Keynote Speakers

Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is University Professor and holder of the Niki and Max Nikias Chair in Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) and serves as the inaugural Vice President for Presidential Initiatives on the Senior Leadership Team of USC’s President. Shri Narayanan’s interdisciplinary research focuses on human-centered sensing/imaging, signal processing, and machine intelligence centered on human communication, interaction, emotions, and behavior. His work has a special emphasis on speech, audio, language, multimodal and biomedical problems and applications with direct societal relevance in defense, security, health, media and the arts. His laboratory is supported by federal (NSF, NIH, DARPA, IARPA, ONR, Army and DHS) and various foundation and industry grants. He has published over 1000 papers and has 19 granted U.S. patents . His research and inventions have led to technology commercialization including through startups he co-founded: Behavioral Signals Technologies focused on the telecommunication services and AI based conversational assistance industry and Lyssn focused on mental health care delivery, treatment and quality assurance.

Michael Koeris, PhD, joined DARPA as the director of the Biological Technologies Office in April 2024. His research and teaching focus on all aspects of chemistry, manufacturing, and control for microbiome medicines, as well as advanced cell and gene therapy approaches. Before coming to DARPA, Koeris served as professor of bioprocessing and as a member of the Amgen Bioprocessing Center in the Department of Biological Engineering and Management at the Keck Graduate Institute.He also advised the NIH’s RADx initiative as a Portfolio Executive, assisting with the rapid development, clinical validation, manufacturing and distribution of Sars-CoV-2 diagnostic tests throughout the pandemic. Prior to joining KGI in 2020, Koeris actively started, grew, and exited biotechnology startups, both as founder and senior leader, as well as a member of the Board of Directors. He holds more than a dozen patents through the U.S. and internationally. His entrepreneurial career began by spinning out Sample6, which was recognized by Forbes as one of the 25 hottest AgTech startups in 2017 and was acquired later that year. Koeris serves as a Board Director of global, non-profit repository AddGene, and in the past served on boards of commercial biotech entities.