After leading multiple scientific software development initiatives for industry leaders in knowledge extraction, scientific big data management and publishing, Igor Mikhalev completed his MBA at the University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam Business School). He now conducts his PhD research in collaboration with UvA and a number of organizations, all industry partners leading the way in data-driven R&D. As co-founder of Firmshift (http://firmshift.com), a company that connects Human creativity with Machine intelligence, Igor is also working on reason.ai (http://reasonai.com), a transformational NLU platform for powering complex goal-oriented and multi-modal sales and support conversations between brands and their customers.