Daniel Melka
Country General Manager, IBM Israel

Melka joined IBM about 20 years ago and held many senior management positions in the company’s services and sales fields in Israel and in France. During the 3 years before his appointment as CEO, he served as Deputy CEO and led IBM Israel’s Sales division. Before he joined the company, he worked for one of the leading integration companies in France.

Melka did his BSc. in Engineering at the Technion, Haifa, and his MBA at Henley Business School, London.

Dr. Noam Slonim
Principal Investigator, Project Debater, IBM Research Haifa

Dr. Noam Slonim is a natural language processing and AI scientist at IBM Research in Haifa, Israel and the visionary and Principal Investigator for Project Debater. Before joining IBM in 2007, Dr. Slonim was an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University, working in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics in the Biophysics and the Systems Biology groups.

Dr. Slonim did his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, working in the machine learning lab under the supervision of Prof. Naftali Tishby. He has co-authored more than 50 papers to date.

In parallel to his research career, Dr. Slonim was writing for television comedy shows, including a popular weekly satire show called The Cameric Five, the Israeli equivalent of Saturday Night Live and for a sitcom focused on explaining science to children.

Dr. Ranit Aharonov
Project Manager, Project Debater, IBM Research Haifa

Dr. Ranit Aharonov is an AI scientist at IBM Research in Haifa, Israel and the manager of the Project Debater team. Prior to joining IBM, Dr. Aharonov, was the vice president of Research and Development at Rosetta Genomics, a biotechnology company focused on developing and commercializing next generation diagnostics.

Dr. Aharonov received her Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2003, where she conducted research in the theory and simulation of learning in neural networks. Dr. Aharonov has a BA in neuroscience from Brandeis University and she is the co-author of more than 30 papers and 15 patents. During her career in industry, Dr. Aharonov took a short break to conduct research in the field of population genetics at Tel Aviv University, which resulted in a paper in Nature Communications.

Prior to her professional career, she traveled extensively and worked in various places across the globe, including spending a season working on a commercial fishing boat in Alaska.

Caroline Taylor
Vice President and CMO for IBM Global Markets

Caroline Taylor is Vice President and CMO for IBM Global Markets. Based in London, Caroline leads the teams responsible for marketing and communications strategy and execution across seven geographical regions of the world.

Caroline joined IBM in 1997, with extensive experience in the independent software sector. Prior to her career in the technology sector, Caroline worked in fine wine retail, including establishing and running her own mail-order wine business. With 30 years of professional marketing experience, Caroline is an Adjunct Professor at Imperial College Business School in London, and a Fellow of the Marketing Society.

Caroline is a passionate advocate for equality and diversity, and is active as an executive sponsor for diversity in IBM. Caroline is a director and trustee of the Oasis Foundation, and chair of the board of trustees of Stop the Traffik, a charity which is pioneering intelligence-led prevention of human trafficking; connecting community generated big data with sophisticated data analytics.