Presenter Type: 2022
Jeanne is the Co-founder and CEO of beingAI, the world’s first transmedia AI beings™ company creating autonomous virtual beings who build long-term engagement and trust with people anywhere, anytime, across devices and media platforms. The company aims to bring humanness into digital experiences to promote positivity and social good—to help us thrive.
Jeanne has over 25 years of experience in business management and technology marketing. She is the former CEO and Chief Marketing Officer of Hanson Robotics, the creator of Sophia the Robot, and held marketing leadership roles at Dell, Cisco, Danaher, and Apple, where she was the product and business manager responsible for launching Apple’s most groundbreaking products in the region. She started her career as a Group Management Trainee at John Swire & Sons, rotating through shipping, aviation, and retail assignments.
Jeanne is active in non-profit work and is the Chairperson of the Advisory Board of The Cathy Ann Hall Sphere Foundation, a social impact network addressing 12 humanitarian issues with lifestyle gamification and web3 solutions, a Founder of Nama Institute, seeking to gamify the learning wisdom, and a Volunteer of Himalayan Consensus Institute, an NGO involved in social enterprise development and climate protection. She is also an angel investor and advisor of several startups.
Jeanne has a Ph.D. degree in integrated and holistic health, an MBA degree from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and a BA degree in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a certified yoga instructor and a life-long student of yoga philosophy, having completed Georg Feuerstein’s five-year Traditional Yoga Studies course.
received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, in 2000. He is currently a Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, and the Academic Code Administrator in the School of Graduate Studies. He was a Visiting Scholar with Harvard University in fall 2015, and was an Associate with the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences from September 2015 to December 2016. His research interests include multi-agent networks, distributed control, optimization, and sampled-data systems. Prof. Aghdam is a member of Professional Engineers Ontario, Chair of the Conference Editorial Board of the IEEE Control Systems Society, Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Systems Journal, and was an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, IEEE ACCESS, IET Control Theory and Applications, and the Canadian Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was a member of the Technical Program Committee of a number of conferences, including the IEEE Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics and the IEEE Multiconference on Systems and Control. He was a member of the Review Panel/Committee for the NSF, Italian Research and University Evaluation Agency, Innovation Fund Denmark Projects, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada ECE Evaluation Group. He was the 2014–2015 President of IEEE Canada and Director (Region 7), IEEE, Inc., and was also a member of the IEEE Awards Board for this period. He is a recipient of the 2009 IEEE MGA Achievement Award and 2020 IEEE Canada J. M. Ham Outstanding Engineering Educator Award. Dr. Aghdam was a member of the IEEE Medal of Honor Committee for 2017–2019 and is currently the Vice-Chair of the IEEE Medals Council.
