Yegor Denisov-Blanch

Yegor Denisov-Blanch is a researcher with the Stanford Software Engineering Productivity Research Group, where he studies how AI is changing software development.

Brady Forrest

Brady Forrest Ignite HQ is the founder and leader of Ignite Talks, a global platform for dynamic, five-minute presentations with a unique format: 20 slides, each auto-advancing every 15 seconds.

Kris Efland

Kris Efland is VP of Engineering at Deepgram, where he helps small, focused teams turn cutting-edge speech AI into practical tools for developers. Over the past two decades he’s shipped everything from consumer gadgets to global cloud services.

Anthony Annunziata

Anthony leads IBM’s company-wide mission in open innovation for AI, including open source software, open data and models, partnerships, developer relations and community enablement.

Mark Roy

Mark Roy is a Principal AIML Architect for AWS, helping customers design and build agentic AI solutions. Mark’s work covers a wide range of use cases, with a primary interest in AI agents at enterprise scale.

Du’An Lightfoot

Du’An Lightfoot is a Sr. AI Engineer at AWS and international speaker who brings a unique perspective to AI transformation through his unconventional journey from USAF veteran in Afghanistan to technical innovation leader at AWS.

Hongpeng Guo

Hongpeng Guo is a Research Scientist at ByteDance Seed, where he works on developing large scale post-training and reinforcement-learning infrastructures. His research interests encompass large-scale machine learning systems in general.

Nyah Macklin

Nyah Macklin is a seasoned researcher and speaker on topics around AI, ML, Ethics, Governance, and Responsibility. Nyah serves as a Senior Developer Advocate for Artificial Intelligence at Neo4j, specializing in GraphRAG, knowledge graphs, and AI-driven developer tooling where Nyah has built high-impact technical communities and led initiatives that advance a critical understanding of AI and its use cases.

Christopher Kirchhoff

Christopher Kirchhoff is an expert in emerging technology, artificial intelligence, and the future of war. He helped found the Pentagon Silicon Valley’s office, which piloted flying cars and microsatellites in military missions and created a new acquisition pathway for start-ups now responsible for $80 billion dollars of technology acquisition by the Department of Defense.

DJ Patil

DJ Patil is an entrepreneur, investor, scientist, and leader in public policy. He has held senior roles in industry, academia, and government and his work has been featured in two Michael Lewis books.