Dr. Pollard holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering & Electronics during which in which he made important contributions to the field of speech synthesis, paving the way for commonplace technologies such as Siri and Alexa. After leaving academia, Mat began his career in IT and has over 25 years’ experience leading IT innovation for large multinational corporations, including CIGNA, Accenture, Liberty Mutual and ARAMARK. He is now Senior Director of Enterprise Architecture and Innovation at American Tower.Inspired by the "train track" puzzles that appear in print editions of newspapers in the UK, Mat set about developing the popular online game Traksly (www.traksly.com).Mat has four IEEE journal publications and has one patent pending.As part-time CTO at ThreadLab, Mat helped a startup clothing subscription service achieve scale by setting the technical vision for the company.