Speakers

Andrew Ng

Partha Ranganathan

Parthasarathy (Partha) Ranganathan is currently a VP & Engineering Fellow, Google where he is the area technical lead for hardware and datacenters, designing systems at scale. Prior to this, he was a HP Fellow and Chief Technologist at Hewlett Packard Labs where he led their research on systems and data centers. Partha has worked on several interdisciplinary systems projects with broad impact on both academia and industry, including widely-used innovations in energy-aware user interfaces, heterogeneous multi-cores, power-efficient servers, accelerators, and disaggregated and data-centric data centers. He has published extensively (including being the co-author on the popular "Datacenter as a Computer" textbook), is a co-inventor on more than 100 patents, and has been recognized with numerous awards. He has been named a top-15 enterprise technology rock star by Business Insider, one of the top 35 young innovators in the world by MIT Tech Review, and is a recipient of the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes award, Rice University's Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni award, and the IIT Madras distinguished alumni award. He is one of few computer scientists to have his work recognized with an Emmy award. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM, and has also served on the board of directors for OpenCompute.

Baskar Sridharan

Baskar Sridharan is the Vice President for AI/ML and Data Services & Infrastructure at AWS, where he oversees the strategic direction and development of key services, including Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, and essential data platforms like Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and AWS Glue.

Prior to his current role, Baskar spent nearly six years at Google, where he contributed to advancements in cloud computing infrastructure. Before that, he dedicated 16 years to Microsoft, playing a pivotal role in the development of Azure Data Lake and Cosmos, which have significantly influenced the landscape of cloud storage and data management.

Baskar earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University and has since spent over two decades at the forefront of the tech industry.

He has lived in Seattle for over 20 years, where he, his wife, and two children embrace the beauty of the Pacific Northwest and its many outdoor activities. In his free time, Baskar enjoys practicing music and playing cricket and baseball with his kids.

Lip-Bu Tan

Lip-Bu Tan is Founder and Chairman of Walden International (“WI”), and Founding Managing Partner of Celesta Capital and Walden Catalyst Ventures, with over $5 billion under management.  He formerly served as Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman of Cadence Design Systems, Inc.  He currently serves on the Board of Schneider Electric SE (SU: FP), Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC), and Credo Semiconductor (NASDAQ: CRDO).

Lip-Bu focuses on semiconductor/components, cloud/edge infrastructure, data management and security, and AI/machine learning.

Lip-Bu received his B.S. from Nanyang University in Singapore, his M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his MBA from the University of San Francisco. He also received his honorary degree for Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of San Francisco.  Lip-Bu currently serves on Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)’s Board of Trustees and the School of Engineering Dean’s Council, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s School of Engineering Dean’s Advisory Council, University of California Berkeley (UCB)’s College of Engineering Advisory Board and their Computing, Data Science, and Society Advisory Board, and University of California San Francisco (UCSF)’s Executive Council. He’s also a member of the Global Advisory Board of METI Japan, The Business Council, and Committee 100. He also served on the board of the Board of Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) from 2009 to 2021, and as a Trustee of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore from 2006 to 2011.  Lip-Bu has been named one of the Top 10 Venture Capitalists in China by Zero2ipo and was listed as one of the Top 50 Venture Capitalists on the Forbes Midas List. He’s the recipient of imec’s 2023 Lifetime of Innovation Award, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) 2022 Robert N. Noyce Award, and GSA’s 2016 Dr. Morris Chang's Exemplary Leadership Award.  In 2017, he was ranked #1 of the most well-connected executives in the technology industry by the analytics firm Relationship Science. 

Mo Elshenawy

With more than 25 years of engineering and leadership expertise, Mo is the President and CTO at Cruise, a self-driving car company. Over the last six years, he has played a pivotal role in driving Cruise's engineering advancements, while scaling the team from hundreds to thousands of engineers. Mo currently leads Cruise’s engineering, operations, and product teams – those who are responsible for all aspects of our autonomous vehicles development and deployment, including AI, robotics, simulation, product, program, data and machine learning platforms, infrastructure, security, safety, operations, and hardware.

Prior to Cruise, Mo led global technologies for Amazon ReCommerce Platform, Warehouse Deals, and Liquidations: a massive scale global business that enables Amazon to evaluate, price, sell, liquidate, and donate millions of used products daily. In addition, over the past decade, Mo was a technical co-founder and CTO for three tech startups, the latest of which is a cloud-based financial services development platform used by top financial institutions.

Arne Stoschek

Arne is the Vice President of AI, Autonomy & Digital Information and oversees the company’s development of autonomous flight and machine learning solutions to enable future, self-piloted aircraft. In his role, he also leads the advancement of large-scale data-driven processes to develop novel aircraft functions. He is passionate about robotics, autonomy and the impact these technologies will have on future mobility. After holding engineering leadership positions at global companies such as Volkswagen/Audi and Infineon, and at aspiring Silicon Valley startups, namely Lucid Motors/Atieva, Knightscope and Better Place, Arne dared to take his unique skill set to altitude above ground inside Airbus. Arne earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Munich and held a computer vision and data analysis research position at Stanford University.

Zaid Kahn

Zaid is currently a VP in Microsoft’s Silicon, Cloud Hardware, and Infrastructure Engineering organization where he leads systems engineering and hardware development for Azure including AI systems and infrastructure. Zaid is part of the technical leadership team across Microsoft that sets AI hardware strategy for training and inference. Zaid's teams are also responsible for software and hardware engineering efforts developing specialized compute systems, FPGA network products and ASIC hardware accelerators.

Prior to Microsoft Zaid was head of infrastructure at LinkedIn where he was responsible for all aspects of architecture and engineering for Datacenters, Networking, Compute, Storage and Hardware. Zaid also led several software development teams focusing on building and managing infrastructure as code. This included zero touch provisioning, software-defined networking, network operating systems (SONiC, OpenSwitch), self-healing networks, backbone controller, software defined storage and distributed host-based firewalls. The network teams Zaid led built the global network for LinkedIn, including POP's, peering for edge services, IPv6 implementation, DWDM infrastructure and datacenter network fabric. The hardware and datacenter engineering teams Zaid led were responsible for water cooling to the racks, optical fiber infrastructure and open hardware development which was contributed to the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP).

Zaid holds several patents in networking and is a sought-after keynote speaker at top tier conferences and events. Zaid is currently the chairperson for the OCP Foundation Board. He is also currently on the EECS External Advisory Board (EAB) at UC Berkeley and a board member of Internet Ecosystem Innovation Committee (IEIC), a global internet think tank promoting internet diversity. Zaid has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Physics from the University of the South Pacific.

Thomas Sohmers

Thomas Sohmers is an innovative technologist and entrepreneur, renowned for his pioneering work in the field of advanced computing and artificial intelligence. Thomas began programming at a very early age, which led him to MIT as a high school student where he worked on cutting-edge research. By the age of 18, he had become a Thiel Fellow, marking the beginning of his remarkable journey in technology and innovation. In 2013, Thomas founded Rex Computing, where he designed energy-efficient processors for high-performance computing applications. His groundbreaking work earned him numerous accolades, including a feature in Forbes' 30 Under 30. After a stint exploring the AI industry, working on scaling out GPU clouds and large language models, Thomas founded and became CEO of Positron in 2023. Positron develops highly efficient transformer inferencing systems, and under Thomas's leadership, it has quickly become one of the most creative and promising startups in the AI industry.

Edward Kmett

Edward spent most of his adult life trying to build reusable code in imperative languages. He converted to Haskell in 2006 while searching for better building materials. Edward served as the founding chair for the Haskell Core Libraries Committee and continues to collaborate with hundreds of other developers on over three hundred functional programming projects on Github. He previously wrote software for stock exchanges at Standard & Poors, served as a researcher at MIRI, and ran Groq's Software Engineering team. As Positron's CTO, today he sets long-term software, architecture, and optimization strategy.

Euicheol Lim

Eui-cheol Lim is a Research Fellow and leader of Solution Advanced Technology team in SK Hynix. He received the B.S. degree and the M.S. degree from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, in 1993 and 1995, and the Ph.D. degree from Sungkyunkwan University, suwon, Korea in 2006. Dr.Lim joined SK Hynix in 2016 as a system architect in memory system R&D. Before joining SK Hynix, he had been working as an SoC architect in Samsung Electronics and leading the architecture of most Exynos mobile SoC. His recent interesting points are memory and storage system architecture with new media memory and new memory solution such as CXL memory and Processing in Memory. In particular, he is proposing a new computing architecture based on PIM, which is more efficient and flexible than existing AI accelerators, to process generative AI and LLM (large language Model) that is currently causing a sensation.

Maria Barisano

Maria Barisano is a Managing Director and Partner, based in the San Francisco office. She has been with BCG since 2013. As a core group member of BCG's Technology Media and Telecommunication (TMT) Practice Area, she works mainly for companies in the technology / high-tech industry.

Maria is leading the Women in Tech effort on the West Coast within BCG. Maria consistently engages with numerous high-profile women C-suite personnel in the tech industry. Maria is immensely knowledgeable in a broad set of topics, with a strong focus on growth/Go To Market acceleration.

Tim Mamtora

Donald Thompson

Donald is currently a Distinguished Engineer at LinkedIn, primarily overseeing the company's generative AI strategy, architecture, and technology. He has more than 35 years of hands-on experience as a technical architect and CTO, with an extensive background in designing and delivering innovative software and services on a large scale. In 2013, Donald co-founded Maana, which pioneered computational knowledge graphs and visual no-code/low-code authoring environments to address complex AI-based digital transformation challenges in Fortune 50 companies. During his 15 years at Microsoft, Donald started the Knowledge and Reasoning group within Microsoft's Bing division, where he innovated "Satori", an internet-scale knowledge graph constructed automatically from the web crawl. He co-founded a semantic computing incubation funded directly by Bill Gates, portions of which shipped as the SQL Server Semantic Engine. Additionally, he created Microsoft's first internet display ad delivery system and led numerous AI/ML initiatives in Microsoft Research across embedded systems, robotics, wearable computing, and privacy-preserving personal data services.

Gerald Friedland

Dr. Gerald Friedland is a Principal Scientist at AWS working on Low-Code, No-Code Machine Learning. Before that he was CTO and founder of Brainome, a no-code machine learning service for miniature models. Other posts include UC Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and the International Computer Science Institute. He was the lead figure behind the Multimedia Commons initiative, a collection of 100M images and 1M videos for research and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles in conferences, journals, and books. His latest book "Information-Driven Machine Learning" was released by Springer-Nature in Dec. 2023. He also co-authored a textbook on Multimedia Computing with Cambridge University Press. Dr. Friedland received his doctorate (summa cum laude) and master's degree in computer science from Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany, in 2002 and 2006, respectively.

Gayathri Radhakrishnan

Gayathri is currently Partner at Hitachi Ventures. Prior to that, she was with Micron Ventures, actively investing in startups that apply AI to solve critical problems in the areas of Manufacturing, Healthcare and Automotive. She brings over 20 years of multi-disciplinary experience across product management, product marketing, corporate strategy, M&A and venture investments in large Fortune 500 companies such as Dell and Corning and in startups. She has also worked as an early stage investor at Earlybird Venture Capital, a premier European venture capital fund based in Germany. She has a Masters in EE from The Ohio State University and MBA from INSEAD in France. She is also a Kauffman Fellow - Class 16.

Rochan Sankar

Rochan is Founder, President and CEO of Enfabrica. Prior to founding Enfabrica, he was Senior Director and leader of the Data Center Ethernet switch silicon business at Broadcom, where he defined and brought to market multiple generations of Tomahawk/Trident chips and helped build industry-wide ecosystems including 25G Ethernet and disaggregated whitebox networking.

Prior, he held roles in product management, chip architecture, and applications engineering across startup and public semiconductor companies. Rochan holds a B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto and an MBA from the Wharton School, and has 6 issued patents.

Manish Patel

Manish Patel is the visionary founder of Nava Ventures, a pioneering venture capital firm headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley. With a career spanning dozens of years at the forefront of technological innovation, Manish is renowned as a Silicon Valley Veteran with a knack for solving complex problems at the intersection of business, technology, and human experience.

Throughout his career, Manish has worn many hats – from operational maven and inventive trailblazer to astute venture capitalist. His deep-seated expertise in global business and product development, coupled with an unwavering passion for transformative technologies, positions him as a driving force behind Nava Ventures' success.

Prior to founding Nava Ventures, Manish held pivotal roles at Google and Highland Capital. At Google, he served as an early product leader, spearheading teams responsible for the design, development, and scalability of groundbreaking products such as Google Ads, GoogleTV, and Google Maps. Later, at Highland Capital, Manish played a key role in expanding the firm's footprint in California, further cementing his reputation as a strategic visionary in the venture capital landscape.  In 2021, Manish embarked on his entrepreneurial journey by establishing Nava Ventures. With a persistent focus on unique technology and experienced management teams, Nava focuses on early-stage investments across a diverse portfolio spanning AI technologies, data analytics, healthcare innovations, and financial services.

Beyond his professional pursuits, Manish's passion for knowledge sharing and mentorship is evident in his roles as an esteemed educator. For years, he has served as a dedicated instructor at the Stanford School of Engineering, nurturing the next generation of tech engineers and innovators. Additionally, his commitment to fostering entrepreneurship extends globally, as he proudly serves as a Fellow at the University of Toronto's Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) and is a Distinguished Fellow at IDEO and has more than a dozen patents.

Neeraj Kumar

As the Chief Data Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Neeraj leads a talented team of scientists and professionals in addressing critical challenges in energy, artificial intelligence, health, and biothreat sectors. With over 15 years of experience in quantitative research and data science, he specializes in developing innovative solutions and managing multidisciplinary teams focused on multimillion-dollar programs at the intersection of fundamental discovery and transformative AI-driven product development.

His expertise spans Applied Math, High-Performance Computing, Computational Chemistry and Biology, Health Science, and Medical Therapeutics, enabling his to guide his team in exploring new frontiers. He has a deep understanding and application of Generative AI, AI Safety and Trustworthiness, Natural Language Processing, Applied Mathematics, Software Engineering, Modeling and Simulations, Quantum Mechanics, Data Integration, Causal Inference/Reasoning, and Reinforcement Learning. These competencies are crucial in developing scalable AI/ML models and computing infrastructures that accelerate scientific discoveries, enhance computer-aided design, and refine autonomous decision-making.

Tony Carusone

Dr. Tony Chan Carusone has over 20 years of experience in teaching and researching integrated circuits and systems for high-speed connectivity across both industry and academia. Since 2022, he has served as the Chief Technology Officer at Alphawave Semi, and he has been a faculty member at the University of Toronto since earning his Ph.D. there in 2002. Dr. Carusone has authored over 100 publications, including 11 best paper awards at leading conferences for his work on chip-to-chip and optical communication, analog-to-digital conversion, and precision clock generation. He co-authored the latest editions of the renowned textbooks "Analog Integrated Circuit Design" and "Microelectronic Circuits," the latter being the best-selling engineering textbook of all time. An IEEE Fellow, Tony has also consulted for the semiconductor industry, collaborating with startups and major global tech companies for more than two decades.

Hira Dangol

Industry experience in AI/ML, engineering, architecture and executive roles in leading technology companies, service providers and Silicon Valley leading organizations. Currently focusing on innovation, disruption, and cutting-edge technologies through startups and technology-driven corporation in solving the pressing problems of industry and world.

Dr. Walden “Wally” Rhines

WALDEN C. RHINES is President & CEO of Cornami. He is also CEO Emeritus of Mentor, a Siemens business, focusing on external communications and customer relations. He was previously CEO of Mentor Graphics for 23 years and Chairman of the Board for 17 years. During his tenure at Mentor, revenue nearly quadrupled and market value of the company increased 10X.

Prior to joining Mentor Graphics, Dr. Rhines was Executive Vice President, Semiconductor Group, responsible for TI’s worldwide semiconductor business. During his 21 years at TI, he was President of the Data Systems Group and held numerous other semiconductor executive management positions.

Dr. Rhines has served on the boards of Cirrus Logic, QORVO, TriQuint Semiconductor, Global Logic and as Chairman of the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (five two-year terms) and is currently a director. He is also a board member of the Semiconductor Research Corporation and First Growth Children & Family Charities. He is a Lifetime Fellow of the IEEE and has served on the Board of Trustees of Lewis and Clark College, the National Advisory Board of the University of Michigan and Industrial Committees advising Stanford University and the University of Florida.

Dr. Rhines holds a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the University of Michigan, a Master of Science and PhD in materials science and engineering from Stanford University, a master of Business Administration from Southern Methodist University and Honorary Doctor of Technology degrees from the University of Florida and Nottingham Trent University.

Nikhil Sukhtankar

As Head of AI & Messaging Platforms org at PayPal, Nikhil leads Product Management & Conversational AI Design teams. Nikhil is responsible for defining the vision & strategy to bring advancements in AI, especially Generative AI & NLU/NLP to power intuitive & intelligent experiences for PayPal's Consumers & Small-Medium Business Merchants. He brings over two decades of experience in building and growing enterprise scale consumer products across technology start-ups, growth companies and S&P 500 large companies. In recent years, my focus has been on building enterprise-scale vertical Applied AI platforms that offer capabilities & services such as AI powered Chatbot, Voice / IVR applications, Semantic & Lexical Search, Agent Assist Solutions (Smart Replies, Summarization) etc within Consumer Wallet, Payments, SMB Merchants, Shopping / Rewards & Customer Success domains. Nikhil also is a Product Advisor to a handful of startups leaders and CEOs. Nikhil has a technical background with Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and has also earned an AI & ML certification from MIT.

Manoj Wadekar

Tom Sheffler

Tom earned his PhD from Carnegie Mellon in Computer Engineering with a focus on parallel computing architectures and prrogramming models.  His interest in high-performance computing took him to NASA Ames, and then to Rambus where he worked on accelerated memory interfaces for providing high bandwidth.  Following that, he co-founded the cloud video analytics company, Sensr.net, that applied scalable cloud computing to analyzing large streams of video data.  He later joined Roche to work on next-generation sequencing and scalable genomics analysis platforms.  Throughout his career, Tom has focused on the application of high performance computer systems to real world problems.

Mo Haghighi

Dr Mo Haghighi is a director of engineering/distinguished engineer at Discover Financial Services. His current focus is hybrid and multi-cloud strategy, application modernisation and automating application/workload migration across public and private clouds. Previously, he held various leadership positions as a program director at IBM, where he led Developer Ecosystem and Cloud Engineering teams in 27 countries across Europe, Middle East and Africa. Prior to IBM, he was a research scientist at Intel and an open source advocate at Sun Microsystems/Oracle. 

Mo obtained a PhD in computer science, and his primary areas of expertise are distributed and edge computing, cloud native, IoT and AI, with several publications and patents in those areas.

Mo is a regular keynote/speaker at major developer conferences including Devoxx, DevOpsCon, Java/Code One, Codemotion, DevRelCon, O’Reilly, The Next Web, DevNexus, IEEE/ACM, ODSC, AiWorld, CloudConf and Pycon. 

Vasudev Lal

Principal AI Research Scientist at Intel Labs where I lead the Multimodal Cognitive AI team. The Cognitive AI team develops AI systems that can synthesize concept-level understanding from multiple modalities: vision, language, video, etc. leveraging large-scale AI clusters powered by Intel AI HW (eg: Intel Gaudi-based AI clusters). Vasudev’s current research interests include self-supervised training at scale for continuous and high dimensional modalities like images, video and audio; mechanisms to go beyond statistical learning in today’s AI systems by incorporating counterfactual reasoning and principles from causality and exploring full 3D parallelism (tensor + parallel + data) for training and inferencing large AI models on Intel AI HW (eg: Intel Gaudi-based AI clusters in Intel Dev Cloud).  Vasudev obtained his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2012.

Phil Pokorny

Phil Pokorny is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for SGH / Penguin Solutions. He brings a wealth of engineering experience and customer insight to the design, development, support, and vision for our technology solutions.

Phil joined Penguin in February of 2001 as an engineer, and steadily progressed through the organization, taking on more responsibility and influencing the direction of key technology and design decisions. Prior to joining Penguin, he spent 14 years in various engineering and system administration roles with Cummins, Inc. and Cummins Electronics. At Cummins, Phil participated in the development of internal network standards, deployed and managed a multisite network of multiprotocol routers, and supported a diverse mix of office and engineering workers with a variety of server and desktop operating systems.

He has contributed code to Open Source projects, including the Linux kernel, lm_sensors, and LCDproc.

Phil graduated from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology with Bachelor of Science degrees in math and electrical engineering, with a second major in computer science. 

Syona Sarma

Syona Sarma is the Senior Director, Head of Hardware Systems at Cloudflare, where she runs the engineering team that builds Cloudflare's infrastructure. Since joining Cloudflare in 2022, she leads the design of the next generation servers that is foundational to all of Cloudflare's services, including compute and storage. More recently, she spearheaded the introduction of specialized accelerators designs on the edge, which enabled launch of Cloudflare's inference-as-a-service product, and is integral to the rapidly expanding suite of AI product offerings. Before coming to Cloudflare, Syona was at Intel, where she started her career in CPU design, and held several different roles in hardware, product and business development in Cloud Computing. 

She holds a Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Texas at Austin, and a business degree from University of Washington.

Albert Chen

Nitza Basoco

Drew Matter

Drew Matter leads Mikros Technologies, a designer and manufacturer of best-in-class direct liquid cold plates for AI/HPC, semiconductor testing, laser & optics, and power electronics.  Mikros provides leading microchannel thermal solutions in single-phase, 2-phase, DLC and immersion systems to leading companies around the world. 

Kalin Ovtcharov

Kalin leads GenAI solutions including Agentic RAG, and LLM based reference solutions to support and inform customer engagements at AMD. Previously he was the CEO & Co-Founder of Extropolis where he led a team developing cloud/mobile products for Agentic RAG, ASR, Stable Diffusion, and ChatBot applications. Prior to Extropolis, Kalin was a researcher and principal lead at Microsoft where he developed and launched configurable cloud-scale AI Inference solutions with Project Brainwave. 

Anku Mehrotra

Ankur is a GM at AWS Machine Learning and leads foundational SageMaker services such as SageMaker Studio, Notebooks, Training, Inference, Feature Store, MLOps, etc. Before SageMaker, he led AI services for personalization, forecasting, healthcare & life sciences, edge AI devices and SDKs, as well as thought leadership programs such as AWS DeepRacer. Ankur has worked at Amazon for over 15 years. Before joining AWS, he spent several years in Amazon’s Consumer organization, where he led the development of automated marketing/advertising systems, as well as automated pricing systems.

Barrett Woodside

In developer-oriented, marketing, and product roles, Barrett spent the past decade of his career working on AI inference, first at NVIDIA, running and profiling computer vision workloads on Jetson. After three years shoehorning models onto embedded systems powering drones, robots, and surveillance systems, he joined Google Cloud where he first-hand experienced the incredible power of Transformer models running accurate translation workloads on third-generation TPUs. He helped launch Cloud AutoML Vision with Fei-Fei Li and announced the TPU Pod's first entry into the MLPerf benchmark. Most recently, he spent two years at Scale AI working on product strategy and go-to-market for Scale Spellbook, its first LLM inference and fine tuning product. Today, he is Positron's co-founder and VP of Product.

Ankita Singh

RK Anand

RK Anand is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer (CPO) of Recogni, an artificial intelligence startup based in San Jose specializing in building multimodal GenAI inference systems for data centers.

At Recogni, RK spearheads the company’s product development and Go-To-Market strategies within the data center industry.

With an unwavering commitment to customer needs and value creation, RK and the Recogni team are striving to deliver the highest performing and most cost and energy efficient multi-modal GenAI systems to the market.

RK brings over 35 years of leadership experience in data center compute systems, networking, and silicon development. His distinguished career includes engineering roles at Sun Microsystems and serving as Executive Vice President and General Manager at Juniper Networks. As one of the earliest employees at Juniper, RK played a pivotal role in the company’s growth from a startup to generating billions of dollars in revenue.

Tony Chan Carusone

Tony Chan Carusone was appointed Chief Technology Officer in January 2022.  Tony has been a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto since 2001.  He has well over 100 publications, including 8 award-winning best papers, focused on integrated circuits for digital communication.  Tony has served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society and on the Technical Program Committees of world’s leading circuits conferences.  He co-authored the classic textbooks “Analog Integrated Circuit Design” and “Microelectronic Circuits” and he is a Fellow of the IEEE.  Tony has also been a consultant to the semiconductor industry for over 20 years, working with both startups and some of the largest technology companies in the world.

Tony holds a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto.

John Wei

John Wei is a venture investment director at Applied Ventures. He focuses on a range of deep tech areas and industry verticals, including advanced materials, semiconductor manufacturing and industrial & enterprise software. He also manages Applied Ventures’ investment activities in the Greater China region.

Prior to joining Applied, John was a key member of the SABIC Ventures investment team, where he led multiple investments in advanced materials, energy, sustainability, manufacturing and agriculture space in North America, Europe and Greater China.

Earlier in his career, John held various commercial and technical roles at The Linde Group and General Electric with experiences mostly in the petrochemical, power generation, alternative energy and oil & gas industries.

John has a Bachelor degree from Tsinghua University and a PhD from Rutgers University, both in Chemical Engineering. While at Rutgers, he also earned a Master's degree in Computer Science. In addition, John holds an MBA degree from UCLA with a focus in Finance and Entrepreneurship.

Jinwook Oh

Jinwook Oh is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Rebellions, an AI chip company based in South Korea. After earning his Ph.D. from KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), he joined the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, where he contributed to several AI chip R&D projects as a Chip Architect, Logic Designer, and Logic Power Lead. At Rebellions, he has overseen the development and launch of two AI chips, with a third, REBEL, in progress. Jinwook's technical leadership has been crucial in establishing Rebellions as a notable player in AI technology within just three and a half years.

Vinesh Sukumar

Steve Mills

Steve Mills is a Mechanical Engineer who has dedicated over 25 years to the development of IT hardware in the enterprise and hyperscale space.  After tours at DELL and Storspeed, he joined Meta in 2012 and is currently a Technical Lead for Data Center and Hardware Interfaces. He also serves on the Open Compute Project Steering Committee representing the Cooling Environments Project. He has 48 US patents and is an author of eight papers covering the packaging and cooling of electronics.

Alex Pham

Bijan Nowroozi

Bijan Nowroozi is Chief Technical Officer of The Open Compute Project Foundation and has more than 30 years of experience with hardware and software development, signal processing, networking, and research with technology companies. Prior to The OCP Bijan developed mission critical infrastructure and was on the leading-edge standards and technology development in multiple technology waves including edge computing, AI/ML, optical/photonics, quantum, RF, wireless, small cells, UAV’s, GIS, HPC, network security, energy and more. 

Jorn Smeets

Jorn Smeets is Managing Director – North America for PhotonDelta. Based in Silicon Valley, his mission is to accelerate the photonic chip industry by building collaborations between North America and the PhotonDelta ecosystem. Prior to his role in the USA, Jorn was Chief Marketing Officer and Board Member of PhotonDelta, where he was closely involved with the organisational strategy and overall business operations. Jorn has a background in business management, with extensive international working experience throughout various industries in China, Singapore, France, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Mitchelle Rasquinha

Eric Stotzer

Eric Stotzer is a Software Engineering Group Director at Cadence Design Systems, where he is responsible for the Neuroweave SDK and  Xtensa Neural Network Compiler (XNNC). Eric worked for 30 years at Texas Instruments developing system software tools for DSPs and MCUs.  Before coming to Cadence, he was at Mythic working on a neural network compiler for mixed-signal AI accelerators.  He is a coauthor of the book Using OpenMP - The Next Step: Affinity, Accelerators, Tasking, and SIMD, (MIT Press 2017). Eric holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Houston.