Schneider Electric Sustainability Prize

Application of Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Sustainability

The Schneider Electric Sustainability Prize is designed to grow the community of innovators intent on finding and deploying positive solutions that address current and future challenges in energy and climate and to accelerate the contributions of AI to sustainability as they relate to manufacturing and operations.  This award would not only honor the recipients for their novel use of AI to solve climate issues, but also for their commitment to making the world a more sustainable place through cutting-edge technology. The intent of this recognition is to open doors to future collaborations, job opportunities in sustainability, and funding for further research, creating a ripple effect of positive impact for years to come.

Learn more about the 2022 MIMO Symposium!

See our 2022 Cognex Prize Winners!

Jeff Wilke is the co-founder of Re:Build Manufacturing, a company that looks to revive U.S. manufacturing leveraging new technology. He hopes to create thousands of new American jobs in factories around the country.

As of 2021, Jeff was the Worldwide CEO of Amazon Consumer. During his more than 21 years as a corporate officer, he led Amazon’s retail and third-party stores, fulfillment, logistics, supply chain, marketing, Prime, and technology teams.

Prior to Amazon, he was vice president and general manager of pharmaceutical fine chemicals at AlliedSignal (now Honeywell).

Daniel Huttenlocher is the inaugural dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Previously he helped found Cornell Tech, the digital technology oriented graduate school created by Cornell University in New York City, and served as its first Dean and Vice Provost.

His research and teaching have been recognized by a number of awards including ACM Fellow and CASE Professor of the Year. Huttenlocher’s main research interests are in computer vision, social media, and understanding AI.

He has a mix of academic and industry background, having been a Computer Science faculty member at Cornell, researcher and manager at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and CTO of a fintech startup.

Daniela Rus is the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. Rus’s research interests are in robotics, mobile computing, and data science.

Rus is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of ACM, AAAI and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy for Arts and Science.

She is the recipient of the 2017 Engelberger Robotics Award from the Robotics Industries Association. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University.

Prof. Faez Ahmed is the d’Arbeloff career development assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, where he leads the Design Computation and Digital Engineering (DeCoDE) lab. His research focuses on creating new machine learning and optimization methods for designing complex engineering systems.

Ahmed and his team are interested in fundamental questions at the intersection of machine learning and design, including how algorithms can synthesize high-performing designs that meet real-world requirements, how algorithms can help discover or generate creative designs that have never been seen before, and how machines can work together with people to create better products.

Before joining MIT, Ahmed was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University and completed his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland. He also gained industry experience in the railway and mining sectors in Australia, where he pioneered data-driven predictive maintenance and renewal planning efforts.

Tim Crane is the Vice President and General Manager of the Autonomy & Automation group at Caterpillar, leading a talented and forward-thinking team to scale technology solutions in mining, construction, quarry and aggregates, and beyond to support customer safety and productivity goals. Building on 30+ years of leading innovative tech, autonomy, and robotics, the Autonomy and Automation team helps Caterpillar customers build a better world – every day.

Tim joined Caterpillar in 2011 when the consulting company he owned was acquired by Caterpillar, becoming one of its customer-focused solutions businesses. Under his leadership as General Manager, the Cat Solutions and Services portfolio included fleet management, productivity and safety consulting, safety technologies, and Caterpillar’s mining machine health and analytics business. The team achieved global expansion and significant growth, while developing processes and technologies that keep Caterpillar customers on the leading edge of safety and operational management.

Tim sat on the board of Seeing Machines, a publicly traded company on the London Stock Exchange (AIM). Seeing Machines is a leader in computer vision technologies which enable machines to see, understand and assist people. Seeing Machines harnesses human factors science to create artificial intelligence (AI) technology that observes driver and operator attention – reliably, unobtrusively, and in real time – and intervenes when necessary.

Christopher Couch is the SVP, Chief Technology and Procurement Officer at Cooper Standard and Founder and CEO of Liveline Technologies.

Promoted to SVP and Chief Technology Officer of Cooper Standard in January 2019. Added Chief Procurement Officer and materials science venture business (AMS) to responsibilities in 2021.

Founded Liveline Technologies in February 2020 as an outgrowth of innovation activities at Cooper Standard. Liveline provides software for real-time process control of factory systems using self-trained AI agents. Actively managing as CEO and Chief Data Scientist.

Specialties: Machine Learning, AI, Controls, Materials Science, M&A, Startup Mentoring, Open Innovation, Toyota Production System, Supply Chain Management, Production Engineering, Operations Management, Strategic Planning, Senior Executive Leadership, Gritty shop-floor Japanese language, Beginning Korean language, high altitude custom drones, Ironman triathlon training & racing.

Sreedhar Sistu is the Vice President | AI Offers at Schneider Electric. He is a senior software product executive and leader with extensive experience in product strategy, portfolio planning, sales enablement, cloud architecture, DevOps, large-scale deployments, off-shore management and project management.

Currently working on accelerating AI adoption into technology offers to optimize energy usage and improve sustainability at scale, all leveraging a comprehensive platform approach. Responsibilities include end-to-end ownership, strategic planning, working with key customers and other stakeholders to define product roadmap, Collaborating with solutions and technology teams deliver products that meet and exceed these needs, defining pricing, packaging and go-to-market messaging for these products, managing internal and external partner interactions for commercial success.

Specialties: Long term product planning, business strategy, competitive analysis, benchmarking, partnerships, people management, Product Lifecycle Management processes, DevOps, Cloud architecture, Micro services, AI applied enterprise software

Dr. Christopher Nguyen is CEO and Co-Founder of Aitomatic, powering the industrial economy by combining domain knowledge with AI. Before that, he led AI engineering teams building & deploying Industrial AI across Panasonic’s global footprint. With a career spanning four decades, the serial founder has played key roles in everything from building the first flash memory transistors at Intel to the development of Google Apps as its first Engineering Director. As a professor, Christopher co-founded the Computer Engineering program at HKUST.

Today, Dr. Nguyen is an outspoken proponent of the emerging field of “AI engineering” and a thought leader in the space of ethical, human-centric AI. With his latest company, Aitomatic, he’s helping industrial value chains tap into their troves of domain-specific knowledge to deploy AI for farm to table sustainability, efficient equipment operations, and reduced energy consumption.

Dr. Nguyen earned his B.S. degree from UC-Berkeley and a PhD. from Stanford in semiconductor device physics & technology.

Tim Hotze recently took over the leadership function for the newly created Enterprise Capacity Planning Team. Prior to this he served for five years as the Senior Vice President, Network Planning, Global Intelligence and Last Mile for Target. He oversees Target’s Supply Chain intelligence products and applications as well as end-to-end strategic and operational functions for Network and Topology Planning. Tim also oversees Fulfillment Optimization, Guest Order and Availability Management. In addition he has full responsibility for Last Mile Operations and the Target Sortation Center Network, from conceptual planning to activation to day-to-day operations including all aspects of Last Mile carrier and delivery management.

Before joining Target in 2017, Tim held a number of elevating leadership roles at Amazon covering Supply Chain Execution, Capacity Planning and Management, Inventory Placement and Labor Planning. He also spent more than a decade at Panalpina World Transport where he had responsibility for worldwide logistics and Supply Chain solutions as well as innovation management. Tim holds a seat on the Advisory Board for the Institute of Business Forecasting and Planning (IBF) and is a former Executive Director as Treasurer and Secretary on the Board of Directors of The Warehouse Education and Research Council. Tim holds a joint Master’s degree in Electrical and Industrial Engineering as well as Logistics and Supply Chain from the University of Technology in Darmstadt (Germany).

Saman Farid is the CEO of Formic Technologies. Prior to founding Formic, Saman was one of three General Partners on a $600m AI & Robotics investment fund – Baidu Ventures (BV). During his tenure at BV, he made investments in 50+ companies, built the US team, joined 15 boards, and helped bring a variety of technologies to market ranging from sensors to neuromorphic chips, from computer vision systems to full-robotic systems. He has a passion for the intersection of bleeding-edge technology and the physical world. He also founded Comet Labs  – a $50m AI fund with an attached robotics incubator and venture studio, where he assembled teams and invested in nearly 100 companies and built partnerships with companies like Bosch, NVIDIA, John Deere, Honeywell, Baidu, Lyft and many more.

Prior to his investing career, Saman built and sold two technology companies (e-commerce & IPTV), and worked at a variety of companies including Microsoft, Honeywell, Verizon & Deloitte Consulting. Saman has an MBA from MIT Sloan & Tsinghua University, as well as an undergraduate degree in control systems engineering from The Cooper Union, which he attended on a full-tuition scholarship.

Mark Gorenberg is Managing Director and Founder of Zetta Venture Partners, which invests in AI-first companies with B2B business models. 

He has 28 years of venture capital experience, funding and serving on the boards of numerous successful startups including Domo (IPO), Teem (acquired by WeWork), Omniture (IPO, subsequently acquired by Adobe), AdForce (IPO, subsequently acquired by CMGI), NetDynamics (acquired by Sun Microsystems), Scopus Technologies (IPO, subsequently acquired by Siebel), and Crowdfactory (acquired by Marketo).

Prior to his career in venture capital, Mark served as a software executive, entrepreneur, and as a member of the first SparcStation team at Sun Microsystems.

Nikhil is a Director of AI Research at Salesforce Research. He leads a team of researchers and engineers working on generative AI and its applications in natural language processing, computer vision, and biomedicine.

His team has developed state-of-the-art AI models for language and image generation and deployed them in collaboration with large companies and university labs at Stanford, UCSF, and UC Berkeley, among others.

He obtained my PhD from MIT in 2016. His work has appeared in AI conferences along with interdisciplinary journals and has been featured in The Atlantic, The Economist, MIT Technology Review, and New York Times.

John R. Hauser is the Kirin Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he teaches new product development, marketing management, and statistical and research methodology.

He has served MIT as Head of the MIT Marketing Group, Head of the Management Science Area, Research Director of the Center for Innovation in Product Development, and co-director of the International Center for Research on the Management of Technology.

He is the co-author of two textbooks, Design and Marketing of New Products and Essentials of New Product Management, and three other books. He is a former editor of Marketing Science. He has published over one hundred scientific papers.

Hauser holds an SB and an SM in electrical engineering, an SM in civil engineering, and an ScD in operations research, all from MIT. He holds an honorary doctorate from the Erasmus School of Economics.