Speakers

John McCabe ’02 ’06 | Senior Design Manager, IBM

With over two decades at the forefront of design and technology, John McCabe has dedicated his career to crafting solutions that nurture communities, redefine industries and inspire individuals. As a Senior Design Manager at IBM, he leads global teams in developing digital products for Watsonx.ai, the industry’s first Enterprise Generative AI platform. His high-performing team is transforming alpha concepts into market-ready experiences, setting conversational AI standards, developing complex generative AI tools, and enhancing design systems to highlight AI-created content.

Before focusing on digital AI-infused products, McCabe envisioned and executed mission-critical off-world robotic manufacturing with NASA, founded a non-profit to nurture creative leadership and built an academic design consultancy that created mixed reality ecosystems, lifestyle mobility services and luxury experiences. Collaborating with industry leaders like BMW, HP, Gulfstream, Disney, Fossil, US Space Force, Dell and Google, these initiatives have generated nearly $100M in partnerships.

McCabe’s career is marked by his commitment to exploring the frontiers of AI, design and creative empowerment. He continues his mission to inspire and lead teams, unlocking the transformative potential of design and technology.

Anya Domlesky | Director of Research and an Associate Principal, SWA

Anya Domlesky is an urban designer and landscape architect, currently the Director of Research at SWA Group. She runs XL Lab, the firm’s innovation lab undertaking practice-based research. The lab explores near future conditions in the built environment, performs analyses of design performance, experiments with new technologies to create tools for the field and does topical investigations that address emerging complexities and unprecedented challenges. As a designer, Domlesky has focused on landscape-driven urban design and environmental planning. She has previously worked at the New York City Department of City Planning Waterfront and Open Space Division and Hood Design, lectured internationally and taught at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and Boston Architectural College. She holds an MLA from the Harvard GSD and an M.Arch II from McGill University.

Karla Saldaña Ochoa | Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, University of Florida

Karla Saldaña Ochoa is a tenured track assistant professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Florida and a faculty affiliate at the AI2 Center, the Center of Latin American Studies and FIBER. She is the director of SHARE Lab, a research group focused on developing projects that leverage the interaction between artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence applied to boost creativity in architectural design and create tools to analyze Big Data of Urban Phenomena. She collaborates on international projects in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Mexico and Ecuador. She is an Ecuadorian architect and coder with a Master of Advanced Studies in Landscape Architecture and a doctorate in Technology in Architecture from ETH Zurich. Her doctorate researched the integration of artificial and human intelligence for an accurate and agile response to natural disasters, leveraging a multimodal fusion approach for machine learning inference.