Panel: Digitizing Online Retail & eCommerce with AI

Rong Yan is currently the CTO for Verishop Inc, a social e-commerce platform that combines quality curation and discovery with the convenience you’ve come to expect. He was the Senior Engineering Director of Product Engineering in Snap Inc. His team is responsible for developing and maintaining the core product features in Snapchat, which is one of the most popular mobile applications in the world. Before joining Snap, he was the Director of Data Science and Infrastructure in Square Inc. from 2013 to 2014, an engineering manager for the Ads Relevance & Quality team in Facebook from 2009 to 2013, responsible for optimizing delivery performance for all Facebook ad products, and a Research Staff Member in the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center from 2006 to 2009. Dr. Yan received his M.Sc. (2004) and Ph.D. (2006) degree from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. His research interests include large-scale machine learning, data mining, social media, multimedia information retrieval and computer vision. More information about Rong can be found at his homepage, http://yanrong.info.

With over 15 years of experience in the field of sales, business development and management consulting, Saad leads a dynamic team supporting Grab’s merchant-partners in Southeast Asia. He and the team are focused on helping these merchant-partners grow and optimise their presence on the platform across the different verticals within the Grab ecosystem, which includes GrabFood, GrabMart, GrabExpress, GrabPay and GrabAds.

Saad was previously the Regional Head of Business Development and Partnerships for GrabFood, where he built and led the team responsible for acquiring and managing key restaurant partners across Southeast Asia.

Prior to joining Grab, Saad was previously the Head of Business Development for Uber in Southeast Asia, as well as India. He has also held roles in the Tata Group, Times of India Group, and Publicis (France).

Aatish is the Head of Content & Language products including NLP, Speech, Cataloguing, Classification, and Search Relevance. The team focuses on empowering customers in social media, e-commerce, and broader enterprise to get diverse human insight on content quickly and fairly. Aatish previously was an early engineer at robotics startup Shield AI, focused on building AI systems to protect service members, and Skurt, an on-demand car rental marketplace acquired by Fair.com (http://fair.com/). In college, Aatish ran Autolab.com (http://autolab.com/), a learning management startup used at CMU, Cornell, Rutgers, NYU, PKU, and others. He graduated with a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.