Lisa Rau
she/herLisa Rau co-founded Fíonta in 2001 with Jeff Sullivan, and served as the organization’s CEO until April 2018. She currently serves as Fíonta’s chief growth officer. Lisa is a well-known thought leader in the nonprofit technology field and continues to provide strategic technology consulting to select clients.
Lisa started in Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, where she majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, receiving a B.S., continuing on to receive an M.S. as part of the first cohort of graduates of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) group. At BAIR, she was assigned the email address, lisa@berkeley.edu, in the early years of the Internet! She went on to complete her Ph.D. in Computer Science, specializing in Artificial Intelligence. She was a NSF visiting scholar and had an office at Penn adjacent to the Eniac, the first fully programmable electronic computer (famously programmed by female engineers while men took the credit). She led AI research for eight years at GE Corporate Research, where she published 50-some articles in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. In 1990 the magazine Popular Science quoted Lisa as saying, “In the future we can imagine the computer as a librarian who not only knows where all the information in the library is kept, but has read and understood everything.” She feels partly vindicated, but is still imagining what the future holds.
Before founding Fíonta, from 1993-2001, Lisa was a senior executive at a commercial information technology services firm where she had profit and loss responsibility for IT services contracts of over $35M in annual revenue, managing a staff of over 300. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband of over 30 years. Lisa loves to ride her bicycle, read, and travel all over the world.
Insights by Lisa Rau
In this fast-paced and engaging presentation, Fíonta Artificial Intelligence expert Dr. Lisa Rau demystifies generative AI and its applicability for association business processes. After an overview of the technology and current offerings, Dr. Rau highlights the business uses most likely to benefit associations now, what to stay away from and why, and what the future […]
Automation functionality is already available to associations and nonprofits in commonly-used software and systems – but are you fully leveraging this powerful technology to lessen the manual workload and permit your staff to focus on more strategic imperatives? Aimed at both nonprofits and associations, this 45-minute on-demand webinar overviews the workflow and automation technology available […]
Overview Learn technology innovation applicable to nonprofits and associations and gain a perspective on what kinds of technological innovations of specific interest may be arriving and their relevance to associations and other nonprofits. Spark your imagination on how organizations’ operations might be dramatically altered by advances in technology. This entertaining presentation provides perspective on the […]
Originally published by Salesforce.org. It’s been a long-time lament in the nonprofit community: the frustrating effect of limited resources on a nonprofit’s impact and opportunities. But now that artificial intelligence (AI) is within reach for nonprofits, the game has changed. With Einstein for Nonprofits in your technology toolbox, you and your team can focus on what […]