Mark Le Dain is SVP, Strategy & Corporate Development at Validere. He leads Validere’s strategic positioning and partnerships and has led the company in this role from several employees to over one hundred currently. Mark has previous experience advising energy and infrastructure companies as an investment banker with Barclays, successfully completing over $18 billion of M&A transactions and $5 billion of capital markets transactions. Mark has been quoted on tech and energy trends in the New York Times, Business Insider and Reuters and is a regular contributor on energy and markets to both Forbes and Rigzone. He speaks regularly on energy and tech, providing one of the keynotes at the Clean Air Conference this past year. He is also a published fiction author. On the weekends, he enjoys yoga and spending time with his wife and son.

Brendan Bennett is a machine learning (ML) researcher on sabbatical from academia. His main areas of expertise are reinforcement learning and neural networks, topics on which he has published a handful of papers and many more unpublished blog posts. Asides from familiarity with theory, he has expertise in developing ML systems from scratch to final product.

Brendan is currently working in the private sector, solving the dual problems of creating useful ML models and making them work in a business context. On the weekends, he builds things (and not just robots), and has recently taken an interest in writing about himself in the third person.

Mike Henry is an Associate in the Energy Group at Burnet, Duckworth & Palmer LLP. He advises clients on a range of commercial matters in the oil & gas and renewable energy sectors including asset and share acquisitions and dispositions, corporate reorganizations, corporate and asset due diligence, and negotiating and drafting commercial agreements. Mike holds an Honours in Business Administration degree from the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western University, and a Juris Doctor from the University of Calgary.