Marsal Gavalda is a senior R&D executive with deep expertise in natural language and machine learning technologies. Marsal currently leads the Commerce Machine Learning team at Square, where he applies machine learning to Square’s overarching purpose of economic empowerment. Previously, Marsal headed the Machine Intelligence team at Yik Yak, where he developed natural language processing and machine learning services to analyze the content of messages, discover trends, and make recommendations at scale and across languages. Prior to that, Marsal served as the Director of Research at MindMeld (acquired by Cisco), where he applied the latest advances in speech recognition, language understanding, information retrieval, and machine learning to the MindMeld conversational and anticipatory computing platform. Marsal holds a PhD in Language Technologies and a MS in Computational Linguistics, both from Carnegie Mellon University, and a BS in Computer Science from BarcelonaTech. Marsal is the author of over thirty technical and literary publications, thirteen issued patents, and is fluent in six languages. He is also a frequent speaker at academic and industry conferences and organizes, every summer, a science and humanities summit in Barcelona on topics as diverse as machine translation, music, or the neuroscience of free will.