From Lab to Launch: Academic Roots and Industry Realities of GenAI in Verticals
Generative AI is evolving fast—the most transformative breakthroughs are happening at the intersection of cutting-edge research and real-world, vertical-specific applications.
Join us for an exclusive panel discussion featuring leading minds from UPenn, Stanford, UCLA and industry, as we explore how foundational research is being translated into high-impact GenAI solutions across healthcare, finance and more.
We'll dive into:
How academic innovation is shaping vertical GenAI tooling and architecture
Challenges in bridging the gap between theory and deployment
What industry builders need from the research community—and vice versa
Insights from a former Google Ventures General Partner on the capital landscape and funding strategies for vertical GenAI startups
This session brings together top researchers, investors, and engineering leaders to explore how we move GenAI from lab to launch—and what it takes to get it right.
Agenda
17:15 - 17:30 Event Check-in
17:30 - 18:15 Panel Discussion
18:15 - 19:00 Networking
Panel Discussion
Panelist:
Professor Dan Roth: the Eduardo D. Glandt Distinguished Professor at UPenn and Chief AI Scientist at Oracle, formerly VP/Distinguished Scientist at AWS AI. Prof Roth led the scientific efforts behind Amazon's first-gen GenAI products like Titan Models, Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon Q, and has been involved in several startups. A leading voice in AI and NLP, Prof Roth is an ACM, AAAI, ACL, and AAAS Fellow and recipient of the IJCAI John McCarthy Award.
Howard Peng, PhD: Co-founder and CTO of Youlify, Howard Peng earned his Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing from UIUC after graduating top of his class in Computer Science at Tsinghua University. He has authored over 25 research papers with 1,000+ citations and brings more than a decade of experience in building AI agents. Prior to Youlify, he led AI efforts at a unicorn startup and built multiple generative AI products from the ground up.
Adam Ghobarah, PhD: Founding and Managing Partner at Top Harvest Capital. Prior to founding Top Harvest Capital in 2021, Adam was a general partner at Google Ventures (GV), where he focused on machine learning (ML) / AI (2012-2020) in software and in health care. Prior to joining GV, he was a director at Google (2006-2012). He built and led a world-class machine learning team that developed models for predicting advertiser behavior and systems for automating ML model training. He was previously a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University, focused on applying statistical machine learning to public health.
Professor Aditya Grover: Co-founder of Inception Labs. Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UCLA. His research interests are at the intersection of generative AI and sequential decision making, and grounded in applications for accelerating scientific discovery. His research has been recognized by best paper award at NeurIPS, Forbes 30 Under 30 List, NSF CAREER Award, and ACM SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award. Aditya received his postdoc training at UC Berkeley, PhD from Stanford, and bachelors from IIT Delhi.
Professor Sanmi Koyejo: Computer Science professor at Stanford and Founder & Chief Responsible AI Officer at VirtueAI. Prof Koyejo leads the Stanford Trustworthy AI Research (STAIR) group. His work focuses on building reliable, ethical machine learning systems, especially for healthcare and neuroscience. Prof Koyejo is also the President of Black in AI and a Sloan Research Fellow.
Rajhans Samdani, PhD: Rajhans Samdani is leads AI at Snowflake with over 15 years of experience in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Prior to joining Snowflake, he led Machine Learning and NLP teams at startups such as Neeva and Spoke, and worked as a research scientist at Google. Rajhans holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois and a bachelor's degree from IIT Bombay.
Moderator:
Bo Gu, MD: Co-founder & CEO of Youlify, former Cardiac Surgeon, ER physician and hospital department chair.
This is a private, invite-only event with limited space. If you're an engineer, founder, or tech leader building in vertical GenAI, feel free to apply to join the conversation.
About Youlify
Youlify builds task-specific AI agents tailored for the healthcare payments space. Our technology transforms complex medical context into optimized revenue for physicians and hospitals. From coding and billing to denial management, we manage the entire revenue lifecycle for medical practices—streamlining operations and maximizing financial outcomes.