Charles Alpert
Charles (Chuck) Alpert is Cadence’s AI Fellow and drives cross-functional Agentic AI solutions throughout Cadence’s software stack. Prior to this, has lead various pioneering teams in digital implementation, including Global Routing, Clock Tree Synthesis, Genus Synthesis, and Cerebrus AI. Charles has published over 100 papers and received over 100 patents in the EDA space. He is a Cadence Master inventor. He has served as Deputy-Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design, chaired the IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference, and earned IEEE Fellow. He received a B.S. and B.A. Degree from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA.
John Solensky
John Solensky is the Vice President of Solutions Engineering at DataBank, where he leads a team focused on delivering colocation, cloud, and AI infrastructure solutions. With over 26 years of industry experience , John brings deep expertise in helping enterprises design and deploy secure, scalable, and high-performance platforms.
Since joining DataBank in 2020, John has been instrumental in advancing the company’s solutions engineering strategy, enabling customers to modernize IT environments and harness the power of AI-driven applications hosted in DataBank’s facilities. His leadership emphasizes collaboration, technical excellence, and a client-first approach, ensuring that organizations can rely on DataBank for mission-critical workloads and next-generation innovations.
Mike Alvaro
Michael Alvaro brings over 12 years of industry expertise spanning construction and mathematics to his role as Principal Solution Architect at DataBank, where he serves as technical lead for the data center sales team. Specializing in enterprise colocation solutions, Michael guides organizations through complex infrastructure requirements involving high-performance computing deployments.
As AI workloads rapidly scale across enterprises, Michael has become a trusted advisor for deployments demanding both high-density air cooling and advanced liquid cooling solutions. His unique construction background provides critical insight into physical infrastructure challenges, while his mathematical foundation enables precise optimization of power, cooling, and space efficiency. Michael’s approach centers on translating complex technical requirements into actionable deployment strategies, helping clients understand not just what’s possible, but what’s most cost-effective and operationally efficient.
Dave Driggers
Dave Driggers is the Chief Executive and Technical Officer and founder of Cirrascale Cloud Services. Mr. Driggers establishes and drives the vision and mission of the company while providing guidance for the development and implementation of the company’s specialized cloud-based, bare-metal server and accelerator partner for artificial intelligence development, training and inference solutions. As the previous founder of Racksaver, Verari Systems, and Cirrascale Corporation, he has an extensive background in hardware development serving various HPC and Artificial Intelligence vertical markets.
Miranda Gardiner
Miranda Gardiner is the Executive Director of iMasons Climate Accord (ICA) -- a groundbreaking non-profit, focused on emissions reductions and sustainability in data centers. Under her visionary guidance, it has emerged as the premier, collaborative arena for digital infrastructure’s commitment to achieving ambitious climate goals by uniting the largest and most influential companies (such as Google, Meta, AWS, and Microsoft) in driving transformative initiatives.
Miranda has grown the ICA to a robust network of member companies with a combined market cap of over $8T, with 30+% of them represented on the various technical committees to ensure a “by the members, for the members” approach. Centered around Power, Equipment, and Materials, ICA has published a Maturity Model and case studies to address critical topics.
She has presented at Climate Week NYC and Datacloud Global Congress, and contributed to publications like PERE’s 2024 Data Centers Report.
In 2020, she received LEED Fellow status from USGBC, and in 2025, was recognized in Data Centre Magazine's inaugural “Top 100 Women in Data Centers”.
Don McCasland
Don leads the Cloud Developer Relations team for AI Infrastructure at Google Cloud. A 20-year veteran in Developer Operations, he is focused on empowering the global developer community to build and scale the next generation of AI applications on Google's cutting-edge platforms.
Don McCasland
Don leads the Cloud Developer Relations team for AI Infrastructure at Google Cloud. A 20-year veteran in Developer Operations, he is focused on empowering the global developer community to build and scale the next generation of AI applications on Google's cutting-edge platforms.
Maxim Khomiakov
Maxim Khomiakov, PhD, is a Senior AI Engineer at Normal Computing, building reliable, high‑performance AI software for automating chip verification and design. He previously developed and deployed production-scale machine learning models within Apple Maps. Before that, he led data science efforts at Otovo and co‑founded Sunmapper (acquired by Otovo). Maxim holds a PhD in Machine Learning from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).