Sandeep is an engineering director leading Databricks MosaicAI Model Training products. Large Language Model training/fine-tuning for GenAI, applying neural networks on structured data for predictive AI tasks, and building reliable performant accelerated computing infrastructure, are Sandeep’s key interests and expertise.

Sandeep and his team built the MosaicAI Training platform on which the Mosaic Research team built state-of-the-art MPT, DBRX, and ImageAI models. Currently, Sandeep is focused on building products that help every Enterprise build “intelligence” on their secure enterprise data.

In the past, Sandeep led teams that built the Amazon SageMaker Model Training platform supporting hundreds of Enterprise journeys from their data to an intelligent model in production.

Deepti is the founder and CEO of Snow Leopard AI, a platform that helps teams build AI apps using their live business data, on-demand. She has nearly 2 decades of experience in data platforms and infrastructure.

As Head of Product at Observable, Deepti led the 0→1 product and GTM strategy in the crowded data analytics market. Before that, Deepti was the founding PM for Google Spanner, growing it to thousands of internal customers (Ads, PlayStore, Gmail, etc.), before launching it externally as a seminal cloud database service. Deepti started her career as a distributed systems engineer in the RAC database kernel at Oracle.

Deepti also serves as Vice-Chair of the Board of pbwc.org, a California non-profit. She has a Masters in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon.

Ion Stoica is a Professor in the EECS Department at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Director of Sky Computing Lab (https://sky.cs.berkeley.edu/). He is currently doing research on cloud computing and AI systems.

Current and past work includes ChatBot Arena, vLLM, Ray, Apache Spark, Apache Mesos, Tachyon, Chord DHT, and Dynamic Packet State (DPS).

He is a Member of NAE, an Honorary Member of the Romanian Academy, an ACM Fellow and has received numerous awards, including the Mark Weiser Award (2019), SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award (2015), and several "Test of Time" awards.

He also co-founded three companies, Anyscale (2019), Databricks (2013), and Conviva (2006).

As CTO, Lalit Ahuja is responsible for the direction, implementation, and delivery of GridGain’s technology strategy.

In his career spanning over 25 years, Lalit has held various leadership roles, including driving enterprise architecture and IT strategy, product management, large-scale program management, and IT operations for companies including Arkana, First American, and Pacific Life.

He also served as a digital strategy advisor to executives at Fortune 500 enterprises. Lalit holds a Master’s degree in Engineering and an MBA from UCLA.

Priya Anand is an award-winning reporter who has covered the technology industry for the last decade for Bloomberg, The Information, BuzzFeed, and now The San Francisco Standard.

She has broken news about the most valuable, powerful, and secretive companies, including Amazon, and about challenges faced by companies trying to get self-driving cars on the road. Her investigations have also shed light on abuse allegations and safety issues at startups.

At the Standard, Priya reports on all things tech and San Francisco, the city she has lived in and loved for nearly a decade.

Scott Wiener, a California State Senator representing the 11th district, has made significant contributions in various areas, particularly with his recent focus on AI regulation.

AI Regulation

In February 2024, Wiener introduced Senate Bill 1047 (SB 1047), aimed at ensuring the safe development of large-scale AI systems. Key features include:

• Safety Standards: Establishing requirements for powerful AI models, including pre-deployment testing and monitoring.
• Whistleblower Protections: Safeguarding employees in AI laboratories.
• CalCompute Initiative: Creating a public cloud computing cluster to support responsible AI development.

The bill has garnered bipartisan support, passing the California Senate in May 2024.

Other Notable Policies

Housing: Wiener has advocated for legislation to address California's housing shortage, including Senate Bills 9 and 10, which promote denser housing near transit.

LGBTQ+ Rights: He champions protections for transgender youth and has worked to modernize HIV criminalization laws.

Public Transportation: Wiener supports increased funding for public transit and high-speed rail projects.

Environmental Initiatives: He sponsors bills to promote renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Wiener’s diverse policy efforts reflect his commitment to addressing both emerging technological challenges and critical issues facing California.

Josh Rubin is Principal AI Scientist and a five-year veteran at Fiddler AI, an enterprise AI observability company. Fiddler's platform provides comprehensive and customizable workflows for monitoring, alerting, and root-causing predictive and generative models in production.

After a first career in experimental particle physics, Josh developed deep-learning models to address complex hardware calibration and signal processing problems for Labcyte Inc., a biotech hardware company. At Fiddler, Josh built and led a data science team that developed novel explainability tools for computer vision and multimodal deep-learning models, and techniques for measuring model robustness and drift in unstructured data, key components of Fiddler's LLM observability product.

Most recently, he's been developing small BERT-scale models to close the feedback loop on measuring large language model performance, serving customers including cloud-native travel platforms, large financial services firms, ad-tech companies, and cryptocurrency exchanges.

In 2024, Dr. June Andrews founded Lat Long Labs to optimize her growing family's quality of life—a complicated mixture of jobs, taxes, weather, healthcare, and, of course, distance to the beach. Since then, Lat Long Labs has grown in scope, helping people decide where to buy homes and providing optimizations for thousands of family types across all zip codes in the US.

Previously, June led the Style Discovery team at Stitch Fix, using data to help guide investments in new inventory. She spearheaded the development of the first real-time ML Monitoring & Diagnostics platform for GE’s airplane engines. Her team’s work has since been extended to turbines in renewable energy and power plants.

At Pinterest, June created a feature store, supporting over 50 ML engineers. At LinkedIn, she supported growth and engagement during a 50% increase in membership. June holds degrees in applied mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering from UC Berkeley and Cornell.

Prem Akkaraju is the CEO of Stability AI, the company best known for its creation of breakthrough foundational model Stable Diffusion (SD). In 2023, Stability AI made “TIME100 Most Influential Companies” and generated a staggering 80% of all AI images online. SD models have been downloaded over 150 million times.

Prem Akkaraju most recently served as CEO of Weta Digital, the multi-billion-dollar, multi-national Academy Award-winning film production and visual effects company. Weta Digital is behind 80+ major studio films, which have generated over $22 billion in global box office, including Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water, Black Panther, Avengers Endgame, Lord of the Rings, The Batman, and The Hobbit.

During his CEO tenure at Weta, Mr. Akkaraju founded Weta Cloud, a robust cloud-based film production pipeline which sold to Unity Software for $1.625 billion in an asset sale transaction. The asset sale included the technology group, software, and certain trademarks (including the name Weta Digital).

Mr. Akkaraju’s leadership and extraordinary value creation marks one of the highest shareholder returns in modern film history, including all studios, production companies, exhibitors, and streaming platforms.

Previously, Mr. Akkaraju was the Co-Founder and CEO of Screening Room, a proprietary feature film security and content delivery platform. Investors in Screening Room included Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, JJ Abrams, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Oracle Corporation, and Skydance Media. The company was founded alongside Sean Parker (Spotify, Facebook).

Mr. Akkaraju is an inventor of 26 issued technology patents, all involving cinema-quality movie delivery.

Prior to Screening Room, Mr. Akkaraju was the Chief Content Officer (CCO) of SFX Entertainment. As CCO, he oversaw all film and TV production and distribution. The content he distributed online generated over a billion views on first and third-party sites, and TV and film projects were released on MTV International and Netflix. Mr. Akkaraju, alongside the CEO and CFO, executed the full roadshow and took SFX Entertainment public on the NASDAQ. The $265 million IPO was priced at a $1 billion valuation.

Mr. Akkaraju was an Executive Producer on the 2021 Oscar-nominated feature film, The White Tiger. The film was theatrically released and hit #1 in 64 countries around the world on Netflix.

He is currently on the Board of Directors of four venture-backed companies: Stability AI (investors include Coatue, Eric Schmidt, Sean Parker, Lightspeed, and Sound Ventures); Citizen (an AI security app, investors include Sequoia, 8VC, and Goodwater); Cantina (an AI social media app, investors include Founders Fund and Google Ventures); and Screening Room (a movie security and delivery enterprise solution, investors include SV Angel and Oracle).

He also was a Keynote speaker at the March 2022 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Mr. Akkaraju has an MBA from Columbia Business School (2004) and a double BA in Applied Mathematics and Economics from the University of New Mexico (1996).

Subho is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Hippocratic AI — a startup in Generative AI and Healthcare. Hippocratic is building a safety-focused large language model specifically for the healthcare industry. Subho heads AI teams building the next generation of foundation models and conversational alignment to human reasoning, preferences, and safety.

Prior to Hippocratic, he led large-scale AI initiatives for massive foundation models at Microsoft Research as Principal Researcher. Over the past ten years, Subho has spearheaded several AI projects at leading research labs at Amazon, IBM, and Google. He graduated summa cum laude from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany with a PhD in Computer Science.

Hippocratic AI has received a total of $120M in funding and is backed by leading investors, including General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, Premji Invest, and SV Angel.

Melissa Herrera is a Developer Relations Engineer at DataStax, focused on bringing the Bay Area developer community together and driving awareness to DataStax Gen AI solutions and product suite, such as Astra DB and Langflow.

Prior to becoming a DevRel engineer, she led the Solutions Engineer team for DataStax's High Velocity Motion team where demoing end-to-end solutions, understanding customer tech stacks/goals, and driving real-time customer interaction was the primary goal.

At Microsoft, Annie leads a global team committed to helping current and future customers discover, engage, and build with AI capabilities on Microsoft’s Cloud. Annie oversees key products within Azure including the Azure Portal, Mobile, Clients, and Copilot experiences, where she is responsible for providing a unified end-to-end experience that helps customers create transformative AI-driven solutions. Additionally, she is responsible for developing an ecosystem that supports startups, students, and developers building on Azure through products like Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub and Microsoft Learn, along with dynamic developer and skilling communities. Under her guidance, Annie's team delivers a holistic customer experience from comprehensive Azure onboarding to sustained expert guidance, skill development, and community support to ensure sustained innovation and growth on the Microsoft Cloud.

Annie has over 15 years of tech leadership experience across startups and established enterprises. Before joining Microsoft, she served as the Chief Product Officer at Calendly, where she led the product strategy and execution that rapidly propelled and established the platform as a market leader. As Chief Product Officer at Glassdoor, she shaped the product vision for millions of job seekers and employers around the world. Annie led Enterprise product teams at Box and significantly contributed to the company’s growth during its pre- and post-IPO phases. She started her career in tech as a founding member and VP of Product at Xpert Financial, an early-stage financial services startup. She also has experience as a lawyer and management consultant before making her mark in the tech industry.

Sam Julien is the Director of Developer Relations at Writer. He’s also an instructor for egghead.io and the author of Getting Started in Developer Relations and the Developer Microskills newsletter.

When he's not writing or coding, Sam loves spending time with his family in the PNW. You can find more of his work at samjulien.com.

Aurimas is the Chief Product Officer at neptune.ai, where he and his team are building the most scalable experiment tracker on the market.

He has over a decade of work experience in various data-related fields, including Data Analytics, Data Science, Machine Learning, Data Engineering, and Cloud Engineering. For more than four years, he has led teams working with Data and Infrastructure.

Aurimas is also sharing his data and infrastructure-related knowledge as the Founder and CEO of SwirlAI.

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. In this role, Anthony has worked across IBM to transform IBM’s product strategy to be based on open technologies and launch new IBM-led community projects in open data tooling, instruction tuning, the Granite family of foundation models, and application-enabling tooling and platform integrations for developer enablement.

Alongside this, Anthony led the creation and launch of the AI Alliance with Meta and now more than 100 leading AI technology and research organizations to support and accelerate open, safe, and trusted generative AI research and development.

Prior to this, Anthony started and led product and engineering for IBM’s AI-accelerated science platform for hybrid AI and HPC workflows. Before this, Anthony started IBM’s Quantum computing business, driving its creation and growth from concept to global leadership. Anthony started his career as a physicist researching superconductors and spintronics for advanced semiconductor-integrated devices, earned his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Yale University, and holds 105 patents.

Jason Lopatecki is the co-founder and CEO of Arize AI, an AI observability company. He is a garage-to-IPO executive with an extensive background in building marketing-leading products and businesses that heavily leverage analytics.

Prior to Arize, Jason was the co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at TubeMogul, where he scaled the business into a public company and eventual acquisition by Adobe. Jason has hands-on knowledge of big data architectures, programmatic advertising systems, distributed systems, and machine learning and data processing architectures.

In his free time, Jason tinkers with personal machine learning projects as a hobby, with a special interest in unsupervised learning and deep neural networks. He holds an electrical engineering and computer science degree from UC Berkeley - Go Bears!

Yu, as a Senior Data Scientist, leverages data science to optimize Snowflake's sales engine, helping salespeople work smarter and more effectively.

Eric Vaughan is an accomplished technology executive and AI thought leader. As CEO of IgniteTech, he spearheads the company's AI-first approach, transforming its products and services with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence.

As the former founder and CEO of three software companies, Eric has earned a reputation as an innovator — architecting and developing groundbreaking software, hardware, and integration solutions. His extensive M&A experience spans over 50 transactions on both the buy and sell sides, including public-company buyouts, private equity sales, and divestitures from IBM.

Eric actively contributes to the advancement of the industry through regular articles in leading business and technology publications and as a sought-after AI speaker at events worldwide. At IgniteTech, he drives an AI-centric culture, pushing teams to continuously upskill and explore the latest AI technologies.

Outside of IgniteTech, Eric is an avid runner. He has completed 50 marathons, his last being the 2021 NYC Marathon, and over 50 ultramarathons, including nine 100-mile endurance trail races.

Keelin McDonell is a product manager on Vertex AI, focused on Generative AI.

She has worked on Natural Language Processing and Generation for over a decade.

Prior to Google, she was on the leadership team at Narrative Science, an early natural language generation startup that was acquired by Salesforce in 2021.

Robert Nishihara is one of the creators of Ray, a distributed framework for scaling Python applications and machine learning applications. Ray is used by companies across the board, from Canva to Runway to Coinbase to Pinterest, to scale their machine learning training, inference, and data processing workloads.

He is one of the co-founders of Anyscale, which is the company behind Ray. He did his PhD in machine learning and distributed systems in the computer science department at UC Berkeley. Before that, he majored in math at Harvard.

Mark Chen is the Head of Frontiers Research at OpenAI, where he focuses on multimodal modeling and reasoning research. He has led significant projects, including the development of DALL·E, the integration of visual perception into GPT-4, and the advancement of Codex and Image GPT.

Before joining OpenAI, Chen worked as a quantitative trader at several proprietary trading firms, such as Jane Street Capital, where he built machine learning algorithms for equities and futures trading.

Chen graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a bachelor's degree in mathematics with computer science. He has also been involved in academic research, contributing to various influential papers in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

In addition to his professional work, Mark Chen is a coach for the USA Computing Olympiad team, reflecting his commitment to fostering young talent in the field of computer science.

Rob is the Head of AI, Microsoft for Startups, where he helps the world's best startups leverage AI to grow their businesses.

A cloud veteran and tech exec with over 20 years of AI/ML experience, Rob has served as CTO and VPE for two Y Combinator startups, raising more than $150M+ and achieving two exits.

Notably, as CTO of Automatic Labs, he built 4.5+ star products available at Apple and Best Buy Stores, which led to a top 10 Y Combinator exit to SiriusXM.

Before joining Microsoft, Rob held the position of Global Head of AI/ML for AWS Startups and Venture Capital, leading a worldwide team of industry experts and developing Generative AI strategy.

Dr. Abraham C. Stern leads product management for BioNeMo, NVIDIA's platform for artificial intelligence-aided drug discovery, where he oversees the development of AI-based technologies for chemistry and biology.

Dr. Stern holds a Ph.D. in computational chemistry and has 20 years of experience developing computational tools and algorithms for molecular design and discovery, including the development and use of generative models for chemistry.

He has co-authored 25 scientific peer-reviewed publications, which have been cited 1900+ times and featured on the covers of "Journal of Physical Chemistry" and "Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics".

Shiva is a Partner, and VP - Head of AI and Data Intelligence at Pivotal Life Sciences, where she is building the data science team and AI platform for a growing international life sciences investment group.

She was formerly the Director of Data Technology and Infrastructure at 23andMe, where she built technology for the consumer health and the drug discovery side of the company. Previous to that, Shiva was the Director of Data Science at Zymergen Inc., a molecular technology company in the Bay Area focused on generating novel chemicals.

Prior to Zymergen, she was the CEO of BioSymetrics Inc., a biomedical machine learning startup in New York. She has a PhD (DPhil) in Computational Biophysics from the University of Oxford and a HBSc. in Computer Science and Human Biology from the University of Toronto.

Bharath received a BA and BS from UC Berkeley in EECS and Mathematics and was valedictorian of his graduating class in mathematics.

He received his PhD in computer science from Stanford University where he studied the application of deep learning to problems in drug discovery. At Stanford, Bharath created the deepchem.io open-source project to grow the deep drug discovery community, co-created the moleculenet.ai benchmark suite to facilitate development of molecular algorithms, and more. Bharath’s graduate education was supported by a Hertz Fellowship, the most selective graduate fellowship in the sciences.

Bharath founded Deep Forest Sciences to accelerate the discovery and design of small molecules and materials using AI. He is also the lead author of “TensorFlow for Deep Learning: From Linear Regression to Reinforcement Learning”, a developer’s introduction to modern machine learning, with O’Reilly Media, and the lead author of “Deep Learning for the Life Sciences”. Bharath is currently working on a forthcoming book about DeepChem.

Alison Cossette is a highly accomplished Data Science Strategist and Podcast Host. As a Developer Advocate at Neo4j specializing in Graph Data Science, she brings a strong technical background and exceptional communication skills to bridge the gap between complex concepts and practical applications.

Alison's passion for responsible AI shines through her work, as she actively promotes ethical and transparent practices. She volunteers with the US Department of Commerce - National Institute of Standards and Technology's Generative AI Public Working Group, advocating for responsible AI development and deployment.

Alison combines her expertise with real-world experience to educate and empower individuals and organizations in data science and AI. Her multifaceted background, commitment to responsible AI, and ability to drive innovation make her a respected figure in the field, contributing to the advancement of data science and responsible AI practices.

Arthur is a Product Manager at SingleStore where he leads growth for their AI-application development suite.

Seungrok Jung is an AI/ML engineer who brings more than 15 years of experience in AI software engineering and AI accelerator hardware design.

At AMD, he specializes in optimizing and benchmarking performances of machine learning algorithms on AMD devices. His interest lies in analyzing recent ML models and extracting the best performance of the models on different choices of ML frameworks, libraries, GPU kernels, and toolkits. He is also interested in contributing to ML open-source communities so that everyone can enjoy the full potential of the AMD devices.

Before joining AMD, Seungrok worked on AI chip accelerator and Mobile SoC processor design at the corporate R&D center of SK Telecom and Samsung Electronics. He holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

Dean Wampler is co-organizing the AI Alliance (thealliance.ai), helping to define and drive its technical focus areas.

He has led several engineering teams at IBM Research and other companies. Dean is an O'Reilly and Manning author, and a regular conference speaker on data and AI topics.

He has a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Washington.

Nick Ni is the Sr. Director of Product Marketing, AI. His team’s responsibilities include product planning, business development, and outbound marketing for AMD's artificial intelligence products and software-defined development environment for embedded systems.

Ni joined Xilinx/AMD in 2014. Prior to Xilinx, he held multiple roles in R&D and applications focusing on embedded system design and high-level synthesis at ATI, AMD, Qualcomm, and Altera.

Ni earned a master’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Toronto and holds over 10 patents and publications.

Nick is a Senior Engineer on MongoDB’s Education AI team. He works on MongoDB’s AI chatbot, including the open-source framework that powers it, as well as MongoDB’s content generation and dataset curation efforts.

Before working in AI, Nick wrote and maintained documentation and sample applications for MongoDB developer-facing products, including the core server, driver libraries, and cloud applications.

Tom Ohtsuka is the Co-founder, CEO, and CTO at Teammately, a pioneering developer platform startup based in Singapore. Originally from Tokyo, Japan, Tom has an extensive background in data science and machine learning.

Prior to founding Teammately, he held significant roles in data at Alibaba/Ant Financial, where he led Data Science and ML initiatives for Alipay Japan and was part of the global founding team for Uni Marketing, a big-data-based marketing business under New Retail that provides precise and personalized marketing solutions for brands. Additionally, Tom served as a founding member and strategy manager at DiDi Food, a food delivery platform.

Under Tom's leadership, Teammately has secured funding from prominent CVCs in Japan, including CyberAgent, just a few months after the project's launch, further validating its innovative approach to AI development.

Tom is an accomplished debater, having advanced to the final rounds at the World Universities Debating Championship in the ESL category. His ideas in political philosophy and moral judgment contribute to his vision for safe AI development for humanity.

Michael Ramos is a seasoned software engineer with over a decade of experience in the public sector, specializing in deploying AI in enterprise settings.

Since 2017, Mike has implemented AI solutions for bank marketing and led some of the U.S. government's largest AI projects, growing an AI program to over $120 million in value.

With real-world experience engineering scalable AI systems and integrating them into business-critical processes, Mike has been recognized as an expert in AI governance and efficacy.

Giorgia is a seasoned operations and strategy leader with over a decade of experience in disruptive strategy, innovation, consulting, operational excellence and RevOps.

In her past roles, Giorgia has helped major international Financial and Tech companies scale, enter new markets, introduce new products and technologies, optimize processes and operations, and improve customer experience.

Currently, Giorgia serves as Square's Global Head of Strategy for Sales, Account Management, and CS, with a focus on bringing greater efficiencies and improved experiences to these areas with AI.

Dr. Youssef is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Radiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. She received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Data Science and Population Health from the Institute of Medical Science, University of Toronto, Canada in 2021. Her research addresses ethical considerations in AI development, aiming to promote responsible use of AI in healthcare. Using mixed-methods methodologies, she investigates the end-user experience with AI systems, identifying ethical and safety concerns related to integrating AI into clinical workflows.

Dr. Youssef leads several AI educational programs and policy initiatives. She co-directs the Stanford AIMI High School Programs, preparing the next generation for careers that intersect AI and medicine. She also serves on several AI policy and education committees across the Stanford School of Medicine.

Dr. Jisheng Wang has more than 15 years of extensive experience in developing industry-leading enterprise software using AI/ML technology with a proven track record of scaling business-critical applications in disruptive markets.

Jisheng is currently serving as VP of Engineering and Head of AI/ML in Traceable AI, a leader in the API Security space. Before that, Jisheng was the Senior Director of Engineering in Juniper Networks - joined through Mist acquisition - and led the development of Gartner’s leading AIOps solution Marvis.

He was also the Senior Director of Data Science in the CTO Office of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, joined through the acquisition of Niara where he served as the Chief Scientist and developed the industry’s first modular and data-agnostic UEBA solution.

Besides being a seasoned engineering leader, Jisheng is also passionate about driving innovation on multiple fronts. Jisheng holds more than 40 patents in security, networking, and AI/ML, and is also a frequent speaker at different AI/ML and security conferences.

Merrin Kurian is a Distinguished Engineer and the AI Platform Architect at Intuit. In this role, she is responsible for (i) GenOS, the operating system for Generative AI app development, and (ii) ML Platform for developing and serving Classical AI models. This role neatly plays into her passion for AI as well as Platform Engineering.

Over her 15+ years career, she has led several technology transformations including Intuit’s public cloud adoption of QuickBooks Online and Intuit’s first NoCode Model Development and Serving solution.

Dr. Alfred Spector is a Visiting Scholar at MIT and a Senior Advisor at Blackstone. His career has led him from innovation in large scale, networked computing systems to broad engineering and research leadership. Recently, he co-authored a Cambridge University Press textbook, “Data Science in Context: Foundations, Challenges, Opportunities.” (See www.datascienceincontext.com)

Previously, Dr. Spector was CTO and Head of Engineering at Two Sigma Investments. Before that, he spent eight years as VP of Research and Special Initiatives at Google, and he held various senior-level positions at IBM, including as global VP of Services and Software Research and global CTO of IBM’s Software Business. Earlier in his career, he founded Transarc Corporation, a pioneer in distributed transaction processing and wide-area file systems, and he was a tenured professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Spector was a Hertz Fellow at Stanford and is also a Fellow of both the ACM and the IEEE. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Spector won the 2001 IEEE Kanai Award for Distributed Computing and the 2016 ACM Software Systems Award. In 2018-19, Dr. Spector lectured widely as a Phi Beta Kappa Scholar (for example, on the growing importance of computer science across all disciplines based on the evocative phrase, “CS+X”). He has been a member of the ACM Turing Award Committee and has done national service through chairing the NSF’s CISE Advisory Board and his membership on the Army and Defense Science Boards. Dr. Spector obtained a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford and a B.A. in applied math from Harvard.

Vipul Raheja is an Applied Research Scientist at Grammarly. He works on developing robust and scalable approaches centered around improving the quality of written communication, leveraging Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.

His research interests lie at the intersection of large language models and controllable text generation methods for text revision. He has authored multiple papers at top-tier NLP conferences such as ACL, NAACL, and EMNLP. He also co-organizes the Workshop on Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants (In2Writing).

Danny Bickson holds a Ph.D. in distributed systems from the Hebrew University and was a research scholar at Carnegie Mellon University. His postdoc project, GraphLab, won the VLDB conference test of time award 2023.

Danny co-founded GraphLab/Turi, a Seattle-based startup, acquired by Apple in 2016, becoming Apple's deep learning infrastructure team.

Danny's recent startup, Visual Layer, is based on the popular open-source project fastdup started two years ago by Danny and his collaborators Dr. Amir Alush and Prof. Carlos Guestrin from Stanford. Within the first two years, fastdup reached 380,000 installations and grew to a company called Visual Layer. Visual Layer product allows enterprises to manage, index, and search billions of video frames and is widely used in many verticals from retail, manufacturing, and the food industry to wildlife monitoring and defense.

Sudeep Das is the Head of Machine Learning, New Business Verticals, at DoorDash, leading Personalization, Search, Product Catalog, and Fulfillment related ML applications within the New Verticals.

He was previously a Machine Learning Lead at Netflix, where his main focus was on developing the next generation of machine learning algorithms to drive the personalization, discovery, and search experience in the product. Sudeep has had more than twenty years of experience in machine learning applied to both large-scale scientific problems, as well as in the industry.

He is a frequent speaker at RecSys, SIGIR, ICML, ReWork, MLConf, Nordic Media Conference, and other machine learning conferences. He holds a PhD in Astrophysics from Princeton University.

Ivan Lee graduated with a Computer Science B.S. from Stanford University, then dropped out of his master’s degree to found his first mobile gaming company, Loki Studios. After raising institutional funding and building a profitable game, Loki was acquired by Yahoo.

Lee spent the next 10 years building AI products at Yahoo and Apple and discovered there was a gap in serving the rapid evolution of Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. He built Datasaur to focus on democratizing access to NLP and LLMs.

Datasaur has raised $8m in venture funding from top-tier investors such as Initialized Capital, Greg Brockman (President, OpenAI), and Calvin French-Owen (CTO, Segment) and serves companies such as Google, Netflix, Qualtrics, Spotify, the FBI, and more.

Cecilia Ziniti is the founder and CEO of a legal AI company, GC AI, built based on her experience as a 3-time general counsel and AI expert. For two decades, Ms. Ziniti has driven product and company success across major tech shifts and turned early technologies into iconic products that millions of people use every day.

As a three-time executive team member for venture-backed tech companies including software unicorn Replit, Ms. Ziniti has led all aspects of operations for hypergrowth. She has architected and closed partnerships with blue-chip companies like Google and Amazon and quarterbacked $300M+ in venture capital rounds from top-tier investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Index, and JP Morgan.

As the founding lawyer on Amazon Alexa and an early team member at Cruise, Ms. Ziniti understands tech adoption and how to earn public and regulator trust. Ms. Ziniti’s strategic insights make her sought-after by founders and have earned her global media appearances including on CNN and NPR.

Before Amazon, Ms. Ziniti was an intellectual property litigator and technology transactions attorney and represented Apple at Morrison & Foerster, an Am Law 20 firm. Ms. Ziniti is an inventor on four US patents. She has invested in and advises dozens of breakout and unicorn companies, including Replit, Instrumental AI, and Seek AI. Her first tech job was as an online community moderator in London.

Cody Coleman is a co-founder of Coactive AI, an analytics platform for visual content, and serves as the CEO. Coactive leverages AI to make it easy for enterprises to search, filter, and analyze large amounts of image and video data by bringing structure to unstructured data.

He is also a founding member of MLCommons, and his work spans from high-performance deep learning to data-centric AI. He holds a PhD in CS from Stanford and MEng and BS degrees in EECS from MIT.

Philip Rathle is CTO of Neo4j, the graph database and analytics leader that enabled the ICIJ to crack the Panama Papers, and NASA to get to Mars two years faster. Neo4j enables thousands of organizations worldwide-- including most of the Fortune 500-- to solve their most pressing & valuable problems through the power of the connections in data.

Philip comes from a long career in data & databases. He joined Neo4j in 2012, where he led Product Management for over a decade, helping to pioneer the graph database category and creating one of the world’s leading database & analytics companies.

Sarmad Qadri is CEO of LastMile AI, a company dedicated to enabling enterprise developers to build and evaluate generative AI applications. Previously, he was an engineering leader at Meta AI, responsible for ML experimentation and model management platforms.

He also helped build Facebook's Jupyter notebook platform, and prior to that worked on compilers, build systems, and IDEs at Microsoft. He graduated with a BMath in Computer Science from University of Waterloo.

Etienne co-founded Weaviate where he is currently the CTO and oversees building the Weaviate Vector Database. Co-Founding Weaviate was Etienne's entry point into the AI world, where he could combine his passion for cloud-native engineering with the new challenges of the AI age.

Prior to Weaviate, Etienne led engineering teams building cloud-native applications for multi-national enterprise companies in the finance, retail, and wholesale industry.

Etienne is passionate about deep tech and modern architectures made for the ever-changing demands of today and tomorrow.

Nir Shavit is the co-founder of Neural Magic. An award-winning computer scientist, patented inventor, professor, and author, Nir is a tech veteran with more than three decades of experience.

He currently serves as a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and spent more than 25 years as a professor of computer science at Tel Aviv University.

Nir has received numerous awards including a 2004 Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science for his work on applying tools from algebraic topology to model shared memory computability, and a winner of the 2012 Dijkstra Prize for the introduction and first implementation of software transactional memory.

Nir is also co-author of the book The Art of Multiprocessor Programming and is an ACM fellow. Nir received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Lareina writes and speaks on technology and diversity. In her role as chair of the McKinsey Technology Council, she recently published the firm’s annual “Technology Trends Outlook”, “The Economic Potential of Generative AI” and “The CEO’s Guide to Generative AI”, each of which examines long-term technology shifts and their implications for different industries.

Lareina is also a leading expert on gender and diversity, serving as McKinsey’s first Chief Diversity Officer. Nearly ten years ago she co-founded Women in the Workplace, an annual research partnership with LeanIn.org that reports annually on the state of women in corporate America. She has coauthored a significant body of research on diversity, including “Race in the Workplace: The Frontline Experience” and “Delivering through Diversity”.

In addition to her work with McKinsey, Lareina serves on the board of the San Francisco Ballet and on the advisory councils of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University and the Beyond Barnard program at Columbia University.

Jerry is the co-founder and CEO of LlamaIndex, an open-source tool that provides a central data management/query interface for your LLM application.

Before this, he has spent his career at the intersection of ML, research, and startups. He led the ML monitoring team at Robust Intelligence, conducted self-driving AI research at Uber ATG, and worked on recommendation systems at Quora.

Jerry graduated from Princeton in 2017 with a degree in Computer Science.

Results-driven Engineering Leader with close to 20 years of experience in the software industry.

Passionate about building, scaling, and inspiring remote teams across various time zones, driving innovation, and fostering collaboration and trust between engineering and other teams.

Proficient in Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript, Elixir, Python, and multiple frameworks, with a background in data science and ML/AI. Committed to promoting Diversity & Inclusion in the workplace and experienced in executing strategic long-term plans for growth.

Enthusiastic technologist, writer, and international speaker at conferences such as DevCon Israel, Ruby Conf, TakeOff Conf Paris, ElixirDaze, and others, constantly seeking to impact businesses and help them achieve better results by leveraging cutting-edge technology.

Kanika is a seasoned professional with a decade of practical experience in the field of AI , focusing on research, development, and implementation of AI models to address various complex issues, such as content safety, user behavior modeling, and recommendation systems.

In her current role as a Research Scientist at Meta Reality Labs, she is involved in pioneering conversational AI projects for AR devices.

Kanika earned her PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where her research delved into the intersection of Deep Learning, Computational Social Science, and Graph Learning.

She has contributed around 20 papers presented at esteemed AI/ML conferences like ACL, SIGIR, and ICML. Moreover, she has extensive experience serving as a speaker and panelist at numerous global conferences.

Rowan is a research scientist working on machine learning methods for autonomous vehicle (AV) planning at Waymo.

Previously, Rowan obtained his PhD in machine learning at the University of Cambridge; worked on AVs at Uber, Toyota, and UC Berkeley; and enjoys organizing academic workshops on AVs.

Amit Jain is the CEO and Co-Founder of Luma AI, a startup pursuing visual intelligence through multi-modal foundation models.

Luma is working on natively combining the next generation of AI with delightful products, and most recently released Dream Machine, a market-leading Video Generation model that garnered 1MM users in 4 days.

Amit founded Luma from Apple, where he worked as a Systems and Machine Learning Engineer, leading work on the Passthrough feature for the Apple Vision Pro and before that on the integration of the first LIDAR sensors for the iPhone.

Amit also has experience in multiple startups, and studied Mathematics and Physics at university.

Konstantina Christakopoulou is the founder and tech lead of the Project ALLY Google Brain Moonshot, aimed at the next-generation of assistive recommendation helping users throughout their lifelong journey.

As a senior research engineer in Google DeepMind, she has led multiple cross-PA efforts on aligning industrial recommendation platforms with human values, publishing in top-tier conferences and delivering 20+ launches, working closely with senior leadership at Google.

Prior to Google, she received her PhD from the University of Minnesota, during which she completed research internships in Google Research and Microsoft Research, and first-authored influential works on conversational recommendation.

Joe Spisak is Product Director and Head of Open Source in Meta’s Generative AI organization. A veteran of the AI space with over 10 years experience, Joe led product teams at Meta/Facebook, Google, and Amazon where he focused on open source AI, open science, and building developer tools such as PyTorch to help the community scale up AI in an open and collaborative way.

As the leader of product for PyTorch, he and the team built an amazing platform and community that made PyTorch the leading open source AI development framework in the industry and took it to the Linux Foundation where it now resides in partnership with Microsoft, Nvidia, AMD, Google, Amazon, and more. Joe is also an angel and advisor to companies like Anthropic, Answer.ai, Lastmile.ai, Evolutionary Scale, Udacity, Lightning.AI, and others.

Jason Wei is an AI researcher living in San Francisco, currently working at OpenAI. He was previously a research scientist at Google Brain, where he popularized key ideas in large language models such as chain-of-thought prompting, instruction tuning, and emergent phenomena.

Jaspar is the founder and CEO of Artisan, a San Francisco company building AI Employees and consolidated SaaS, starting with an AI BDR and all-in-one outbound sales platform. The company aims to consolidate and automate the entire GTM stack.

Prior to founding Artisan, Jaspar was running an agency focused on GTM & Branding.

Dr. Shelby Heinecke leads an AI research team at Salesforce, focusing on cutting-edge AI for product and research in emerging directions including autonomous agents, LLMs, and on-device AI.

Some of her team's most notable agentic AI works include the open-source multi-agent platform, AgentLite, and the "Tiny Giant", a competitive 1B model for function-calling.

Shelby earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in machine learning theory. She also holds an M.S. in Mathematics from Northwestern and a B.S. in Mathematics from MIT.

Website: www.shelbyh.ai

Anna Marie Clifton (AMC) is the Head of Product at Zapier Central, where she spearheads the development of cutting-edge AI agents.

With a wealth of experience as Head of Product at Vowel, the AI meeting platform which was acquired by Zapier in 2024, Anna Marie has been instrumental in shaping AI-driven solutions.

She resides in San Francisco with her partner, their 4-year-old fur baby, and their 5-month-old skin baby.

Dr. Radha Iyengar Plumb assumed the role of Department of Defense Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, a Principal Staff Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense on April 9, 2024. In this role she is leading the acceleration of the DoD’s adoption of data, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) to generate decision advantage.

Prior to this appointment, she served as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (DUSD(A&S)) and was responsible to the Under Secretary of Defense for all matters pertaining to acquisition; contract administration; logistics and materiel readiness; installations and environment; operational energy; chemical, biological, and nuclear defense; the acquisition workforce; and the defense industrial base.

Previous DoD assignments include serving as Chief of Staff to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, where she was responsible for leading the executive staff, providing counsel and advice to the Deputy Secretary, and ensuring Deputy-led governance processes were aligned with key leadership priorities. In addition, she served as Acting Deputy Director of Administration and Management within the Department of Defense.

Prior to her appointment as Chief of Staff, she was the Director of Research and Insights for Trust & Safety at Google and had previously served as Global Head of Policy Analysis at Facebook. Before her Silicon Valley work, Dr. Plumb was a senior economist at the RAND Corporation where she focused on improving measurement and evaluation of readiness and security efforts across the Department of Defense. In that capacity she served as lead author on a number of critical reports including assessing the implications of open service of Transgender Service members and review of security and suitability screening efforts.

From 2014-2015, Dr. Plumb served as the Deputy Chief of Staff to the Deputy Secretary of Energy, where she led policy processes including budget and policy reviews related to modernizing nuclear infrastructure and efforts to enhance energy sector security and resilience. Previously, she was the director of personnel and readiness at the National Security Council, where she was instrumental on executive actions on sexual assault in the military. She also served as policy advisor and Chief of Staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, and as a civilian in Afghanistan conducting measurement and assessment work to support the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team for the Commander, International Security Assistance Force.

Dr. Plumb received her Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University. Her research has covered empirical evaluations of policies aimed at reducing violence, including criminal violence, sexual assault, terrorist behavior, and sexual and intimate partner violence. At the outset of her career, she was an assistant professor at the London School of Economics and a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Harvard.

Brian is the Founder and CEO of Unstructured. Unstructured has quickly emerged as a critical capability in the LLM ecosystem, with tens of thousands of companies using its technology.

Previously, Brian helped build and scale another machine learning company, Primer AI.

While in government, Brian served as the Iraq Country Director on the National Security Council, advising President Obama on foreign policy matters concerning Iraq, ISIS, and the Middle East. Brian also served in the Central Intelligence Agency, where he completed multiple war zone tours.

Brian has an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and a BA/MA in Political Science from the University of California, Davis.

Marwan Sarieddine is an AI engineer and a member of the Anyscale training team, where he teaches data engineering and large-scale AI.

Previously, he served as the founding engineer of a supervised deep-learning startup in the financial sector and co-founded a real estate analytics startup.

Marwan holds a Master of Engineering from MIT and a Bachelor of Engineering from AUB.

He is passionate about running, weightlifting, and reading, continually seeking to expand his expertise and stay at the forefront of technological advancements.

Christy Bergman is a passionate Developer Advocate . She enjoys creating demos, tutorials, speaking, organizing events, and helping people learn about Unstructured Data and AI. Before Zilliz, Christy worked in distributed computing at Anyscale and as a Specialist AI/ML Solutions Architect at AWS. Christy studied applied math, is a self-taught coder, and has presented at conferences including a publication in ACM.

In her free time, Christy enjoys hiking, bird watching, writing in French or English, and previously owned the Secret Wine Shop in SF.

Tomasz Tunguz is a general partner at Theory Ventures, an early stage software & infrastructure firm investing $1-25m in early stage companies. Tomasz writes a blog at tomtunguz.com & has worked with companies like Looker, MotherDuck, Monte Carlo, Hex, Omni, Lilt, Chorus, & Dremio. He co-authored the book Winning with Data.

Amy came to Menlo Ventures to grow the firm’s consumer technology and gaming practice and back founders building new products at the forefront of emerging platform shifts.

As an investor, Amy seeks founders who share her obsession with products that define how people work, live, and play. She believes that emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and AR give founders new surface areas to create magical consumer experiences. Not afraid to get her hands dirty, Amy loves using new bleeding-edge products and actively participates in user communities.

Before joining Menlo, Amy focused on Web3 and gaming at FTX Ventures, where she invested in Sui, Soba Studios, TripleDot Studios, Yuga Labs, and Doodles. Prior to that, she led investments in consumer, gaming, and blockchain at Lightspeed Venture Partners, where her investments included Epic Games, Faraway Games, Weee!, Webull, Arbitrum, and Alchemy. As an operator, she was SVP and CFO of the Global Digital and Sports portfolio for Discovery, Inc., a $2+ billion business that includes Eurosport, the PGA, the Olympics, US Motor Trend, and Scripps Lifestyle Studios. Before Discovery, she ran finance and operations at Welcome, an NYC-based marketing software company that Optimizely later acquired. Amy began her career at Insight Venture Partners, working with companies like JD.com, Zumba, and Tumblr. She holds a B.A. in biochemistry from Harvard.

Outside of work, Amy skis and climbs mountains. She is based in New York City and frequently in SF and LA. You can find her on Twitter at @amytongwu, where she shares thoughts about gaming, consumer technology, and blockchain.

Roger Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Cosigned, a platform for funding and collaborating on creative ventures. He previously founded Computable, a data and AI model marketplace, and served as a program chair for the O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference. In addition to starting companies, Roger has also invested in numerous startups as an angel investor and VC at O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV). Originally trained as a research scientist and engineer, Roger earned his PhD from UC Berkeley while tinkering with photons and nanomaterials at the smallest scales.

Prior to joining Silverton in 2017, Roger was a Principal at Genacast Ventures in New York, a boutique seed-stage venture capital firm affiliated with Comcast Ventures focused on B2B software investing. While at Genacast, he was involved with investments in BigID, DrayNow, and Uptycs.

Before his investing career, Roger worked as an engineer turned PM at Google in Mountain View where he led various initiatives within Google Maps and Chrome. Roger studied computer science and mathematics at the University of Michigan and holds an MBA from The Wharton School.

Prashanth is an AI engineer at Kùzu Inc., an embedded graph database startup in Ontario, Canada. He has two master's degrees: one in Aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan, and another in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. In recent years, he’s worked on a variety of data engineering, data science, and machine learning problems and has thought deeply about databases and data modeling paradigms.

In his spare time, Prashanth enjoys hiking, biking, trying out new cuisines, engaging with the AI developer community, and blogging about all things data @ thedataquarry.com.

Kanu is a Partner at Khosla Ventures investing in enterprise applications and infrastructures that leverage ML, deep learning, NLP, language models, as well as robotics and autonomous systems and hardware acceleration. She has led and helps manage KV’s investments in companies including PolyAI, Zordi, Mimica, Lexion, Zendar, NoMagic, Korbit, Analog Inference, and Rosebud.

She has more than 10 years of operating experience as a research scientist at Intel and Cadence, and was a founding or early engineer at startups including OmniSci (hardware-accelerated data analytics), Nascentric (fast-circuit simulation tool, acquired by Cadence), and Atrenta (predictive analytics for design, acquired by Synopsys).

Kanu has co-authored three books; authored 35+ peer-reviewed publications; and holds a patent on high performance computing and hardware acceleration. She obtained a Ph.D. and master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Texas A&M University and a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Delhi. Kanu also earned her MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was also co-president of the annual Venture Capital and Private Equity Conference.