ELEVATE

Rick holds the role of Vice President leading the Emerging Technologies Team in the Canadian Banking Services organization. He joined CGI after the acquisition of JSL in 2015 to lead the Emerging Technology division of CGI's banking and financial services division. Rick is responsible for Agile consulting services, banking technology products and services. As President and Co-owner of JSL, Rick oversaw a dynamic team of expert IT and Business/Technology Specialists who specialize in delivering technology related business solutions for their clients in the Financial Services Industry.

Rick is a dynamic business focused IT Executive who has spent close to 20 years leading large, transformational projects and teams for two of the World’s finest International Financial Institutions. As the Canadian CIO for Macquarie Bank, Rick built an exceptional team of IT professionals responsible for all IT disciplines of Macquarie’s Canadian Retail & Commercial Lending divisions, Retail Brokerage and Global Investing Products divisions. Fortunately for CGI (and our customers), a core team of Rick’s best Macquarie employees followed Rick to JSL and then to CGI.

Rick has led the IT aspects of numerous acquisitions and divestitures, led significant big data, ERP, AML and Compliance Programs. He is also adept at creating and leading large technology roadmaps and strategy engagements and has led large development and support teams ranging from Assembler and COBOL Book of Record legacy applications to cutting edge wireless, voice recognition and internet applications.

If you asked Rick which professional achievement he is most proud of, he would probably say; “What really puts a smile on my face is seeing people engaged and working together. The change in atmosphere is palatable, when you create the conditions for people to work effectively together, and actually enjoy the process, anything is possible and everything gets done with quality…”

Khallil Mangalji is the co-founder and chief technology officer at Fiix, an innovative startup that sends expert, licensed mobile mechanics to your home or office to service your vehicle, so you can skip spending time in repair shops and dealerships.

Previously working at Apple and Facebook, and now focused on growing his Toronto-based company, Khallil subscribes to a "No BS" mindset that focuses on hard work and results.

Understanding human language is an extremely complex endeavour. Since Maluuba was founded, we've been on a mission to solve artificial intelligence by teaching machines to think, reason and communicate as humans do.

To date, we've built one of the largest deep learning institutions for language understanding, launched our products on tens of millions of devices globally and published leading research in the AI space. Our work in machine comprehension is leading the industry and we're excited to be working with great partners on accomplishing our vision.

Salima, who grew up in Kenya, and graduated from McGill in 2015, is the Founder of Soular - a company that provides solar powered backpacks to children in East Africa so they can study every night. Soular has distributed backpacks across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, most recently launched its one-for-one model in North America in collaboration with Disney and HSN, and has been endorsed by Lupita Nyong’o. Salima has been named in the Top 40 Under 40 Women in East Africa.

Chris Ford is the CEO of Capco Toronto. He is a partner in Capco’s Technology practice and the senior delivery manager specializing in large program management and technology delivery. He has over 15 years of consulting experience, and focuses on the management of account and relationship activities for Canadian financial institutions. Chris is a recognized thought leader in his field, and has published articles on non-functional testing with emphasis on the performance and operability domains. He has an engineering background and diverse technology experience. Prior to joining Capco, Chris worked as an independent technology consultant, and as a Senior Consultant with Deloitte Consulting.

Gary Teelucksingh is a Partner at Capco based out of Toronto with a focus on the Wealth and Investment Management practice. He is a wealth management and financial services expert, with over two decades of functional experience across Marketing, Sales, Operations, Compliance and Product Development in the banking, mutual fund, broker/dealer and insurance industries.

As the Director of Velocity, Jay advocates for entrepreneurship and provides guidance to startups to help them build successful businesses. Jay is passionate about enabling all contributors of the Kitchener-Waterloo startup ecosystem to punch above the region’s collective weight. Jay began his entrepreneurship journey ten years ago at the University of Waterloo, while pursuing a degree in Mechatronics Engineering. During his studies, he co-founded BufferBox, which was ultimately acquired by Google, where Jay worked for 3.5 years before joining Velocity. What Jay finds most interesting about working in the startup world is the lack of a rule book, and the fact that early stage companies can do things in a way that larger companies can’t. When he is not mentoring companies, you can find Jay tinkering with hardware, playing squash, or teaching his parrot new tricks.

A growth and analytics professional with a passion for using the intersection of data, engineering, and marketing to fuel business results. Currently VP of Growth and Analytics at 500px.

Sylvia loves being active in the community and enjoys speaking at industry events, with past engagements including Start-Up Festival Montreal and SMX Toronto.

Specialties:
1) Growth teams: building teams at the intersection of data, marketing, and eng to lead change
2) Growth strategy: product language / channel fit, product virality, funnel and campaign optimization, multivariate testing
3) Analytics & big data- marketing and web analytics, user segmentation, predictive modeling, multi channel attribution, marketing ROI measurement, tracking technologies

Tanmay Bakshi, 13, is a Software/Cognitive Developer, Keynote Speaker, Algorithm-ist, IBM Champion for Cloud, Honorary IBM Cloud Advisor, a Writer, and the Author of Hello Swift!; shares his knowledge with the world through his YouTube channel called Tanmay Teaches; is a host of an IBM Facebook Live series called Watson Made Simple with Tanmay; has taken a resolve to help 100,000 kids and beginners on their journey to innovate through coding; and supports initiatives like STEAM, Everyone Can Code, Girls Who Code, and Kids Can Code. His journey into the world of programming began when he was 5. Playful beginning with batch programming, Foxpro, and VB turned towards Objective-C and got his app tTables, which helps practice times tables, accepted into the iOS app store when he was 9. At the age of 12, he presented one of his many algorithms, AskTanmay, the world’s first web-based NLQA (Natural Language Question Answering) System to be powered by IBM Watson, at IBM InterConnect 2016. You’d be awestruck to know how he’s using Cognitive Computing, Cloud Computing, and IoT, in the field of Healthcare, Special Needs, Education, and Business to ELEVATE your approach to the next level of computing - Artificial Intelligence.