HELEN KONTOZOPOULOS
  • HOME
  • BIO
  • TEACHING
  • SPEAKING
    • IWW
  • BLOG

Women Investors at the 2022 Angel Investors Ontario Conference

10/19/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Angel Investors Ontario conference started off this morning with focus on women investors and women-led startups. I was honoured to join the panel:

Peng-Sang Cau: VP, ATS Automation
Helen Kontozopoulos: Co-Founder, ODAIA Intelligence
Dejana Dua: Partner, Anexa Capital

Dr. Ketaki Desai: Co-Founder & CEO, Tracer
All Moderated by Danielle Graham, Co-Founder, The Firehood

#womenwhoinvest
#womenfounders
#angelnetworks
​#womenledstartups

0 Comments

GLOBAL AI SUMMIT 2022

8/19/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
I'm looking forward to this year's Global AI Summit in Riyadh, Saudia Arabia!

September 13-15, 2022The Global AI Summit is a two-way conversation that engages every attendee, speaker, and partner in a rich dialogue about how AI can solve complex problems, empower businesses, shape our future, and ultimately, transform society.

From local and regional “visions” to the united economic framework, The Global AI Summit gathers the most prominent policy makers, leading investors, thought leaders and innovators in the field today.

globalaisummit.org
#GlobalAISummit #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #healthinnovation
Picture
Picture
Picture
0 Comments

Women in Tech & Friends in Athens, Greece

7/19/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Endeavor Greece + Hellenides + ORAMA Ventures + Genesis Ventures =

Together with Helen Kontozopoulos we are inviting women and allies to hear about stories from women leaders who did a mind-shift in their careers and lives.

We want to hear from women who have started something new, recently entered into tech, or changed their thinking about their futures.

We encourage you to come learn, connect, and network with some amazing women in the tech community of Athens.
Come join us on July 21st!

Register: 
https://www.eventbrite.fi/e/women-in-tech-connect-learn-network-tickets-379566181667

#Athens #Greece
#WomeninTech
#Womenfounders
​#startups #Entrepreneurship
0 Comments

Creative Authenticity With Helen Kontozopoulos - Eureka Moments Only Podcast

6/27/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Welcome to the Eureka Moments Only Podcast, a show that highlights members of the global entrepreneurship community and breaks down the moments of change that lead to success in business that we like to call eureka moments.

Chris Decker kicks off this season with Helen Kontozopoulos, who teaches Product Development, Design, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto. Among Helen’s achievements include co-founding the Department of Computer Science Innovation Lab and co-founding ODAIA Intelligence.

HIGHLIGHTS
  • Helen on being a startup founder
  • The process of growing her startup
  • Helen’s Vision and Mission
  • The difference between the academic world and the business world
  • Helen’s eureka moment
  • Helen’s role models

Link to the podcast: https://www.audacy.com/podcast/eureka-moments-only-2bd29/episodes/creative-authenticity-with-helen-kontozopoulos-e0c25

#EurekaMomentsOnly
#HelenKontozopoulos
0 Comments

Artificial Intelligence and Biotech Panel at #MaRSImpactHealth

5/23/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
May 27, 2022 - 11am
MaRS Discovery District, Toronto

A.I./M.L. innovations now affect almost every aspect of our lives. As the digital merges with the biological, many new opportunities will emerge in our ability to discover, deploy and market new therapeutics.


Meet several A.I.-based ventures — Cyclica, BenchSci, ODAIA and deepCDR — changing our perspectives on pharmaceuticals as they move from bench to bedside.

Panelists:

Vivek Goel, President and Vice-Chancellor, University of Waterloo
Helen Kontozopoulos, Co-founder, Chief Tech Evangelist, ODAIA.ai
John Chan, Head, Takeda ShinrAI Center for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Sai Reddy, Founder, deepCDR Biologics
Stephen MacKinnon, Chief Platform Officer, Cyclica
Tom Leung, MSc PhD, Founder and CSO, BenchSci

https://hopin.com/events/mars-impact-health

0 Comments

How to Find Your Startup's Niche

4/25/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture

By Helen Kontozopoulos, Co-founder & Tech Evangelist, ODAIA.ai
First published in Entrepreneur

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/424748 

When you’re a young startup with promising technology, capturing the interest of a lot of different industries is a great boost. However, it brings a new set of problems. There’s no surer way to dilute your brand and burn through your capital than to spread yourself too thin across multiple sectors. It pushes your customer acquisition costs through the roof and almost guarantees that you’ll be a second-tier alternative in several industries but a market-leader in none.

You can’t be all things to all people. But choosing which sector to focus on can be a real challenge — particularly if you’re working with a technology, like AI, that has countless potential applications. As a tech entrepreneur with a background in online retail, I naturally gravitated toward ecommerce firms when seeking clients for my company’s customer analytics platform. I could see it would be a good fit, and it was. However, it was also a surprising hit among sales teams in pharmaceuticals — an industry I knew far less about but which is on track to be a $16-billion market for tech like ours.

So, how do you choose a market to go after? And when? Here’s what I learned from my heart vs. head struggle to pick a lane:

Avoid pilot project purgatoryOne of the hardest things to know is at what point you should start focusing in on a particular market. There’s a natural tendency to avoid closing doors, but that creates a risk of getting stuck in endless market research, due diligence and test projects. Their returns diminish quickly. 

In 2018, my partner and I incorporated our company around a technology that applies AI to data-driven analytics to understand and influence the customer journey. We took countless meetings and talked to people in at least 10 different industries — including supply chain, lighting factories, IoT devices, pharmaceuticals, ecommerce, advertising and cybersecurity. We had multiple offers to work on paid pilot projects, and we took on several, which helped us refine our product. But after around two years of projects and meetings, it became apparent that we were gaining less and less from each one. When COVID hit and threw everything into flux, we’d already decided the time had come to focus, but it forced us to quickly choose between ecommerce and pharma, our two highest-potential markets. When an opportunity presents itself, you can’t hesitate.

If a sector is hyped, it’s saturatedOne of the biggest mistakes is going for what’s sexy now, because at that point, you’re already too late to enter the market. Hype is not a useful metric, and you can’t stick with something just because it’s cool. If you’re not seeing good usage stats for your product within three to four months, then you’ve got to stop and move on.
In our case, there were lots of voices, including investors, nudging us toward ecommerce. It’s certainly a buzzier sector than pharma, but the market is so saturated, so we had to consider how we could compete. We wouldn’t be that special. We’d be going up against behemoths like Google Analytics, and that’s tough.
For any machine-learning company, data is everything. As soon as we had a contract with a pharma organization, we had access to their data, so we could really work on building a specialized product with it. That was a big indicator that we were going in the right direction.

Listen to the market’s signalsThe biggest thing to consider is whether you are pushing your idea too hard on a market or whether it is genuinely pulling your technology toward it because there is a need.  

I once had a meeting with a very smart investor who told me everybody tries to sell their technology on the basis that it will cut their client’s costs. But enterprise customers get more excited about products that will make them money. The ROI is clearer.

During the pandemic, the ROI on our product came into sharp focus in the pharma industry as its sales reps couldn’t get in front of their customers. We started getting lots of people popping up on LinkedIn asking if they could try out the tech. That’s when we realized we were on to something with pharma. That type of traction gets us excited. And if you don’t get excited about your user, then there’s something wrong.

You need to have a few indications that you’ve got a viable product: It has to make business sense, it has to make tech sense and it has to make design sense, meaning it’s user-friendly. And, especially when we’re talking about AI, it has to make ethical sense. For pharma, we ticked all the boxes.

The next question for us was, how fast can we do this? Can we get it in front of enough users quickly? We could do that in ecommerce. Pharma was slower, but there was a bigger long-term opportunity as we would be one of the first players in the market. We opted to go with the harder and riskier option but for a bigger win in the end. If it’s a bit more niche, you’re likelier to have a larger impact.


If it comes to head vs. heart, head wins.Frankly, I was more attracted to ecommerce. I have worked with multiple merchants over the years, the content is fun and data is accessible. I felt pulled emotionally in one direction, but the business and technology opportunity was pulling me in the other. Also, it was a bit sexier than pharma. Again, I felt pulled emotionally in one direction, but the business was pulling me in the other. We were hitting our milestones continuously in pharma. And the reality is, entrepreneurs must be responsible to their investors and employees. So, for the past two years, I’ve swapped art for science and have been talking to people in pharma every week to learn about their industry, their challenges or even just what their workday looks like.

If you can go big in one industry that needs you, go for it. It might not be the sexiest one, but it’s the one that will make a good business.

Helen Kontozopoulos is the co-founder and chief tech evangelist of ODAIA, which helps predict customer activity and redefine the workflow for pharma and life science commercial teams.
0 Comments

Women in AI and data science at the 5th Annual Toronto Women in Data Science Conference and Awards

3/30/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Check out the #AI panel I will be moderating:​

Thursday, April 28, 2022 @ 14:40 - 15:55 EST
Helen Kontozopoulos (moderator) - Co-founder at ODAIA Intelligence
Patricia Thaine - Co-Founder & CEO at Private AI
Azin Asgarian - Applied Research Scientist at Georgian
Eyra Abraham - Founder of Lisnen

Link to sign up to the conference and awards, check out the whole agenda too: 
https://www.womxndsto.com/schedule/5th-annual-toronto-womxn-in-data-science-annual-conference-and-awards​

​
#womenindata
#womenfounders
#datascience
0 Comments

Toronto Womxn in Data Science 5th Annual Conference Awards April 2022

3/20/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
The conference talks, panels and workshops on April 27th and 28th will be hosted on a virtual platform called Venue. The Award Ceremony on the evening of April 28th will be held at The Drake Hotel with recordings available to anyone who cannot make it in person. We will also be sending out recordings of all sessions subject to speaker approval post conference. 

Link: 
https://www.womxndsto.com/5th-annual-conference-awards​ 
0 Comments

Women in AI Week 2022

3/13/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Join me on Monday, Mar 14th at 6:30pm ET to hear from 4 awesome women + all the partner organizations speak at the Kickoff Event

Register Here: https://ai.science/winai

Serena McDonnell Somaieh Nikpoor, PhD. Kaaren Whitney-Vernon safa Ben Guirat Elora Riganelli Muluwork Shegaw Alice Rueda Ellie D. Norris Melissa Barr Sam Ghasan Ali El-Sharif, Ph.D. Frincy Clement Kishawna Peck

Speakers:
-Margaret Mitchell
-Mehrnaz Shokrollahi - PhD
-Helen Kontozopoulos
-Eva Sachar

Organizations:
-aggregate intellect {FUNDRAISING}
-New York Artificial Intelligence (NYAI)
-Spotify
-Google Developers Group Windsor
-Women in AI
-(WiMLDS) Women in Machine Learning & Data Science NYC
-LA Tech4Good
-Happy Hive (happyhive.work)
-PureFacts Financial Solutions
0 Comments

Launch my digital art into the world! #helenkontozopoulos #AIart

1/20/2022

0 Comments

 
Finally launched my artwork out in the world. I have been creating artwork for over 20 years and in 2018 I took a course on creating art with artificial intelligence!

Check it out! ​https://helenkontozopoulos.art
Picture
0 Comments
<<Previous
    Authored by:
    Picture

    Helen Kontozopoulos

    Co-Founder and Chief Tech Evangelist at ODAIA.ai 
    Adjunct Professor, at the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada

    Archives

    October 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    September 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    December 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    September 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    December 2016
    September 2016
    March 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    September 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    June 2013

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Copyright 2022 HELENISSOCIAL

  • HOME
  • BIO
  • TEACHING
  • SPEAKING
    • IWW
  • BLOG