Our Team
NIKOLA DOUBKOVÁ
PSYCHOLOGIST
Nikola Doubková works at PromethistAI as a psychologist and she is primarily responsible for developing Poppy’s social talk and deep talk skills. What she enjoys the most is working on Poppy’s empathy and implementing an integrative approach into Poppy’s dialogue strategy.
She is interested especially in intraindividual variability, otherness, and personality disorders. She is currently undergoing specialized training in person-centered psychotherapy.
Nikola also works as a first-stage researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health, Czech Republic, and is currently doing her PhD in Psychology at Charles University.
JAN ŠEDIVÝ
RESEARCH DIRECTOR
Jan Šedivý is the leader of our NLP (Natural Language Processing) team, which has won this year’s Amazon Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge with their SocialBot Alquist. Before that, they took a final position in all of the three previous years of the competition.
As Jan’s interests lie in AI and entrepreneurship, he decided to split them between the Czech Technical University where he leads a team of PhD students researching the fields of Conversational AI, NLP, Internet APPs, and speech recognition, and PromethistAI where he holds the post of CTO.
Jan has three decades of experience in the IT industry, has led numerous global research and development projects, and holds 19 US patents. He began as a researcher and research manager at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center (1992-2008) and later moved to Google as a Technical Lead Manager (2008-2010).
VÍT JAKIMIV
CHIEF DESIGNER
Vít Jakimiv works as a conversational UX designer at PromethistAI. He makes sure that Poppy develops her skills and is responsible for coordinating the whole TTP team.
What Vít likes most about TalkToPoppy! is the challenge to create a complex interaction system embracing various phenomena from the sphere of both linguistics and psychology, generating highly variable and smooth conversations with the potential to become as human-like as possible.
Between 2012 and 2020, he taught German, French, and Czech. From 2016 to 2020, Vít worked as a language advisor at Czech Television. He studied philosophy, ancient Greek, and Latin at Charles University in Prague.
KLÁRA LORENCOVÁ
CEO
Klára Lorencová is an entrepreneur, investor, business advisor and lawyer with over twenty years in business and leading law firms, assisting businesses and entrepreneurs with strategy and business development. She possesses the right strategy acumen, interpersonal skills and corporate and legal insight to turn ideas into business.
ONDŘEJ BEČEV
PRODUCT DESIGNER
Ondřej Bečev is TalkToPoppy’s product designer. At PromethistAI he is concerned with the specification of Poppy’s future development and designing new features in order to meet users’ needs. Ondřej is also active in research and communication with scientific partners.
He likes to think about the ways to combine psychology insights with conversational technology to create progressive mental health applications backed by science.
Ondřej also works as a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health and CEITEC - Central European Institute of Technology. He has conducted research projects in areas like sense of agency, intention awareness in voluntary agency, interoception and virtual reality.
JURAJ JONÁŠ
PSYCHOLOGIST
Juraj Jonáš is a psychologist who conceptualizes the approaches to particular topics and issues that come up in Poppy’s conversations with the users. He also takes part in the shaping of Poppy’s personality.
Otherwise, he is interested in cross-cultural psychology and cognitive functions in various clinical and non-clinical populations.
He is a psychology researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health and a trained psychotherapist with an integrative approach and the main focus on Gestalt and Body therapy. He is also a PhD student of clinical psychology at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, where he previously studied ethnology and psychology. He has also worked at the Czech Academy of Sciences.
KAROLÍNA JANKŮ
PSYCHOLOGIST
Karolína Janků is a clinical psychologist and researcher whose main research and clinical focus is the field of sleep medicine. In PromethistAI, she collaborates on creating conversational content with focus on CBT techniques, including strategies for improving sleep quality. As a therapist, she sees a huge potential of virtual therapy assistance in clinical and non-clinical practice.
Karolína is based at the National Institute of Mental Health. She has completed a specialized training in cognitive behavioral therapy and gained a PhD in the field of Neuroscience at the Third Faculty of Medicine, Charles University in Prague.
TOMÁŠ ZAJÍČEK
CPO
Tomáš Zajíček is the head of the IT team. He ensures that the app works properly and efficiently from a technical point of view.
Being passionate about #devops and digital gadgets, Tomáš decided to change the course of his professional life by joining Jan, helping him fulfill the vision of bringing our company to life.
He started his career in graphic design and game programming. Spending more than 20 years in digital services as a solution architect, development, and technical operations leader, Tomáš primarily worked for larger businesses.
RADEK HEISSLER
PSYCHOLOGIST
Radek Heissler is a psychologist and his main task is to create and supervise dialogues concerning various psychological issues, such as cognitive distortions, suicide intentions, relationship problems, etc. He analyzes data from the psychological and therapeutic perspective and designs and implements various therapeutic interventions and techniques to improve Poppy’s psychological assistance.
His psychotherapy focus is based on the existential approach (logotherapy) but is also inspired by other approaches, such as CBT or solution-focused therapy. As a bonus, he studies Catholic theology.
He also works as a research psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health, where he carries out research on personality disorders and cognitive psychology, affective disorders, otherness, trauma, SuperAging, and other topics. He earned his master‘s degree from Charles University in Clinical Psychology.
Every day, our people set off beyond the limits of current technology — our passion for inventions pushes both us and our users ceaselessly forward.
As a dynamic start-up with global ambitions, we believe that:
-
our AI can make the world more human
-
the concept of digital personas will become a new industrial standard
-
the ability of human-like communication can unlock new potential of IT
To reach the finish line we take advantage of effective interdisciplinary cooperation:
-
years of experience in NLP research in leading global companies
-
high-performing software engineering
-
linguists, psychologists, and conversational UX experts