Karin Klein
Partner, Bloomberg Beta
Karin Klein leads east coast investing activities for Bloomberg Beta, an early-stage VC that invests in startups making work better, with a focus on machine intelligence. She has been recognized on the Techweek100, Silicon Alley 100, Crain’s Women to Watch in New York Tech, and New York Business Journal’s “Women of Influence.” Karin currently serves on the board of directors for Paramount Group (NYSE: PGRE), Harvey Mudd College, and L’Oreal’s Women in Digital. She also enjoys volunteering as a mentor with TechStars and the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Prior to launching Bloomberg Beta, she led new initiatives at Bloomberg and oversaw Softbank’s venture team that reviewed new investments. She also was the co-founder and president of an educational training business for children. Karin has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is a summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the Annenberg School of Communications and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Daniela Perdomo
Founder, goTenna
Daniela Perdomo is the co-founder & CEO of goTenna, a technology company creating distributed communication networks that increase scale, resiliency, and access.
Born of her experience during Hurricane Sandy, when one-fourth to one-third of cell towers and power stations went down in a 10-state area, goTenna brings communications infrastructure into the 21st-century by decentralizing it. Its bottom-up networks combine cognitive mobile ad-hoc networking protocols with low-power, low-cost, easy-to-use devices. The company's award-winning first device, goTenna, pairs to regular smartphones to enable texting and GPS location-sharing independent of cell service, wifi or even satellites. In just two years, goTennas have been used by many tens of thousands of consumers, government agencies, and disaster relief personnel.
The next-generation goTenna Mesh launched this summer and is enhanced by a “holy grail” advancement never achieved outside the military: a totally off-grid, mobile, long-range mesh network. The tactical-grade goTenna Pro line of devices and services will be available to public safety, defense, enterprise, and industry by year's end.
Five years after Sandy inspired Daniela to start goTenna, a recent contract awarded by the New York City Economic Development Corporation will fund the provision of 20,000 goTenna Mesh devices to beneficiaries located within the city's FEMA-designated 100-year floodplain.
Prof. Jeanette M. Wing
Director of the Data Sciences Institute, Columbia University
Jeannette M. Wing is Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. From 2013 to 2017, she was a Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research. She is Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon where she twice served as the Head of the Computer Science Department and had been on the faculty since 1985. From 2007-2010 she was the Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. She received her S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Professor Wing's general research interests are in the areas of trustworthy computing, specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. Her current interests are in the foundations of security and privacy. She was or is on the editorial board of twelve journals, including the Journal of the ACM and Communications of the ACM.
She is currently Retiring Chair of the AAAS Section on Information, Computing and Communications and a member of the Board of Trustees for the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics. She has been a member of many other advisory boards, including: Networking and Information Technology (NITRD) Technical Advisory Group to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), National Academies of Sciences' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (former chair), ACM Council, Computing Research Association Board, and DARPA ISAT (former chair). She served as co-chair of NITRD from 2007-2010. She was on the faculty at the University of Southern California, and has worked at Bell Laboratories, USC/Information Sciences Institute, and Xerox Palo Alto Research Laboratories. She received the CRA Distinguished Service Award in 2011 and the ACM Distinguished Service Award in 2014. She is a member of Sigma Xi, Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).
Heidi Johnson
Global Head of Community, Collaboration & Compliance Products, Bloomberg LP
Heidi Johnson defines business strategy and product development for the suite of tools that Bloomberg Terminal subscribers use to chat, share insights, prices and trade ideas with colleagues and trading counterparties. Heidi's group is also responsible for the Bloomberg Terminal's mobile application and the company's enterprise compliance solutions for communications management and archiving, trade surveillance and record-retention.
Heidi joined Bloomberg in 2014 to lead product development for Bloomberg's community and collaboration tools, such as Bloomberg Chat (IB), message (MSG) and NOTE, a shared workspace where users can exchange up-to-date market and security information, news and research with other Bloomberg users. In only three years, Heidi's role expanded to include responsibility for enterprise compliance and trade surveillance solutions, which incorporates Bloomberg's cross-asset pre-and post-trade cost analysis solutions (TCA, BTCA).
Previously, Heidi led product development for message and collaboration services at financial information provider, IHS Markit. She has also led digital communications strategy for a leading global investment bank and built communications and collaboration software for AOL Time Warner.
Heidi earned her masters and bachelors degrees in biology from the University of Pennsylvania.
