Eugenia Kuyda is the CEO and founder of Replika, an AI companion designed to build deep emotional connection and help people feel better, and has been at the vanguard of AI for the whole of her career. Eugenia started working on conversational AI in 2012 - and launched the first publicly available chatbot fully powered by generative AI in 2015. Prior to that she was an investigative reporter and journalist.

Replika is backed by Y Combinator and Khosla Ventures and has been recognized as one of the “Five Technologies that will Rock Your World” by New York Times AI tech reporter Cade Metz.

Misha Sra is the John and Eileen Gerngross Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she directs the Human-AI Integration Lab in the Computer Science department. Misha received her PhD from the MIT Media Lab in 2018, advised by Prof. Pattie Maes in the Fluid Interfaces Group. She has published at the most selective HCI, VR, and machine learning venues such as CHI, UIST, IEEE VR, CVPR, ECCV and EMNLP where she received four best paper awards and honorable mentions. MIT selected her as an EECS Rising Star in 2018. In 2023, she was awarded an NSF CAREER Award for her work in Human-AI Interaction design. Her research has received extensive coverage from leading media outlets (e.g., from MIT News, The Verge, PCMag) and has drawn the attention of industry research, such as Toyota Research, Samsung Research, and Unity 3D.

Michael Connor is Executive Director of Rhizome, where he oversaw the Net Art Anthology initiative, an effort to retell the history of net art through 100 works, presented as an online exhibition, gallery exhibition, and book. He is also curatorial advisor for Kadist, a non-profit contemporary art organization, and ArtBlocks, an NFT platform. His first online curatorial project took place in 2003 at FACT, Liverpool, where he organized an edition of the traveling exhibition “Kingdom of Piracy” with Shu Lea Cheang, Yukiko Shikata, and Armin Medosch. Connor is currently editing a book by Gene Youngblood about the work of Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz.

Rhizome champions born-digital art and culture through commissions, exhibitions, scholarship, and digital preservation. Founded by artist Mark Tribe as an email discussion list including some of the first artists to work online, Rhizome has played an integral role in the history of contemporary art engaged with digital technologies and the internet.

Since 2003, Rhizome has been an affiliate in residence at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a leading destination for new art and new ideas. Together, New Museum, Rhizome, and NEW INC, the first museum-led incubator founded by New Museum in 2014, explore the future of contemporary art and technology.

APOSSIBLE is a nonprofit bringing psychologists, technologists, artists and creatives together to explore how technology can better support creativity and human fulfillment.