Founder & CEO, Alectio

Jennifer Prendki is the founder and CEO of Alectio. The company is the direct product of her beliefs that good models can only be built with good data, and that the brute force approach that consists in blindly using ever larger training sets is the reason why the barrier to entry into AI is so high. Prior to starting Alectio, Jennifer was the VP of Machine Learning at Figure Eight, the company that pioneered data labeling, Chief Data Scientist at Atlassian and Senior Manager of Data Science in the Search team at Walmart Labs. She has spent most of her career creating a data-driven culture wherever she went, succeeding in sometimes highly skeptical environments.

She is particularly skilled at building and scaling high-performance machine learning teams and is known for enjoying a good challenge. Trained as a particle physicist (she holds a PhD in particle physics from Sorbonne University), she likes to use her analytical mind not only when building complex models but also as part of her leadership philosophy. She is pragmatic yet detail oriented. Jennifer also takes great pleasure in addressing both technical and nontechnical audiences alike at conferences and seminars and is passionate about attracting more women to careers in STEM.