Hilary Mason

Co-founder & CEO, Hidden Door

Hilary Mason's career is defined by pushing the limits of what big data and artificial intelligence can achieve. For more than 20 years, she has built practical AI-powered products in industries as diverse as finance, education, and healthcare. She has now set her sights on revolutionizing the world of gaming as co-founder and CEO of Hidden Door, a place for fans to find, discover, and play in their favorite fictional worlds. A charming speaker who resonates with both technical and general audiences, Hilary turns a pragmatic lens toward the growing AI scene, separating hype from reality and helping companies understand where this new technology fits into their business.

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“The math is all the same,” is Hilary’s explanation for how she’s been able to work with AI in so many different settings. From quality control cameras in pizza making to robots that let surgeons know when a procedure is going awry, machine learning has nearly endless applications. But Hilary maintains that AI will never replace human intuition and creativity, and calls for a nuanced understanding of the ways AI should and shouldn’t be used. Her respect for human ingenuity is apparent in her work at Hidden Door, where she partners with authors, filmmakers, and other creatives to build interactive story adventures set in the fictional realms they’ve created. Think Dungeons & Dragons and similar tabletop role-play games, but in the universe of your favorite book, movie, tv series, or video game.

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Prior to founding Hidden Door, Mason held many positions at the cutting edge of industry. In her former role as Data Scientist in Residence at Accel, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm, she advised companies large and small on their data strategy. In her tenure as Chief Data Scientist for Bitly, the popular link-shortening service, she helped define the field of data science and led a team that studied attention on the internet in realtime, doing a mix of research, exploration, and engineering. She also founded Fast Forward Labs (acquired by Cloudera), a machine intelligence research company that helps organizations develop new business opportunities through emerging technologies. After the acquisition, she took on the role of General Manager of Cloudera’s AI and Machine Learning business units.

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Hilary has been named to Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business, Fortune’s 40 Under 40, Crain’s New York Business’s 40 under 40, and is a recipient of the TechFellows Engineering Leadership Award. She is co-founder of HackNY, a non-profit that helps talented engineering students find their way into the startup community of creative technologists in New York City; and member of NYCResistor. She advises a number of companies, including collective[i], DataKind, and Betaspring, among others. She also served on Mayor Bloomberg’s Technology and Innovation Advisory Council, giving her insight into how government and industry can work together.

Topics

AI Applications for Any Business

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that AI is transforming every aspect of our lives, especially the way we work. You know your business should be taking advantage of AI because, as the saying goes, AI won’t replace workers, but workers who use AI will definitely replace workers who don’t. But strategy is important. (Let’s not jump the gun and lay off half your workforce and replace them with a handful of ChatGPT “prompt engineers.”) In this customizable talk, Hilary Mason will draw on her extensive experience across consumer and enterprise organizations to help you discover where and how to implement this revolutionary technology into your existing business structures. Audiences will walk away with a deeper understanding of how AI works, feeling empowered—rather than frightened—by everything AI has to offer.

AI Will Not Replace You…Probably

When programs like ChatGPT and DALL-E came on the scene with the ability to write eloquent essays and produce stunning images in a matter of seconds, white collar workers were shaking in their boots. Many are still wondering how their livelihoods will be impacted as the technology gets increasingly accurate and capable. (Baffling hallucinations and images of 14-fingered humans with way too many teeth will soon be a thing of the past.) But is work as we know it a fading concept? This presentation is an opportunity to dive deep into the future of work with someone who has been building AI-powered technologies for decades, rather than writing think pieces about the robot apocalypse for a few months.