Sedef Akinli Kocak is a Director of Professional Development at Vector Institute. She leads suite of programs aimed to build workforce capacity in artificial intelligence and integrating advanced technologies into current and future work streams. Prior to this role Sedef was a Senior Project Manager & Technical Translator at Vector where she engaged industry partners on Applied AI projects. She has led several large scale multi-industrial projects at Vector such as Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Privacy Enhancing Technologies. She is listed in “Top 25 Women in AI: Canada Edition”, nominated DMZ Women of the Year Annual Award 2022, and listed as a Finalist Women in AI in North America 2023 for her inspirational work, accomplishments, and contributions to create impact on the Canadian tech ecosystem. Sedef completed her PhD at the Data Science Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University. Sedef is also an accomplished researcher in the area of sustainability design in software intensive systems and a part time Data Science and Analytics lecturer and supervisor at the Toronto Metropolitan University. She served as a member of the Compute Ontario Board Advisory Committee and AI program development advisor at the Continuing Education, University of Toronto. She also served as a chair and co-organizer of many academic conferences and workshops including AAAI Workshop on Responsible Language Models, IEEE Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems, ICT for Sustainability, and many more. She is a member of ACM, IEEE, Engineers for Sustainable World, Women in AI, AI4Good and academic advisory committee of several AI related initiatives.