011 he was Director of MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. He is the author of five books and co-founder of Humatics Corporation, which develops technologies to transform how robots and autonomous systems work in human environments.

As Managing Director, Products & Services Research and Open Innovation, Jean-Marc Frangos is responsible for managing the research programmes to prepare BT’s future offering aimed at the Consumer and Business markets, including areas such as TV over IP, Virtual Reality, IoT and Cloud Technologies. He is also responsible for innovation partnerships with venture capitalists, start-ups and industry peers in the United States, Asia, and Europe.

Based in Silicon Valley, Jean-Marc identifies disruptive technologies and innovative service opportunities, and establishes the technical and commercial links with BT’s research and operational divisions. He runs the internal idea management process which identifies the best innovation candidates from 100,000+ BT employees worldwide. His team also designed and runs BT Infinity Labs, a novel incubator concept based in Shoreditch, London, to foster collaboration with the UK entrepreneur community.

Jean-Marc has held a wide range of technology, customer facing and operational responsibilities in Europe and in the US during the course of his 25-year career in the world of telecommunications, and was one of the founders of BT’s European expansion.

David Mindell is an engineer and historian. An expert in human relationships with robotics and autonomous systems, he has led or participated in more than 25 oceanographic expeditions. From 2005 to 2011 he was Director of MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. He is the author of five books and co-founder of Humatics Corporation, which develops technologies to transform how robots and autonomous systems work in human environments.

Nina serves as President and CEO of NTT Innovation Institute Inc. (NTT i3), the prestigious Silicon Valley-based innovation center for NTT Group, one of the world’s largest ICT companies. Focused on fostering strategic innovation, NTT i3 works with established enterprise companies interested in investigating new approaches to evolving into technology-first, digitally-driven businesses. Accelerating the movement of innovation from initial idea to marketplace implementation, NTT i3 combines access to the significant global infrastructure resources, investment fund, research knowledge, and trusted long-standing customer relationships of NTT Global with its own software startup expertise and deep enterprise relationships.

Previously, Nina was responsible for leading the creation and execution of Nike Technology strategy, planning and operations world-wide. Prior to that, she was Senior Vice President of SAP’s Global Premier Customer Network (PCN). At SAP, she led both the PCN Center of Excellence and SAP’s Global Executive Advisory Board. During her eight year tenure, she was a part of SAP’s Global Ecosystem & Partner Group which was charged with continuing to build and enable an open ecosystem of software, service and technology partners together with SAP’s communities of innovation. Additionally, she served as the Global Chief Operating Officer for the worldwide Customer Education organization, responsible for driving more than half a billion euros in global education software and services revenue.

Currently, Nina serves on the advisory boards of two early-to-mid stage technology companies: Reflektion and AppOrchid.

Sertac Karaman is the director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, and an associate professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. His research areas are robotics and control theory, particularly the applications of probability theory, stochastic processes, stochastic geometry, formal methods, and optimization for the design and analysis of high-performance cyber-physical systems. The applications of this research include driverless cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, distributed aerial surveillance systems, air traffic control, and certification and verification of control systems software. Karaman received a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science and an SM in mechanical engineering from MIT and BS degrees in mechanical engineering and in computer engineering from the Istanbul Technical University.