The Rotman Career Centre held an invite-only breakfast for current students, their internship managers, and Rotman alumni at the National Club in downtown Toronto for Three TED-Style Talks on Issues That Matter.
Speakers
AVI GOLDFARB - Rotman Chair in A.I. and Healthcare; co-author of the bestselling book Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Avi is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab, Senior Editor at Marketing Science, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Avi’s research focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the digital economy. He has published over 70 academic articles in a variety of outlets in marketing, statistics, law, computing, and economics. This work has been discussed in White House reports, Congressional testimony, European Commission documents, the Economist, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, CBC Radio, National Public Radio, Forbes, Fortune, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.
Topic: Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence
KELLY PETERS - Behavioral Economics Thought Leader, Entrepreneur, Professor & Author
Kelly Peters is the CEO and co-founder of BEworks, the world’s leading behavioral economics firm and one of the largest employers of psychologists in the private sector.
She believes scientific thinking, properly applied, has the power to transform society. In her talks, Kelly analyzes our most intractable problems with a behavioral lens and inspires audiences to develop solutions grounded in a scientific understanding of behavior.
In addition to building a world-class team of scientists, Kelly developed the BEworks Method, a proprietary framework which fuses behavioral insights with the scientific method. Working alongside her firm’s co-founder, the legendary behavioral economist Dan Ariely, she’s developed an approach which has been applied to complex challenges at many of the world’s largest firms and government agencies.
She’s overseen the launch of hundreds of field experiments and uncovered pioneering research on the factors influencing decision-making, helping close the gap between academic research and real-world application. She’s led complex innovation projects and commercialized new ideas and concepts to disrupt traditional models.
Kelly is a sought-after global speaker. She’s presented at several TEDx events and is a featured speaker at World Business Forum conferences. She’s been featured in The New York Times, Fortune and Forbes.
Kelly teaches Applied Behavioral Science at one of the world’s top MBA programs at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. She also regularly lectures at Cornell, Harvard and other universities.
Topic: Changing The World Through Scientific Thinking
FARHAN THAWAR – Vice-President, Engineering at Shopify and the former CTO & Co-Founder of Helpful.com, which was acquired by Shopify. Prior to this role, he was the CTO, Mobile at Pivotal and VP, Engineering at Pivotal Labs. Farhan is best known for scaling Xtreme Labs 35x and building some of the most popular mobile apps in the world. He is an avid writer and speaker and was named one of Toronto's 25 most powerful people. Prior to Xtreme, Farhan held senior technical positions at Achievers, Microsoft, and Trilogy. Farhan completed his MBA in Financial Engineering from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and Computer Science/EE from the University of Waterloo. Farhan is an advisor at Eniac Network, Ritual.co and Y Combinator. He also holds a board seat at Optiva (formerly Redknee).
Topic: Three Things I Will Do Differently Next Time
