Sanika Bapat is an AI researcher at The MITRE Corporation. She holds a B.A. in Computer Science and Philosophy from Wellesley College, as well as an M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University, with a concentration in Healthcare. Her graduate research centered on the summarization of clinical health records using large language models (LLM), which led to her co-founding a startup offering Natural Language Processing (NLP) services to clinicians. Her healthcare experience led to her passion for patterns and insights identifiable by large AI models. At MITRE, Sanika has diversified her expertise by applying different AI architectures across various domains, including healthcare, geospatial and environmental monitoring, and multimodal data fusion. Currently, her focus lies on evaluating Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques using LLMs.

Dr. Denise Dunlap is an Associate Professor in the Manning School of Business at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Dr. Dunlap a specialist in strategic management and international business and focus on innovation and entrepreneurship. Her primary research interest is on studying how knowledge sourcing practices in developed countries and emerging markets matter for innovation and entrepreneurship. Dr. Dunlap’s most well-known research is on breakthrough innovations and those that improve global healthcare.

Her core research agenda is focused on scholarship engagement involving the intersection between business and science. Since joining UMass Lowell,  Dr. Dunlap has had the opportunity to pursue her long-term, interdisciplinary career passion, which is to engage in collaborative efforts with colleagues both within and outside of the Business School on important and high-impact topics regarding innovation and entrepreneurship. As a result of these interdisciplinary efforts, she is the business site PI on two NIH grants: the P50 Center for Accelerating Practices to End Suicide through Technology Translation (CAPES) and the Center of Advancing Point of Care Technologies (CAPCaT) in heart, blood, lung, and sleep disorders.

Erin Teeple is a Senior Principal Scientist at Sanofi. She holds a ScB in Computational Biology and MD from Brown University. She earned her PhD in Data Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She completed her residency training at Brown/Rhode Island Hospital and Harvard School of Public Health and a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical outcomes research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Her published scientific works span from laboratory studies into fundamental mechanisms of disease to epidemiology and clinical outcomes analyses with a focus on the development of novel AI/ML methods for biomedical applications.  

Talk Tite: NLP and LLMs for Engineering Applications

Dr. Sarkar has had the opportunity to gain broad experience in business strategy and product management for companies like Dassault Systèmes and MathWorks. In these roles, she has worked to develop complex analyses and innovative solutions to identify new market opportunities and drive growth.

In addition to her hands-on experience, she completed a Doctor of Philosophy in Civil Engineering from Vanderbilt University, and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Texas at Dallas. I also earned a certification in Product Management from Pragmatic Marketing.

Dr. Sarkar’s areas of expertise include: Product Management | Strategic Planning | Market Positioning | Market Analysis | Team Building & Leadership | Presentation & Communication | Competitive Analysis | Product Roadmapping | Financial Modeling | Business & Corporate Strategy | Business Analytics | Market Analysis & Competitive Intelligence | Statistical Analysis & Interpretation

Talk Tite: Watermarking for Data Provenance in Object Detection

Anna Raney is a Lead AI Engineer at The MITRE Corporation. She holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and M.S. in Computer Engineering, specializing in image processing and pattern recognition, from the University of New Hampshire. Since joining MITRE in 2020, Anna has explored various facets of AI, but found her passion to be AI Security when she led a project on embedding watermarks into object detection datasets for data provenance. She is now the Secured AI Group Lead within the Trustworthy and Secure AI Department. In her role, Anna works closely with diverse stakeholders from the Department of Defense (DoD), Intelligence Community (IC), and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), developing AI capabilities that are safe, secure, and trustworthy. Additionally, she contributes to MITRE ATLAS (https://atlas.mitre.org/), a comprehensive, globally accessible knowledge base that details adversary tactics and techniques against AI-enabled systems.