Building the AI workforce of the future

DART is an early-stage startup accelerator and impact fund.* With our location in Zurich and San Francisco, we provide early-stage Swiss and European founders a bridge between the US and Europe and enable them to internationalise at a faster pace.* We focus on impact and only invest in startups with a strong scientific or technical background that are building breakthrough technologies that positively impact people or the planet.* A managing team of two female partners naturally brings a 50% gender diversity balance among startup founders and investors.

My applied research group focuses on novel use cases for generative ML within the Unity ecosystem.

Tech leadership for the Generative AI unit of Unity Labs (https://unity.com/labs)Tech leadership for the Multiplayer Suite unit of Unity Gaming Services (https://unity.com/solutions/gaming-services): designing and building a product stack allowing self-reinforcing, prosocial norms to emerge in online communities.

"Enabling emotional intelligence everywhere,so human and artificial intelligencecan interact with awareness and empathy."Together with my co-founder, I led the company through 4 fundraising rounds and 2 major pivots; I created the Swiss office and led its operations from inception through acquisition, hiring 20+ staff over 4 years; I re-org'd the company to endure through the Covid crisis, and led the acquisition by Unity.

- Co-founded the NGO and obtained its recognition as a public interest association;- Established formal partnerships with other organisations in developing countries;- Designed environmental education projects;- Raised project funds through crowdfunding;- Managed and volunteered on projects in four Asian countries from April 2016 to March 2017.

Working directly with the CEO and COO, staffed and grew a team of 6 data scientists, machine learning engineers, and advisors. The DS&AI team is responsible for building and deploying intelligent products to support decentralised collaboration in a network of over 800 collaborators worldwide, provide analytics services to the management, and help create Hyperloop: the future of sustainable transportation.While at Hyperloop TT I designed, implemented, and released the first version of Lucy: https://www.hyperlooptt.com/lucy/

Worked with a passionate network of people from all over the world to make Hyperloop a reality for the future of transportation.

I oversaw the development of the independent research division of a budding cryptocurrency startup; it included reaching out to novice and specialised audiences, securing project funding, leading fundamental and applied research projects, and promoting the company's research on the international stage.My main projects at ECUREX included:- starting the P2PFISY conference series and network (www.p2pfisy.com)- co-authoring a comprehensive report on the technological, entrepreneurial, economic, and legal aspects of digital currencies (www.paolotasca.com/research/digital-currencies-principles-trends-opportunities-and-risks)- co-editing the Springer book "Banking beyond Banks and Money" (www.springer.com/en/book/9783319424460)- lecturing on Bitcoin and digital currencies to academic and business audiences.In early 2017, ECUREX morphed into OYOBA (www.oyoba.net).

Part of the Digital Analytics team, responsible for guiding the digital transformation of the largest media & Internet group in Switzerland, by providing analytical insights and products to support data-driven decision making.Some of the projects I led at Tamedia Digital:- built from scratch a recommender system and A/B testing framework for a large online store- designed and built a high-performance data structure and query engine to perform overlap computations on large streams of Internet traffic data- implemented a hybrid machine learning approach (unsupervised clustering/neural network/decision tree algorithm) to understand and classify user-created online polls (http://bit.ly/2iP6iDp).

Designed and conducted independent research, published 12 peer-reviewed papers, secured 1.2M CHF in research grants, taught students at the postgraduate level, gave invited lectures and talks at multiple universities and international conferences.