Rebecca Crootof will shortly begin work as the Executive Director of the Information Society Project and Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. Her research interests include technology law and international law; she has recently written on how autonomous weapon systems highlight the need for a “war torts” regime, how technological advances contribute to growing the Executive branch’s war powers, and how weapon characteristics affect the likelihood that it will be successfully banned. Crootof earned her B.A. cum laude at Pomona College, her J.D. at Yale Law School, and her PhD at Yale Law School, where she graduated as a member of the first class of PhDs in law awarded in the United States. 

As someone who started programming at age 10, Jimoh Ovbiagele has kept himself busy. In the past, Ovbiagele has worked on self-driving cars, built text-prediction software for wearable tech, led a team of developers at an industry leading design agency, and all this before the age of 21 when he came up with the idea for and co-founded ROSS Intelligence in 2015. As ROSS Intelligence’s CTO, Ovbiagele leads the development team behind ROSS, the world’s first artificially intelligent legal research assistant. When he is not working on ROSS’ brain you can catch him on an electric skateboard in the Bay area, thinking about the future, neural nets, and smoothies (but actually).

Christopher Reed is COO and General Counsel at Zenti, Inc., which provides proprietary natural language processing software. Reed has also worked for the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, as an IEEE-USA Fellow, as leader of the data modeling sub-group of the IEEE 2030 Smart Grid Standard, and a co-founder of Albeado. Prior to that, Reed worked coding, supporting, and teaching people to use software at companies ranging from market leaders, like Nokia and Borland, to small companies, like Pumatech and Lutris Technologies.

David Ahn is a partner at Fenwick & West LLP. Ahn focuses his practice on developing patent strategy and managing patent portfolio, for clients of all sizes in technical fields including artificial intelligence, robotics, and computer software. Based on his extensive experience, he has drafted and successfully prosecuted hundreds of U.S. and foreign patents. Ahn is also an expert in conducting pre-litigation analysis and counseling regarding infringement, validity, and product clearances of patents. He has prepared numerous validity, infringement and non-infringement opinions and represented clients in due diligence investigations. He has also counseled design around for clients’ products or services to minimize the risk of patent litigation against the clients.

Charles Roslof has been Legal Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation since February 2016, before which he had worked on WMF’s legal team as an intern and as Intellectual Property & Internet Law Fellow. At WMF, he oversees the trademark portfolio and works on copyright policy. Charles received his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Law & Gender and a writer and performer for the law school comedy musical. Outside Wikimedia, he has collaborated with Tiffany Li to research the intellectual property rights of non-human creators (such as animals and artificial intelligences).