As Managing Director at IDEO, Savannah has designed and led new products and ventures for over a decade. She is the Global Head of IDEO’s Emerging Technology Lab, bringing businesses from today’s realities to the worlds we’ll live in next. Prior work includes pioneering Emotion AI for mental health with Dr. John Gottman, co-founding a chain of tech education schools in Sub-Saharan Africa, and building the coding bootcamp industry as a software engineer at Hack Reactor. Recognized by MIT, Forbes, and the World Economic Forum, she’s an early stage advisor who’s propelled startups from ideation through Series B. Savannah is committed to designing tech that serves humanity, the planet, and life on earth.

Dr. Madeline Gannon, a multidisciplinary designer blending techniques in art, design, computer science, and robotics to forge new futures for human-robot relations. Also known as »The Robot Whisperer«, Gannon specializes in convincing robots to do things they were never intended to do: from transforming giant industrial robots into living, breathing mechanical creatures, to taming hordes of autonomous machines to behave like a pack of animals.

Dr. Gannon has been a World Economic Forum Cultural Leader, a Robotics & AI Researcher at NVIDIA and a former artist in residence at ETH Zurich, Autodesk Pier 9, and the Carnegie Mellon STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. She is known as one of the ‚Top 10 Women in Robotics Industry‘ and ‚World’s 50 Most Renowned Women in Robotics’ according to Analytics Insight. Gannon holds a M.Arch from Florida International University, and a Ph.D in Computational Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

John Zimmerman is the Tang Family Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction at the HCI Institute, one of seven computer science departments within Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. He conducts research on human-AI interaction, human-robot interaction, and AI innovation processes. He teaches courses in UX design, service design, and on the design of AI products and services. He joined the university in 2002. His professional experience includes time at Philips Research investigating new forms for interactive television as well as several years working in film, video, and multimedia production. John is a member of ACM’s CHI Academy and has been an AAAS fellow focused on outreach to the public about AI. He’s published over 150 peer-reviewed papers and authored 40 patents. He regularly speaks on design, HCI, and AI at academic conferences and within the tech industry. While at Philips, he co-invented a method for scrolling touchscreens now used on almost all phones and tablets.

John has 20+ years of experience designing AI products and services. For the last several years he’s explored the idea of AI as a Design Material, including what makes AI uniquely difficult to design. He’s designed TV show recommenders, office productivity tools that automate routine tasks, a system that learns the pick-ups and drop-offs of busy parents and keeps them from forgetting their kids, a decision support tool that helps cardiologists decide when to implant mechanical hearts, a crowdsourced real-time arrival system for transit riders, and smart classrooms that watch instructors teach and offer feedback on their actions and student reactions so they can improve their teaching. Prior to this workshop, he spoke at SXSW 2024 on Designing Successful AI Products and Services.

Yusuf is the CEO of Playlab, a tech nonprofit that empowers educators & impact organizations to build their own AI tools.

Prior to founding Playlab, Yusuf led new product development for Teach For America, contributed to Scratch (a creative coding platform used by millions of kids), researched at the MIT Media Lab, and was on the founding team of ALU & ALX, a pan-African network of universities and alternative higher ed pathways.

Outside of work, he mentors startups through MIT’s Sandbox Fund, angel invests in AI edtech companies like LitLab and Recess, and is a proud girl dad.