Podcast/Video Interviews by Stephen Ibaraki
A Chat with Jan Romportl, PhD: AI researcher; Executive; Entrepreneur; CEO and Co-Founder of Elin.ai
This week, Stephen Ibaraki has an exclusive interview with Jan Romportl, PhD.
Jan Romportl, PhD is CEO and Co-Founder of Elin.ai, an AI platform that protects young people from the psychological harms of social media. He brings 20+ years of experience as an AI researcher, executive, and entrepreneur, with a rare combination of deep technical expertise and firsthand knowledge of both enterprise AI scaling and clinical mental health systems.
Romportl holds a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and Master's degrees in both Cybernetics and Philosophy of Communication from the University of West Bohemia. His early career combined academic research in natural language processing and speech synthesis with teaching roles in AI fundamentals and human-computer interaction. He published widely on synthetic speech naturalness, prosody modeling, and assistive AI applications – including voice restoration systems for laryngectomy patients. A – a
In 2015, Romportl transitioned to industry as Chief Data Scientist at O2 Czech Republic (part of the €50B+ PPF Group), where he built and led a data science team across telecommunications, finance, media, and oncology. From 2019 to 2022, he founded and directed Dataclair.ai, PPF and O2's AI Centre of Excellence, managing a 40-person team delivering machine learning applications across multiple domains. Concurrently, he served as a research consultant and later senior researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health in Prague – blending his AI expertise with psychiatry research, studying data science applications in diagnosis, treatment, and wearables.
Today, Romportl applies his technical expertise to confront the youth mental health crisis driven by social media algorithms – a problem whose scale and urgency became clear only in recent years. In January 2023, he co-founded Elin.ai with Prof. Jiří Horáček (Director of the National Institute of Mental Health), CTO Petr Stanislav, and advisors from Google DeepMind and Stanford. Elin monitors Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook feeds in real time, detects the accumulation of psychological harm across multiple dimensions, and intervenes with hyper-personalized messages before damage occurs. The platform combines a trusted AI assistant (homework help, safe search, troll replies) with real-time feed protection – operating inside the moment of consumption rather than before or after it.
Elin is built explicitly on the Stanford Integrated Harm Framework (2025), which maps 16 distinct harms to 7 intervention goals via 28 clinically informed communication strategies. The company is currently piloting with 30,000 students in the Czech Republic (government-backed longitudinal study, independent efficacy measurement), has signed a B2B2C distribution deal with O2 Czech Republic (launching May 2026), and is entering the US market with school district partnerships.
Romportl is an active voice on AI ethics, regulation, and youth safety. He organizes the Prague AI Safety Meetup, participates in Czech Effective Altruism, and advocates for existential risk minimization. He holds certifications in Big Data (UC San Diego), R programming and data science (Johns Hopkins), and SAFe agile frameworks. He is fluent in Czech and English, and conversant in Slovak, German, and Russian.
When not building protective AI, Jan runs, dives (PADI certified), flies small aircraft, collects vintage computing hardware, and reads philosophy.