Past Speakers

Selma Svendsen is Senior VP of Product Development at Oxipital AI, a computer vision and AI company, where she leads the engineering organization behind the company's V-CORTX platform. She brings more than two decades of leadership experience spanning consumer robotics, medical diagnostics, industrial automation, and humanoid robotics — a career defined by her ability to move across industries while consistently rebuilding and scaling engineering and operational organizations.

Most recently, Selma served as Chief Operating Officer of Boston Dynamics, where she led an over 500-person organization with unified accountability across R&D, product management, supply chain, and manufacturing. During her tenure, she led turnarounds of the company's Stretch and Spot business units, authored a manufacturing strategy paper, and secured a major manufacturing partner's commitment to produce Boston Dynamics products at scale in a dedicated facility.

Her career anchor was iRobot, where she spent 20 years progressing through engineering and program management leadership roles, contributing to the Roomba 500 and 600 Series — the company's best-selling product lines and a major driver of iRobot's 50 million-plus robots sold worldwide. She also held a senior leadership role at PerkinElmer, focused on diagnostics and maternal health, and later led industrial automation efforts at Rise Robotics.

Selma holds a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Univerzitet Džemal Bijedić. She holds 24 U.S. patents developed over the course of her career. In 2017, she was inducted into the Women in Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame, an honor she received through an unsolicited nomination from colleagues, and she is also the recipient of iRobot's Chairman's Award.

Born in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Selma brings a personal connection to the region alongside her professional expertise in building and leading engineering organizations through periods of significant technological and operational change. She is based in the Boston, Massachusetts area.