Corey Jaskolski is a National Geographic Fellow, explorer, engineer, and MIT graduate. He designs, builds, and deploys technologies for exploration and conservation missions in some of the world’s most beautiful and unforgiving environments. Jaskolski’s work has taken him to all seven continents on projects like scuba diving among the icebergs in Antarctica, descending 12,500 feet below the ocean’s surface in a three- person submarine to explore the Titanic, leading a helicopter-based effort to produce a high-resolution aerial LIDAR map of the Nepalese side of Everest, and venturing deep inside flooded caves while digitizing Maya human sacrifice victims and Ice Age bear skeletons. Recently Jaskolski developed a custom camera array to capture a 3D digital copy of one of the world’s last Sumatran rhinos. Today, Corey is collaborating with National Geographic Society on the development of a cloud-based Conservation Intelligence Platform, aimed at providing real-time identification of endangered species and security alerts for protected areas. Jaskolski is founder and CEO of Synthetaic, an impact-driven artificial intelligence start-up that creates AI solutions, leveraging synthetic data for applications including conservation, anti-poaching, security, and medical imaging.

In October 2020, Corey was honored with the prestigious Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year Award for his innovations in the fields of conservation, science, and technology.

Dave started his career as an Electrical Engineer but for the past three decades has been managing teams across the entire product development cycle from inception through to having products in the market. As Director of Engineering for Synthetaic, Dave leads a team of Ph.D. scientists, AI experts, Full-Stack-Developers, and User Experience professionals unlocking impossible AI in the areas of Medical, Security, and more. As Director of R&D for Johnson Controls (a $30 B/yr public company), Dave had over 100 staff reporting to him across a number of inception-to-market projects including cloud-enabled smart security camera systems. Previously as a senior program manager at Rockwell Automation, Dave oversaw the full electrical, firmware, software, mechanical, and manufacture operations of several types of high-end automation controllers that interfaced with motion-controller, sensors, and computer vision systems and were used in applications ranging from brewery production lines to the pharmaceutical industry.

Akasha Sutherland is an intrepid explorer, diver, and conservationist who strives at connecting communities, businesses, and institutions with their ever-changing environments. Prior to joining Synthetaic, Akasha served as the director of communications for 3D media and digitization company, Virtual Wonders, where she led scanning expeditions to some of the world’s most treasured cultural and natural sites. Having worked in countless chapters of conservation and on action-based media campaigns around the world, Akasha’s role at Synthetaic focuses on developing and maintaining relationships with NGO’s, protected areas, and large collaborators like National Geographic Society. Today, Akasha is intent on using Synthetaic’s core IP and impact-based mission, to harness the power of machine learning, in order solve some of the planets most pressing environmental challenges.

Before joining Synthetaic, Brian was the Principal Data Scientist at a cloud implementation firm with an AI focus. Brian was responsible for architecting and deploying enterprise big data cloud-based AI solutions across many industries. Since he did all of this in the Azure cloud framework, Brian works in close collaboration with Microsoft senior technical staff. Prior to his industry work, Brian earned his PhD with a focus in computational neuroscience from Marquette University (MU) with specialization in medical imaging, signal processing, machine-learning (AI), and high-performance computing. During his postdoctoral studies at Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), he used computational and AI methods to characterize injury mechanisms in the event of a roadside bombs (IEDs) in combat zones. Using many disparate sensing modalities along with machine-learning models, he worked to characterize the dynamic response of the spine in a seated soldier when exposed to impacts that resemble those from underbody blasts in armored vehicles. This characterization was instrumental in the design of an anthropomorphic test device (ATD, or crash-test-dummy) for use in armored vehicle design. He has built many complex predictive models, some of which have been published [3], [4] or even become MSFT case studies.