Ari Heljakka, PhD
Founder & CEO
Root Signals
Ari is the Founder and CEO of Root Signals. In 2005, he identified Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as a pivotal goal and collaborated with early pioneers in cognitive architecture, reinforcement learning, and probabilistic inference from 2005 to 2007.
Due to limited funding in AI at the time, Ari started a SaaS company Dream Broker, with the goal of funding his future AI research. Dream Broker became Finland's fastest-growing company in 2012 according to Deloitte, serving over 1,000 enterprise and public sector clients.
In 2017, Ari returned to his AI passion, identifying generative models as the field's most promising frontier and completed his Ph.D. in Generative AI in 2021. With AGI becoming a mainstream concept in 2022, he founded Root Signals to advance this vision. Ari has published 10+ academic AI articles on venues including in NeurIPS, ICLR and AAAI.
Ouz Gencoglu
Co-Founder & Head of AI
Root Signals
Oguzhan (Ouz) Gencoglu is an AI expert with deep expertise in Machine Learning. He takes a holistic view to his field combining science, business strategy, leadership, and policymaking. Ouz is currently the co-founder and Head of AI at Root Signals AI from Finland as well as the founder of AI advisory, Laconic, serving as an advisor and board member to various companies and institutions. He previously co-founded Top Data Science, an AI consultancy from Helsinki, and led a large team of machine learning experts for 7 years. Ouz is an avid speaker and continues to give talks on diverse topics related to AI.