Our Team
The project is a brainchild of Cristina Mota. She is being helped by a team of dedicated advisors and volunteers.
Cristina Mota
FOUNDER, CEO
From a young age, Cristina always loved all STEM subjects and dreamed of becoming a scientist. While in college, she became fascinated with computer science, especially natural language processing and earned a BS and PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon and a DEA in Fundamental Informatics and Applications from the Université de Paris 7 Denis Diderot. She was a visiting scholar at the Proteus Group at NYU, and a research associate at Linguateca followed by a postdoc at INESC-Id Lisboa doing research in paraphrasing systems.
Her new dream is to teach coding, the basics of natural language processing and of artificial intelligence (her areas of expertise) to all small children in the greater NYC area and beyond with the help of friendly robots Dash & Dot and Ozobot.
When she is not playing with one of her many robots, she loves to cook for her family and friends, swim, go to the movies with her husband, and play board and card games with her son and friends. She loves ice cream and going to the beach. Her only fancy dream is to own a boat (possibly operated by a friendly robot)!
SYlviE
Coming soon!
Jana Sukkarieh advisor
Entrepreneur, mathematician, consultant, angel investor. Founder & CTO: Noha-Z, an ecosystem for content optimization using hybrid machine/human intelligence. Co-Founder & CTO: Counselytics, a re-inventor of the contractual legal industry (acquired by Conga). First employee at Cybersecurity startup Secerno (acquired by Oracle). Jana received masters in speech recognition and natural language processing and a PhD in artificial intelligence from Cambridge University after which she was a postdoc at Oxford University and then a research scientist at ETS building educational and automatic scoring technologies.
Shazia Shah
New York based designer and product developer. Having been introduced to programming as an adult, Shazia has a profound understanding of the need to bring coding concepts to children at an early age.
VERonika
Coming soon!