Speakers

As Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Adobe, Cynthia Stoddard oversees Adobe’s global Information Technology and Cloud Operations teams. In her leadership role, Cynthia spearheads a global strategy for delivering services and operations that form the mission-critical backbone for the company. She has 25-plus years of business experience and IT expertise leading large global organizations including Adobe, Netapp, Safeway, and APL Limited in supply chain, retail, and technology development. 

Mark Lohmeyer leads the Compute and AI Infrastructure business for Google Cloud. In this role, he is responsible for the Google Cloud Compute Engine, AI/ML infrastructure (Cloud TPU and GPU), Core ML services, block storage (Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk), and enterprise solutions (SAP on GCP, Google Cloud VMware Engine, etc.)
Mark’s background includes leadership roles in general management, product management, marketing, business development, and engineering management, across a wide range of core infrastructure technologies, including compute, storage, and networking.

Prior to joining Google, Mark was the SVP/GM of VMware’s Cloud Infrastructure Business Group. In this role, he led a large-scale, global organization, spanning engineering, operations,
product management, and product marketing for the VMware infrastructure portfolio across Private Clouds, Public Clouds, and Cloud Provider Partners / Sovereign Clouds.

Prior to VMware, Mark led the product team for Enterprise WAN and Routing at Cisco and was the GM for HA/DR and Storage solutions at Veritas Software. Earlier in his career, he worked on storage I/O hardware at Adaptec, and digital imaging research and hardware design at the Sarnoff Research Labs, and holds a patent based on this work.
Mark holds a Bachelors and Masters degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also served as the head teaching assistant for Computational Structures.

Dr. Anirudh Devgan is President and CEO of Cadence and is a member of the Board of Directors. Prior to becoming CEO in 2021, he was President of Cadence, before which he served as Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Digital & Signoff and System Verification groups. Under his leadership, Cadence has significantly grown its computational software and hardware portfolio, expanded into adjacent and new markets, and achieved several years of record revenue growth. Prior to joining Cadence in 2012, Dr. Devgan was Corporate VP and member of the executive staff at Magma Design Automation and earlier held management and technical roles at IBM.

Dr. Devgan is widely recognized as one of the leading authorities in electronic design automation (EDA) and successfully pioneered the application of massively parallel and distributed architectures to create several industry firsts and most impactful products in the areas of SPICE simulation, library characterization, place and route, static timing, power, and electromagnetics, among several others. He also drove the first common compiler architecture for emulation and prototyping platforms.

Dr. Devgan is an IEEE Fellow, member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), has written numerous research papers, and holds 27 US patents. He has won several awards, including the prestigious Phil Kaufman Award for his extensive contributions to EDA as well as the IBM Corporate Award and IEEE McCalla Award. Dr. Devgan serves on the boards of the Global Semiconductor Alliance and the Electronic System Design Alliance.

Dr. Devgan received a Bachelor of Technology degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and MS and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

David Glick serves as the senior vice president of Walmart’s Enterprise Business Services. He leads enterprise systems, including People Technology Modernization, Finance Tech, Associate Digital Experience (ADE) and Shared Services, that enable Walmart to spend smartly, act digitally and build trust with associates and shareholders. 

Before joining Walmart, David served as the chief technology officer for Flexe, a logistics and supply chain technology provider. There, he was responsible for building the foundational technology that allows for an open logistics network to optimize the delivery of goods. Prior to that, he was vice president of fulfillment and logistics tech for Amazon, where he was responsible for all the technology inside the walls of Amazon’s fulfillment centers, as well as the founding tech vice president of Amazon Logistics. 

David has over 20 years of experience in enterprise tech, product development, system architecture and logistics and fulfillment tech. 

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of South Carolina, Chapel Hill. 

Berta Rodriguez Hervas is the Chief AI and Analytics officer at Pfizer and serves as co-chair of Pfizer’s AI Council. Berta has an extensive background in AI, machine learning and analytics, with a track-record of quickly developing AI solutions and delivering them at scale in large global organizations. Until recently, Berta was Vice President of Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms and Machine Learning Operation at Stellantis, a global automotive company, designing and implementing the strategy for the next generation of autonomous vehicles. Prior to that, she held key program and product development roles at NVIDIA, Tesla, and Mercedes-Benz.

Barry Cooks is a global enterprise technology veteran with 25 years of experience leading teams in cloud computing, hardware design, application microservices, artificial intelligence, and more. As Vice President of Technology at Amazon, he is responsible for compute abstractions (containers, serverless, VMware, micro-VMs), quantum experimentation, high performance computing, and AI training. He oversees key AWS services including AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Container Service, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, and Amazon SageMaker. Barry also leads responsible AI initiatives across AWS, promoting the safe and ethical development of AI as a force for good. Prior to joining Amazon in 2022, Barry served as CTO at DigitalOcean, where he guided the organization through its successful IPO. His career also includes leadership roles at VMware and Sun Microsystems. Barry holds a BS in Computer Science from Purdue University and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Oregon.

Alan Rosa is the SVP, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and Head of Infrastructure and Operations at CVS Health .  The 3,500 colleagues and contractors in his organization are responsible for delivering services and experiences related to Digital Workplace, Contact Center, Infrastructure, Cloud and Technical Operations across all CVS lines of business.  In addition, Alan is the appointed CISO for the company responsible for health and integrity of the Cybersecurity program, GRC/Risk initiatives and Privacy Engineering.

Prior to joining CVS Health, Alan was the CISO and head of IT for Twitter where he was responsible for the Security program as well as all aspects of the Information Technology organization.  Alan has over 25 years of experience driving the development and evolution of enterprises technologies and teams for large multinational brands while building products and services that protect assets while avoiding risks.  He has held global leadership roles for companies such as Disney, MSG, General Electric and Quest Diagnostics. 

An award winning technology leader, Alan was named to the Top 100 of HITEC (Hispanic IT Executive Council), and the ComputerWorld Premier 100. Alan has served on various technical advisory boards and counsels including those for Dell, EMC, Cisco and VMware. 

Alan holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Florida, and Masters degrees from Columbia University and Seton Hall.  He also attended the Rutgers University College of Law. In addition he holds technical designations in the areas of Security, Networking, and Privacy.  He is a veteran of the US Navy having proudly served in the Submarine service. 

To learn more about Alan, follow him on LinkedIn

Sam Hamilton leads the Data, Analytics, ML, AI, and GenAI Platform teams, which delivers secure, high-quality and easy-to-use Visa core data assets as a service together with reliable and scalable platforms as services to enable Visa and its partners to rapidly and efficiently innovate data and AI-driven business products and services to lead the digital payment industry.

Laura was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Cologix in 2022 after serving as the company’s President and Chief Revenue Officer since 2018. Laura has over 25 years of experience in cloud and technology global leadership focused on GTM strategy, revenue growth, global customer success, sales and account management, and revenue and client relationship management.  Laura was EVP and Chief Customer Officer at Equinix, and prior she spent nine years at VMware, overseeing the Cloud Services business as co-General Manager and Vice President. Laura held global IT and technical support teams for Jeppesen, a Boeing Company, and served various technical and global leadership positions at Lockheed Martin.  Laura is also on the board of Digital Edge DC. Laura holds an MBA in Information Systems from Regis University and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA) in Marketing from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she played collegiate tennis.

Mark Kidd is an executive vice president and general manager of the Iron Mountain Data Centers and Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) business units. Mark has led the data center organization since its inception in 2013 and additionally took over the ALM organization in early 2023. Mark is responsible for driving growth across the data centers and ALM platforms, including setting strategic direction, leading commercial efforts, and developing expansion opportunities. Prior to his current role, Mark was senior vice president of Enterprise Strategy where he worked alongside the executive team to shape the overall company strategy, directed various internal consulting projects to enhance business unit planning, and managed the Office of the CEO. Over his 19-year tenure with Iron Mountain, Mark has held four additional positions in strategic planning, portfolio management, capital investments, and financial analysis. Prior to joining Iron Mountain, Mark worked at Thomas Weisel Partners, a boutique investment banking firm. Mark graduated with his A.B. in economics from Harvard University.

Mohamed Awad leads the infrastructure line of business at Arm where he is responsible for leveraging Neoverse’s class-leading performance per watt to accelerate Arm’s growth across Cloud, HPC, 5G, and the Edge. Previously, Mohamed led Arm’s IoT line of business.

Prior to joining Arm, Mohamed spent 10 years in various leadership roles at Broadcom, including establishing the Mixed Signal Asic Products division and building its security and mobile payments business. Before Broadcom, Mohamed served in various leadership roles at Ember Corporation, Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks, and Avici Systems.

Mohamed has been named inventor or co-inventor on multiple patents throughout his career and holds a BS in Computer Science, from the University of Massachusetts.

Ram Velaga is Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Core Switching Group at  Broadcom, responsible for the company’s extensive Ethernet switch portfolio serving broad markets including the service provider, data center and enterprise segments. Prior to joining Broadcom in 2012, he served in a variety of product management roles at Cisco Systems, including Vice President of Product Management for the Data Center Technology Group. Mr. Velaga earned an M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Penn State University and an M.B.A. from Cornell University. Mr. Velaga holds patents in communications and virtual infrastructure.

After years of working at the intersection of tech and real estate development, Chris Crosby set out in 2011 to take a new approach to data center development. His vision was to focus on greenfield projects and deliver customizable, scalable, sustainable, and low-cost data centers in an expedited time frame.

A testament to Chris’ bold vision and a solid culture centered around four core convictions from which the company has never wavered, Compass has grown at a remarkable rate. From completing its first 1.2 MW data center in 2012 to serving the campus-level hyperscale market with developments underway across the globe less than a decade later, Compass’s success is the result of Chris’ vision, a strong foundation, and a talented team of innovative thinkers.    

In 2023, Compass was recognized as one of Inc. Magazine’s 5000 fastest-growing companies. In the same year, Chris was named EY’s southwest area Entrepreneur of The Year®. Compass continues to drive industry-leading sustainability practices under Chris’ leadership, creating a lasting impact on the data center industry. 

Ankur Gupta is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Digital Design Creation at Siemens EDA. This includes Test, Embedded Analytics, Digital IC design, Power Optimization, and Power Integrity Analysis. Formerly he was head of Product Management and Applications at Ansys, Semiconductor and Head of Applications Engineering for Digital Implementation & Signoff at Cadence Design Systems.

Ankur has 20+ years of experience in EDA, working on some of the industry’s most innovative Test, Digital Design, Implementation and Signoff products. He holds a Master’s Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, from Iowa State University.

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.

David co-founded and is the Head of MLPerf for MLCommons, the world leader in building benchmarks for AI. MLCommons is an open engineering consortium with a mission to make AI better for everyone through benchmarks and data. The foundation for MLCommons began with the MLPerf benchmarks in 2018, which rapidly scaled as a set of industry metrics to measure machine learning performance and promote transparency of machine learning techniques. In collaboration with its 125+ members, global technology providers, academics, and researchers, MLCommons is focused on collaborative engineering work that builds tools for the entire AI industry through benchmarks and metrics, public datasets, and measurements for AI Safety. Our software projects are generally available under the Apache 2.0 license and our datasets generally use CC-BY 4.0.

John Overton is the CEO of Kove IO, Inc. In the late 1980s, while at the Open Software Foundation, Dr. Overton wrote software that went on to be used by approximately two thirds of the world’s workstation market. In the 1990s, he co-invented and patented technology utilizing distributed hash tables for locality management, now widely used in storage, database, and numerous other markets. In the 2000s, he led development of the first truly capable Software-Defined Memory offering, Kove:SDM™. Kove:SDM™ enables new Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities, while also reducing power by up to 50%. Dr. Overton has more than 65 issued patents world-wide and has peer-reviewed publications across numerous academic disciplines. He holds post-graduate and doctoral degrees from Harvard and the University of Chicago.

Atif is the former Chief Digital Officer at McDonald’s and past President at Volvo and MGM Resorts. He’s now the founder of Ritual, an AI-powered platform helping organizations scale structured, intelligent decision-making. 

With a track record of leading digital transformation at the highest level, Atif brings valuable insight into how large enterprises adopt and scale AI effectively.

Atif has created over 500 billion dollars in enterprise value and advises cutting-edge companies like SpaceX and Anthropic. 

Barak Turovsky is the Chief AI Officer at General Motors. He is an operating advisor and product and business leader with over 25 years of experience in artificial intelligence (Generative AI/Large Language Models, Computer Vision, etc), Ads & Commerce, Cloud applications, and Enterprise Software.

Prior to General Motors, Barak was VP of AI at Cisco, Chief Product Officer at Trax Retail, and Director & Head of Product for Languages AI at Google.

Arun Nandi is a visionary keynote speaker, advisor and thought leader in AI. His professional experience driving impact for larger enterprises from Data, Analytics & Insights initiatives spans close to 20 years.

He was presented the Top 100 Influential AI & Analytics leaders award, the Top 40 AI Leaders under 40 award and LinkedIn Top Voice. He currently works as Chief Data & AI Officer at Carrier Global Corp, a Fortune 200 company. He previous was Head of Data & Analytics at Unilever. He has built AI and analytics practices from the ground up on multiple occasions.

Arun serves and consults with advisory boards and investment firms recognized as a credible voice in the industry. He was esteemed jury member at prestigious events such as The Drum Awards and LVMH’s Dare Competition. He has delivered keynote addresses at many events with other experts including Andre Ng (Deep Learning), Julien Simon (Hugging Face).

Arun works with numerous service providers within the AI, data and Analytics ecosystem and shapes the strategy for his enterprise and the industry at large.

Arun is based in New York, NY, USA. He is a keen traveler, foodie and adventure motorcyclist.

Zeljka Lemaster is Head of AI Innovation and Incubation Hub US (AI3) at Ericsson. Her journey with artificial intelligence began during her Master's thesis, and she has been deeply involved in the field ever since. Together with her team, Zeljka actively collaborates within the Silicon Valley ecosystem, working on cutting-edge AI methodologies and solutions to integrate them into Ericsson's portfolio of products and services.

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.

Milind Naphade, SVP, Technology, leads the AI Foundations team at Capital One. In this capacity, Milind partners with product, tech, and business leaders to advance AI efforts, such as generative AI, at Capital One.

Prior to joining Capital One, Milind was the Chief Technology Officer of Metropolis at NVIDIA where he led the technology and innovation strategy and execution for NVIDIA’s Metropolis platform and product offerings. Prior to joining NVIDIA, Milind held executive and leadership roles at Cisco and IBM Research. As the Director of the cognitive systems organization at Cisco, he built the organization that focused on machine learning, natural language processing and AI. In his 14 years at IBM Research, Milind led several company-wide strategic AI initiatives in multimedia analytics and smarter planet solutions.

Ahmed Menshawy is the Vice President of AI Engineering at Mastercard. In this role, he leads the AI Engineering team, driving the development and commercialization of AI products that deliver business value across the organization. His work focuses on enabling Mastercard to harness the power of AI to solve complex problems, optimize operations, and enhance customer experiences. Ahmed collaborates with cross-functional teams to bring innovative AI solutions from concept to market, ensuring they align with Mastercard’s strategic objectives

An accomplished author and recognized contributor to the AI community, Ahmed has co-authored Deep Learning with TensorFlow and written Deep Learning by Example. His most recent book, Graph Learning for the Enterprise, published by O’Reilly, provides practical insights into efficiently training and deploying graph learning pipelines at scale

At Salesforce, Hitesh is responsible for the end-to-end architecture of platforms delivered to financial services and insurance clients globally. His focus is on working with key strategic customers to align Salesforce implementations with their business goals, particularly around the conjunction of Data+AI and CRM. This involves collaborating with retail and commercial banking, payments, wealth management, investment banking, insurance, and capital markets to influence product roadmaps and shape the future of technology in these industries. A significant part of Hitesh's role includes facilitating discussions with CTOs, CIOs, CDOs, and Chief Architects to: •⁠ ⁠Analyze current architectures and design target states. •⁠ ⁠Optimize Salesforce technologies for customer needs. •⁠ ⁠Integrate and Interoperate with Salesforce platforms within broader ecosystems. Being the executive sponsors for the customers, I play a key role in influencing product development within Salesforce by advocating for customer-driven innovations. 

Hitesh oversees end-to-end platform and solution architecture for global financial services and insurance clients. He specializes in aligning Salesforce solutions with strategic business objectives, particularly at the intersection of Data+AI and CRM. By collaborating with retail and commercial banking, payments, wealth management, investment banking, insurance, and capital markets, Hitesh helps influence product roadmaps and shape the future of technology in these industries.

A key part of his role involves engaging CTOs, CIOs, CDOs, and Chief Architects to analyze current architectures, design target states, and optimize Salesforce within broader ecosystems. As an executive sponsor, Hitesh champions customer-driven innovation, ensuring product development meets evolving industry needs.

Eliana Stefani, PhD is a Staff Autonomy & AI Research Engineer at Lockheed Martin, with expertise in autonomous systems, AI, and robotics. She has experience architecting solutions to complex problems, leading teams across engineering disciplines, and deploying artificially intelligent systems to the edge. 
 
As Principal Investigator, she architected the autonomy stack and developed novel autonomous driving software for the Lunar Terrain Vehicle, enabling a rover to navigate dynamic obstacles while traversing unmapped environments; garnering interest from additional customers. 
 
As Program Manager and later Chief Engineer, she architected system design, led a multi-disciplinary engineering team from research concept to successful test events, guided the program to a contract win, and interfaced with customers and stakeholders. 
 
Dr. Stefani's strong track record of delivering high-impact results and driving program success has been recognized with multiple awards from within Lockheed Martin. She has presented at conferences including NVIDIA's GTC-DC and Amazon's re:MARS. 

Chandra Kapireddy is joining our leadership team as the Head of Analytics, AI/ML, and Gen AI. Chandra brings over 27 years of experience building and leading world-class data, analytics, and artificial intelligence teams. Recognized for his expertise in change leadership, strategy and execution, team building, and delivering results, Chandra has an impressive track record of innovative solutions and driving substantial business growth within the financial services sector.

Chandra has held key leadership positions at some of the industry’s leading companies, including JP Morgan Chase, Capital One, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Oracle, and AWS. Most recently, he served as Managing Director and Head of AI/ML Products for JPMorgan Chase. Chandra was also a member of JP Morgan Chase’s AI executive council, where he played a pivotal role in shaping the strategy, products, controls, and governance across the company. His visionary leadership has driven innovations in cloud computing, data analytics, and AI/ML earning him numerous awards.

Chandra’s extensive experience and enthusiasm for cutting-edge technologies will provide powerful leadership in a critical area of our technology future.   Please join us in welcoming Chandra to the Enterprise Data & Analytics leadership team.

A.K. Karan is the VP of advanced engineering & innovation at Baxter International, a leading medical device supplier. Karan joined Baxter in 2021 and currently leads the strategy for the company’s automation, digital-transformation, and operational-excellence processes. Prior to joining Baxter, Karan held a variety of leadership roles spanning engineering, operations and digital transformation.    

Abhijeet Gulati is the Head of AI & Senior Director of Engineering at Mitchell’s Auto Physical Damage (APD) business unit. Abhijeet is an accomplished technologist with over two decades of experience in the semiconductor, wireless, software & technology industry, focusing on AI, Machine Learning, NLP, Generative AI and SaaS solutions. He is a driven Artificial Intelligence, Advanced Analytics and business intelligence leader.

As the Head of AI at Mitchell International, Abhijeet has spent the past 5 years improving InsureTech inefficiencies, minimize decision biases, developed proprietary, differentiated enterprise scale AI products and an intelligent open platform that democratizes adoption of AI in enterprise business workflows. Abhijeet has extensive experience directing large-scale initiatives involving R&D, business & product strategy, operations, and advanced video, image and data analytics. Abhijeet has authored several patents on the application of AI in InsureTech industry. Abhijeet sits on the board of several AI standards, Ethical & Responsible AI committees.

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.

Mike Bahr joined DRW Holdings in 2013 and has built co-locations and stand-alone data centers for trading firms all over the world. Mike is also in charge of all MEP designs for all company offices globally. Mike also is co-founder of a start-up, Co-Low.com, a true subscription based colocation/data center finder for all IT needs. Mike lives in Crown Point, IN with his wife Colleen and his four children.

Dr. Rohith Vangalla is a Senior IEEE Member, AI Researcher, and Lead Software Engineer at Optum Technologies, specializing in AI-driven automation, cybersecurity, and enterprise AI infrastructure. With over ten years of experience, he has pioneered AI solutions in healthcare, digital marketing, and aviation, publishing impactful research that has transformed industry practices. At Optum, he has been instrumental in developing AI-driven chatbots, secure automation frameworks, and scalable AI solutions that enhance efficiency, compliance, and real-time decision-making. As a scholar, reviewer, and judge for major AI conferences, Dr. Vangalla continues to shape the future of AI infrastructure, privacy-first systems, and responsible AI development.

Daniel Wu is an accomplished technical leader with over 20 years of expertise in software engineering, AI/ML, and team development. With a diverse career spanning technology, education, finance, and healthcare, he is credited for establishing high-performing AI teams, pioneering point-of-care expert systems, co-founding a successful online personal finance marketplace, and leading the development of an innovative online real estate brokerage platform. Passionate about technology democratization and ethical AI practices, Daniel actively promotes these principles through involvement in computer science and AI/ML education programs. A sought-after speaker, he shares insights and experiences at international conferences and corporate events. Daniel holds a computer science degree from Stanford University.

Mike is the Head of AI/ML & Advanced Analytics at the Children’s National Hospital in Washington DC. At Children’s he leads the team responsible for developing, monitoring, and maintaining custom AI/ML applications in addition to driving AI governance and upskilling initiatives. He’s spent his entire career in the healthcare industry emphasizing AI and advanced analytics. His prior roles include leadership roles at Monogram Health, Exact Sciences, and Elevance.

Jacey leads AI, Data Science and Advanced Analytics for Pella Corporation. Pella Corporation, based in the U.S, is one of North America’s largest manufacturers of premium windows and doors. Jacey’s current focus is on expanding the footprint of AI, Data Science and Advanced Analytics at Pella Corporation, guiding the organization to realize the value promised in this space. Jacey is a storyteller who bridges the gap between the possible and the practical, ushering organizations along their journey to become data driven. Jacey holds master’s degrees from Iowa State University in business and data science. He carries strong advanced analytics experience across many industries including manufacturing, e-commerce, energy, financial services and real estate.

David Hinkler brings over three decades of comprehensive manufacturing expertise to the table. His career spans 17 years in Operational Technology (including industrial controls, automation systems, manufacturing execution systems, and quality systems) complemented by 16 years in Information Technology (covering ERP implementations, IT/OT integrations, security, and advanced analytics).

With leadership experience across multiple industries – from Life Sciences (15 years) and Food & Beverage (8 years) to Automotive (5 years) and Chemical (4 years) – David has developed exceptional depth of knowledge in industrial controls, data integration, manufacturing execution systems, quality management, and security implementations.

As a recognized industry expert, David has contributed to numerous technical committees and publications, including IEC 62443, ISA-95, BioPhorum, and MESA Smart Manufacturing, establishing himself as a thought leader in manufacturing technology integration and digital transformation.

Shreya Singhal works in Generative AI Research & Development at Aristocrat Gaming and is a Graduate Research Assistant at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work spans large language models (LLMs), reinforcement learning, and optimization for scalable and interpretable AI systems.

Shreya has hands-on experience fine-tuning open-source models like Gemma 2B for under-resourced languages, deploying compressed generative models in low-resource environments, and implementing bias and fairness evaluation pipelines using interpretable subspace analysis. She has previously worked at Dell Technologies, Charles Schwab, Deloitte, and Accenture, contributing to AI-powered solutions across gaming, finance, and enterprise automation.

Her current research focuses on efficient LLM training and evaluation pipelines, fairness-aware model design, and bringing generative AI to edge and enterprise use cases. She is passionate about making AI more inclusive, scalable, and grounded in real-world constraints.

Sakshi Naik is an AI Consultant at Walgreens Boots Alliance, where she leads the development of ethical and impactful AI solutions in healthcare. With a Master’s in Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology and a Bachelor’s in IT Engineering from Mumbai University, she brings deep technical expertise across data science, machine learning, and AI infrastructure.

Sakshi is also a recognized voice in AI policy. She has advised U.S. Senators and Members of the House of Representatives on the future of responsible AI and serves as Secretary of the IEEE Connecticut Section. As a member of the IEEE AI Policy Committee (AIPC), she actively contributes to shaping national and global frameworks for trustworthy AI.

Richard Ho is Head of Hardware at OpenAI working to co-optimize ML models and the massive compute hardware they run on. Richard was one of the early engineers working on Google TPUs. Before Google, Richard was part of the D. E. Shaw Research team that built the Anton molecular dynamics simulation supercomputer. Richard started his career as co-founder and Chief Architect of 0-In Design Automation, a pioneer in verification tools for chip design (acquired by Mentor Graphics/Siemens). Richard has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and M.Eng, B.Sc. from University of Manchester, UK.

Apala Guha is Principal AI Architect at Microsoft. In her current role, she studies AI model architectures and analyzes their behavior and performance on GPUs. With these insights, she co-designs SoCs, systems and compilers for Azure AI. In the past, she was part of AI hardware development at Tenstorrent and Lightmatter. She has a PhD in Computer Engineering from University of Virginia and has held several academic research positions on accelerator compilers.

Chris Sharp has over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, with an extensive background in developing technology strategies in global markets. He has a deep knowledge of the data center sector and is well positioned to expand technical innovation at Digital Realty.

Most recently, he was responsible for cloud innovation at Equinix, where he led the development of innovative cloud services solutions and developed new capabilities enabling next-generation, high-performance exchange, and interconnection solutions, facilitating broad commercial adoption of cloud computing on a global basis.

Previously, Chris held leadership positions at top network and colocation providers, including Qwest Communications, MCI/Verizon Business and Reliance Globalcom.

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.

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.

Priya Kesavan is an AI Strategy Principal at Microsoft. In her current role, she leads the development of long-term strategies and roadmaps for Microsoft's in-house AI hardware systems. In the past, Priya held several leadership positions in product management for SoC and systems development at Intel and Cisco. Driven by a passion for harnessing AI to address complex real-world challenges and improve user experiences, she is a strong advocate for "AI for good." Priya is also committed to empowering women in technology and AI, spearheading initiatives to foster their growth and advancement. She holds a degree in Computer Engineering from Madras University.

A technical leader, Marc has led the design and construction of large-scale data center projects across the United States as well as in the Middle East and Asia. His projects have included greenfield, brownfield, build to suite, and adaptive reuse projects for colocation, corporate, and hyperscale data center customers.

Before joining CleanArc, Marc held leadership positions at leading data center consultancy firms Orchard Green Associates, Smith Engineering, PLLC and Syska Hennessy Group. Marc takes pride in understanding the technical and cultural nuances required for project execution across geographies. At CleanArc, he takes a collaborative and comprehensive approach to project management and execution, bridging the gaps between infrastructure and design/construction teams as CleanArc works to deliver best-in-class reliability, sustainability, supply chain management and capital efficiency during the entire data center life cycle. Marc holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology and an MS in Real Estate from the NYU Shack Institute of Real Estate.

Rashmi Gopinath is a General Partner at B Capital Group where she leads the fund’s enterprise software practice in cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, devops, and AI/ML sectors. She brings over two decades of experience investing and operating in cutting-edge enterprise technologies. She led B Capital’s investments in over 24 companies such as DataRobot, FalconX, Clari, Phenom People, Synack, Innovaccer, Labelbox, Fabric, 6Sense, Highspot, Pendo, Starburst, OwnBackup, Figment, Perimeter81, Zesty, among others.

Rashmi was previously a Managing Director at M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, where she led investments globally in enterprise software and sat on several boards including Synack, Innovaccer, Contrast Security, Frame, UnravelData, Incorta, among others.

Prior to M12, Rashmi was an Investment Director with Intel Capital where she was involved in the firm’s investments in startups including MongoDB (Nasdaq: MDB), ForeScout (Nasdaq: FSCT), Maginatics (acq. by EMC), BlueData (acq. by HPE), among others. Rashmi held operating roles at high-growth startups such as BlueData (acq. by HPE) and Couchbase (Nasdaq: BASE) where she led global business development, product and marketing roles. She began her career in engineering and product roles at Oracle and GE Healthcare. She earned an M.B.A. from Northwestern University, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Mumbai in India.

As Head of Applied AI Research at Amazon Dash Cart, Sean Ma leads the AIML science organization (multiple science and software teams) advancing computer vision, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Sean has a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering focusing on image and video understanding using AI from the University of Illinois, and also holds an innovation leadership certification from MIT, plus a certification of software program/project management and certification for Scrum Product Owner.

Sean has built, led, and managed globally distributed teams of researchers and engineers, delivered proof-of-concepts and production solutions, and won multiple awards and patents. 

 Brittany Miller is the Global Senior Vice President of Infrastructure Development at NTT Global Data Centers, overseeing global construction, engineering and supply chain operations.

 With over 15 years of experience, she has led major infrastructure projects across the data center, cloud and semiconductor industries.

 Before joining NTT Global Data Centers, Brittany held leadership roles at Microsoft and Intel, where she managed large-scale construction programs, supply chain operations and strategic infrastructure development.

Raul Martynek joined DataBank in 2017 as the Chief Executive Officer. In this role, he defines the strategic direction of the company and its operations. Raul is a 20+ year veteran in the telecom and Internet Infrastructure sector. He most recently served as a Senior Advisor for Digital Bridge Holdings LLC. Prior to Digital Bridge, he served as CEO for New Jersey-based data center and managed services operator Net Access, LLC. Net Access was acquired in 2015 by Denver-based data center operator Cologix. 5Prior to Net Access, he was the CEO of Voxel dot Net, Inc., a global managed hosting and cloud company, which was acquired by Internap Network Services Corp. in 2012. Mr. Martynek also served as the Chief Restructuring Officer of Smart Telecom, a Dublin, Ireland-based fiber carrier which was acquired by Digiweb in 2009.

Before that he evaluated investment opportunities in the telecommunications and Internet sector as a Senior Advisor at Plainfield Asset Management, a $4B hedge fund. Prior to Plainfield, Mr. Martynek spent 13 years with telecom and Internet provider InfoHighway Communications Corp; first as Chief Operating Officer of Eureka Networks and then as President and CEO of InfoHighway. InfoHighway was acquired by Broadview Networks in 2007. Mr. Martynek earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Binghamton University and received a Master Degree in International Affairs from Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.

Karen oversees the planning and execution large scale data center projects for AREP’s PowerHouse Data Center platform.

Karen brings almost two decades of design, sustainability, and project management experience in the mission-critical sector, having successfully managed complex sustainable data center design and engineering projects, including campus developments, hyperscale built-to-suits, and major infrastructure renovations. As a sustainability SME, Karen was recently honored by the Green Building Initiative (GBI) as its 2024 Member of the Year for her exceptional dedication to improving the built environment.

Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha is an IBM Fellow and IBM Chief Scientist for Brain-inspired Computers.  He is a cognitive computing pioneer who envisioned and now leads a highly successful effort to develop brain-inspired computers.  The groundbreaking project is multi-disciplinary, multi-national, multi-institutional and has had worldwide scientific impact.  It has been funded to the tune of >$200M by DARPA, DOD, DOE, and Commercial contracts.  Its resulting revolutionary computing architecture and ecosystem break from the prevailing von Neumann paradigm and constitute a foundation for new classes of ultra-low-power, compact, real-time, multi-modal sensorimotor information technology systems.

Dr. Modha has made significant contributions to IBM businesses via innovations in caching mechanisms for storage controllers, clustering algorithms for services, and coding theory for disk drives.  His work has been featured in Economist, Science, New York Times, BBC, Discover, MIT Technology Report, Associated Press, Popular Mechanics, Communications of the ACM, Forbes, Fortune, and IEEE Spectrum amongst thousands of media mentions.  Author of over 80 papers and inventor of over 200 patents, he has been a recipient of ACM’s Gordon Bell Prize; Misha Mahowald Prize; R&D Magazine’s 2016 Scientist of the Year; USENIX/FAST Test of Time Award; Best Paper Awards at ASYNC and IDEMI; First Place, Science/NSF International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge; IIT Bombay Distinguished Alumnus Award; UCSD ECE Distinguished Alumnus Award; R&D 100 Award; and is a Fellow of IEEE and World Technology Network. In 2013 and 2014, he was named as Best of IBM.  TrueNorth and NorthPole have both been accepted into the Computer History Museum.  On their 40th Anniversary, EE Times named Dr. Modha amongst 10 Electronics Visionaries to Watch.

Dr. Modha received BTech from IIT Bombay in 1990 and PhD from UCSD in 1995. 

Ashwin Gumaste is an AI Architect at Microsoft. He specializes in building AI systems, scaling networks, and model estimation. Before joining Microsoft, Ashwin held key roles at Infinera, Cisco, and Fujitsu, as well as academic positions at IIT Bombay and MIT. Earlier in his career at IIT Bombay, he designed, developed, and successfully commercialized carrier Ethernet switch routers, earning India's highest science and technology honor, the Bhatnagar Prize. A distinguished fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences in India, Ashwin has made significant contributions to AI and network engineering. He has authored three books, published 215 peer-reviewed papers, and holds 28 granted patents.

François Sterin joined the Data4 Group in December 2022 as Chief Operating Officer (COO). He has over 20 years of in digital infrastructure, datacenters and network for hyperscalers and cloud providers.  A member of the executive committee, he oversees the group business operations. He also manages the CSR policy via the Data4Good program.

Phill has more than 25 years of experience identifying new opportunities for further growth of leading data center infrastructure, network architecture, and cloud solutions in the U.S. and abroad.

As Chief Innovation Officer at Aligned, Phill is responsible for the management of revenue generation and profitability objectives, as well as championing key innovation, technology, and sustainability strategies aimed at maximizing new business development.

Prior to joining Aligned, Phill served as Chief Innovation Officer at EdgeConneX, where he was instrumental in driving strategies focused on creating the next generation of network edge-based data centers for the digital content ecosystem. Throughout his career, Phill has also served in numerous senior executive-level positions at Virtacore, Alcatel-Lucent, Savvis (now CenturyLink Technology Solutions), and MCI (now Verizon Digital Media Services). He currently holds eight active technology patents and serves on the Board of Directors for Netrality Data Centers as well as the Clean Energy Buyers Association (CEBA) Advisory Board.

Ryan Mallory is President and COO at Flexential, and has 25+ years’ experience leading global infrastructure operations across network, platform, and customer-facing functions for top-tier data center providers.

At Flexential, Ryan leads day-to-day operations across all company functions—scaling the company’s national platform of 40+ data centers and a 100Gbps+ private network backbone to meet the demands of today’s high-density compute environments. Since joining in 2020, Ryan has helped advance the FlexAnywhere® platform, unifying colocation, interconnection, cloud, and managed services into a scalable solution for enterprises navigating AI, digital transformation, and compliance complexity.

Before Flexential, Ryan held leadership roles at Equinix, Digital Realty, XO Communications, SAVVIS, and UUNET.

Matt Pfile is the founder and CEO of Crane Data Centers Inc., a data center developer and operator with a strong commitment to sustainability, customer centricity, and innovation. He has over 25 years of experience in telecom engineering, critical infrastructure acquisition, corporate banking, management consulting, and commercial negotiations. Prior to Crane, he spent 12+ years at Google leading over $5B of global infrastructure acquisitions and led the entry of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) into Australia and Japan, data center site selection strategy, third-party data center leasing, utility interconnections, and land acquisitions across the Americas and Asia. He received a degree in finance from Georgetown University and an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis.

Tom spearheads EdgeCore’s understanding and adoption of emerging technologies with a current focus on the impacts and demands of AI on the data center ecosystem.  While interacting with a broad spectrum of technologists, industry thought leaders, and community stakeholders, Tom ensures that EdgeCore stays at the forefront of innovation, geographic expansion, and future trends in order to deliver on the company’s promise to provide safe, sustainable, and futureproof data center solutions to the world’s largest cloud and technology companies. Tom’s industry experience began in the post-dot com early 2000s period and stretches through the rise of enterprise wholesale colocation in the 2000s, through the rise of hyperscale cloud in the 2010s, and now generative AI driven world.

Prior to joining EdgeCore, Tom worked for Amazon Web Services, where he was accountable for strategy and execution for new and existing regions across EMEA, APAC, and the Americas, along with diligence and strategy for additional regions under evaluation. Prior to Amazon, Tom was co-practice leader of Cassidy Turley’s (now Cushman & Wakefield’s) Data Center Advisory Practice, focused on end-user representation and capital markets transactions. Tom previously worked at CoreSite Realty Corporation as Regional VP of Sales.

Tom holds a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard College, with honors.

I was drawn to Rambus to focus on cutting edge computing technologies. Throughout my 15+ year career, I’ve helped invent, create and develop means of driving and extending performance in both hardware and software solutions. At Rambus, we are solving challenges that are completely new to the industry and occur as a response to deployments that are highly sophisticated and advanced.

As an inventor, I find myself approaching a challenge like a room filled with 100,000 pieces of a puzzle where it is my job to figure out how they all go together – without knowing what it is supposed to look like in the end. For me, the job of finishing the puzzle is as enjoyable as the actual process of coming up with a new, innovative solution.

For example, RDRAM®, our first mainstream memory architecture, implemented in hundreds of millions of consumer, computing and networking products from leading electronics companies including Cisco, Dell, Hitachi, HP, Intel, etc. We did a lot of novel things that required inventiveness – we pushed the envelope and created state of the art performance without making actual changes to the infrastructure.

I’m excited about the new opportunities as computing is becoming more and more pervasive in our everyday lives. With a world full of data, my job and my fellow inventors’ job will be to stay curious, maintain an inquisitive approach and create solutions that are technologically superior and that seamlessly intertwine with our daily lives.

After an inspiring work day at Rambus, I enjoy spending time with my family, being outdoors, swimming, and reading.

Education

• Ph.D., Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
• M.S. Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
• Master of Engineering, Harvey Mudd College
• B.S. Engineering, Harvey Mudd College

Dave Lazovsky is the Co-founder and CEO of Celestial AI, the creators of the Photonic FabricTM. Celestial AI, founded in April 2020, has developed the optical interconnectivity technology platform for AI computing.

Prior to founding Celestial AI, Mr. Lazovsky was a Venture Partner at Khosla Ventures. He has 30 years of experience in the semiconductor industry and over two decades of experience building and leading successful start-ups. In 2004 Mr. Lazovsky founded Intermolecular, a semiconductor and clean energy R&D and Intellectual Property licensing company. He served as the company’s Chief Executive Officer, President and as a member of the board of directors from September 2004 through October 2014.

As President and CEO, Mr. Lazovsky led all aspects of the business through its lifecycle from early-stage start-up to public company. Intermolecular (IMI) went public on the NASDAQ in 2011. He currently has over 80 issued and pending U.S. patents.

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.

Sid Sheth is the co-founder and CEO of d-Matrix, the company changing the trajectory of commercially viable generative AI by introducing an entirely new computing paradigm designed from the ground-up for AI inference in modern datacenters.

Sid spent over two decades as a business and technical leader transforming startups into industry leaders and creating new categories of technology, taking them from innovations to commercialization. Before founding d-Matrix, Sid served as senior vice president & general manager for the Networking Business Unit at Inphi Corporation where he incubated and grew the group into a $1B+ business by focusing the business on the cloud and enterprise data center segment. Prior to Inphi, Sid was at NetLogic Microsystems (now Broadcom) and Intel where he ran marketing and worked in R&D for networking chips and processors.

Sid earned his MSEE from Purdue University, where he serves on the Electrical and Computer Engineering Advisory Board. He is a regularly featured speaker at industry tradeshows and conferences, is a published author at ISSCC and holds multiple patents.

Taeksang is a Corporate VP at Samsung Electronics where he is leading a team dedicated to pioneering cutting-edge technologies including CAMM, MRDIMM, CXL memory expander, fabric attached memory solution and processing near memory to meet the evolving demands of next-generation data-centric AI architecture. He has 20 years' professional experience in memory and sub-system architecture, interconnect protocols, system-on-chip design and collaborating with CSPs to enable heterogeneous computing infrastructure. Prior to joining Samsung Electronics, he worked at Rambus Inc., Micron Technology and SK hynix in lead architect roles for the emerging memory controllers and systems. 

Taeksang received his Ph.D. degree from KAIST, South Korea, in 2006. Dr. Song has authored and co-authored over 20 technical papers and holds over 50 U.S. patents.

Godwin Maben is a seasoned professional with an extensive 30-year experience in the semiconductor industry, specializing in low-power design and power optimization for System on Chip (SoC) architectures. Godwin has contributed to the development of SoCs for mobile, IoT, GPU, and networking applications, focusing on ARM and RISC-V based designs.

Godwin has a proven track record in developing the architecture of Power Management Integrated Circuits (PMIC) for mobile and IoT devices, and architecting mobile SoCs with advanced power structures, including power gating, Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), and Multi-Voltage (MV) techniques.

In addition to optimizing logic, system, and RTL architectures to reduce power for hundreds of blocks, Godwin has extensive experience in RTL coding, specifically targeting energy efficiency for hundreds of partitions. Skilled in developing custom cells to minimize glitches and has implemented algorithms within tools to optimize power consumption.

Godwin has developed comprehensive methodologies for implementing zero-pin retention flops from pre-RTL to silicon and has architected tools such as UPF Architect. Additionally, has created higher-level abstractions to Natural Language Processing (NLP) for various tools, including HDL, SDC, and UPF.

With expertise in designing low-power circuits and HDL coding with a focus on low power, Godwin excels in power architecture, PMIC design, and debugging power issues from simulation through emulation, synthesis, place, and route (P&R), and Engineering Change Order (ECO) processes. Dedicated to advancing low-power design techniques and methodologies, ensuring the development of energy-efficient and high-performance semiconductor solutions.

Andrew Sloss is VP of Technology at Vaire Computing. A founding engineer at Arm,  he played a central role in the design and deployment of 27 commercial compute systems and helped scale the company’s architecture to over 150 billion chips shipped globally. He is the author of one of the most widely referenced books on ARM system architecture and has led engineering teams across embedded, mobile, and datacenter domains. At Vaire, Andrew brings decades of silicon and systems design experience to bear on one of the hardest challenges in computing: reducing AI energy costs at scale.

Matthew Burns develops go-to-market strategies for Samtec’s Silicon-to-Silicon solutions. Over the course of 25 years, he has been a leader in design, applications engineering, technical sales and marketing in the telecommunications, medical and electronic components industries. He currently serves as Secretary at PICMG. Mr. Burns holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University.

Dudy is a qualified manager and technology expert, with more than 30 years of experience in the networking industry. As a senior AI networking expert, he partners closely with the product and engineering teams to shape DriveNets’ vision for AI Networking, helping to deliver the high performance of a proprietary solution with a standards-based Ethernet implementation that provides unrivaled performance. Previously, Dudy served as the VP of Product Marketing at Ceragon. He also served as a Director of Solutions Engineering at Alvarion Ltd. Dudy holds an M.Sc.-E.E degree from the Tel Aviv University.

Nalini is a recognized leader at Deloitte in AI & Data Practice, standing at the forefront of AI innovation and Strategy. With a distinct path of achievements, she delivered over 30 talks on generative AI, emphasizing its safe usage and business efficiencies for life sciences and tech companies. Nominated as top 100 women in AI for 2023, 2024, she currently serves as the California state ambassador for Women in AI. Beyond her professional prowess, Nalini is a wellness instructor, artist, and a podcast host.

Ankur Mehrotra is a GM at AWS Machine Learning and leads foundational SageMaker AI services such as SageMaker Studio, Notebooks, Training, Inference, Feature Store, MLOps, etc. Before SageMaker AI, 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.

Krishna is founder and CEO of SiMa.ai™, a machine learning company enabling effortless ML for the Embedded Edge.

Previously, he was the COO of Groq, a machine learning startup. He was with Xilinx for 18 years, where he was Senior Vice President and GM of Xilinx’s overall business prior to his most recent role as Executive Vice President, Global Sales. Prior to Xilinx, he held various engineering and business roles at Altera Corporation and Cypress Semiconductor. He holds 25+ international patents. He has also served on the board of directors of public and private companies.

Puneet Kumar, CEO and co-founder of Rivos Inc., which he established in May 2021. His impressive career includes leading the ChromeOS Platform Engineering team at Google as a Senior Director, where he oversaw the program's growth to over 100 million users. Puneet's entrepreneurial journey includes co-founding Agnilux (acquired by Google), where he served as VP of Engineering, and PASemi Inc. (acquired by Apple), where he was an Engineering Director in the Platform Architecture team. He also held senior leadership positions at SiByte Inc. (acquired by Broadcom) and was a Systems Researcher at Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center. Puneet holds a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Bernie Malouin is CEO of JetCool, A Flex Company.

Dedicating over 15 years to cooling innovation, Dr. Bernie Malouin is at the forefront of revolutionizing liquid cooling solutions in high-power electronics for data centers. He began his career at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he pioneered and patented microconvective liquid cooling technology—a breakthrough that enhances cooling efficiency by directing fluid jets at processor hotspots, setting a new standard for thermal management.

As the founder of JetCool, Malouin collaborates with chipmakers, OEMs, and hyperscalers to advance high-performance computing and AI workloads. In November 2024, JetCool was acquired by Flex, a global manufacturing and supply chain solutions provider, to bolster its data center and power portfolio.  Following the acquisition, Malouin leads JetCool’s liquid cooling initiatives within the Communications, Enterprise, and Cloud (CEC) division. In this capacity, he continues to drive the industry toward greater efficiency, resiliency, and environmental sustainability.

Nikhil Tyagi is a recognized leader in next-generation technology, with a proven track record at the intersection of AI infrastructure, wireless innovation, and immersive computing. As Senior Manager of Wireless Device Innovation at Verizon, he leads strategic initiatives for breakthrough device categories that integrate AI, XR (AR/VR), and advanced connectivity.

Previously, Nikhil held key roles at Humane, Meta, and Apple, where he helped shape pioneering AI and XR experiences—from developing on-device intelligence for ambient computing, to architecting scalable XR systems and wearable platforms. His cross-functional expertise spans edge AI, spatial computing, and system-level wireless design, making him a pivotal voice in the evolving landscape of AI-driven interfaces."

Pyungsu Han is the Vice President and CTO of R&D at Qualitas Semiconductor.
He holds a Ph.D. from Yonsei University and previously worked at LG Electronics.
With deep expertise in high-speed interconnect technology, he leads cutting-edge R&D initiatives and drives strategic growth in the semiconductor industry.

Assaf Gad is the Chief Strategy Officer and General Manager at Intuition Robotics, focusing on bridging the gap between technology and real-world challenges, particularly for vulnerable populations. A seasoned product leader, Gad's career is driven by a passion for creating innovative user experiences using cutting-edge technology, creative problem-solving, and business insight.

With extensive experience in both hardware and software product development, Gad has led teams from ideation to market, emphasizing meaningful technology. He uses storytelling to connect technology with people, highlighting the interplay between user experience, innovation, and consumer brands.

Gad has a history of pioneering new user experiences. At N-trig, he introduced digital writing technologies that led to its acquisition by Microsoft for the Surface portfolio. At PointGrab, he integrated computer vision solutions into devices by Samsung, TCL, and Lenovo. Prior to Intuition Robotics, he led marketing and strategic partnerships at Audioburst and mentors startups at Techstars Barclays Accelerator in Tel Aviv. He also held leadership roles at Powermat Technologies, modu Mobile, and Telmap Ltd (acquired by Intel). Gad holds a BSc. in Computer Science from The Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.

Jeongkyu Shin is the founder of Lablup Inc. and has made significant contributions to open-source projects over the past two decades, including his lead developer role in the Textcube Project. He has served as an AI expert at Google Developers Experts since 2017 and was active in the Innovative Steering Board of the Northeast Asia Open Source Software Promotion Forum until 2022. In recognition of his contributions to the technology industry, he was awarded the prestigious Industrial Service Medal by the Korean government in 2024. Additionally, Jeongkyu supports startup companies as a technical mentor at Google for Startups Accelerator.

He holds a Ph.D. in Statistical Physics from POSTECH, where his research focused on complex systems, agent-based models, and computational neuroscience. Throughout his career, Jeongkyu has led machine learning and open-source projects in various companies and labs, specializing in text classification, entropy-related information compression, and contextual search. Since 2015, he has been developing Backend.AI, an open-source, hyper-scalable AI infrastructure platform (available at https://www.backend.ai).

James joined the OCP Foundation staff in 2024 as VP Market Intelligence and Innovation, working with technology leaders in the community and augmenting the foundation’s directional strategy, innovation efforts and marketing. His contributions to the OCP proceed from over two decades of experience in technology research, engineering, product management and marketing.

Transformational Quality Leader with over 15 years of experience in mission-critical industries and technical infrastructure with a proven track record in driving operational excellence and product reliability and quality improvements through innovative strategies, exceptional leadership, and meticulous execution.  She is adept at enhancing organizational efficiency, reducing costs, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Anahita is a certified ASQ Six Sigma Black Belt and Quality Engineer with deep expertise in managing large-scale projects and leading cross-functional teams to achieve strategic goals.
Passionate about building and leading high-performing technical teams and enable their success and growth.

Mehir Arora is a founding engineer at ChipAgents, a company at the forefront of integrating agentic AI into Electronic Design Automation (EDA) workflows. Graduated from UC Santa Barbara, Mehir has contributed to advancing state-of-the-arts in AI methodologies, including a paper presented at ICML 2024. At ChipAgents, he focuses on developing agentic AI tools that enhance chip design and verification processes, aiming to significantly improve efficiency and productivity in semiconductor engineering. 

Haseeb Budhani is the CEO and co-founder of Rafay Systems. He previously co-founded and led Soha Systems, which was acquired by Akamai Technologies, where he later served as Vice President of Enterprise Strategy. Haseeb has also held executive and leadership roles at Infineta Systems, NET, and several other technology companies. He holds an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.

Ipsita Mohanty is an accomplished AI Leader and Vice Chair of IEEE Women in Engineering, Santa Clara Valley, Region 6. With over 15 years of experience spanning Salesforce, Goldman Sachs, Walmart Labs, and Amdocs, she has led several impactful AI-driven initiatives, including architecting Salesforce-Tableau Agents and enhancing recommendation systems at Walmart. Ipsita holds a Master’s degree in Information Technology from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Engineering from KIIT University. She is also the co-founder of QApp, an AI/ML automation platform empowering freelancers. Winner of several AI Awards and recognized among the Top 100 Women in AI Leaders globally, she actively contributes to AI research and community leadership while championing diversity in technology.

Shweta Behere is a Senior Engineering Manager at Workday, where she leads cloud platform engineering teams dedicated to building resilient and scalable systems. She is at the forefront of delivering AI solutions to enhance cloud platform infrastructure and observability. She currently serves as the IEEE Chair for the Women in Engineering Affinity Group for the Santa Clara Valley Section.

With over 18 years of experience, Shweta has made significant contributions to advancing public cloud, storage, and virtualization technologies, resulting in multiple patents and publications highlighting her innovative impact. Her leadership has earned her industry recognition, including being named among the “Top 50 Women of Impact in 2025" by Women Impact Tech and one of the “30 Outstanding Women in Engineering Leadership” by the Women Tech Network for her substantial contributions to the field.

Shweta is passionate about promoting women in engineering fields. As a thought leader, she addresses the challenges of balancing career and parenthood in tech, sharing her insights through articles and panel discussions. Through her mentorship, advocacy, and leadership, Shweta Behere inspires the next generation of technologists, especially women, and actively cultivates a more inclusive and supportive environment.

Ilissa Miller is the Founder and CEO of iMiller Public Relations, host of the NEDAS Live! podcast, and Editor-in-Chief of Data Center POST and TelecomNewsroom. With nearly 30 years of experience in PR, marketing, and digital infrastructure, Ilissa has launched global campaigns across data centers, cloud, and telecom. She serves on the Forbes Agency Council, advises the Nomad Futurist Foundation, and holds board roles with OIX and the In-building Wireless Association (TIWA).

Jeffrey Springborn is the Chief Executive Officer of Colovore, bringing more than two decades of executive leadership experience across the technology and energy sectors. Prior to joining Colovore, Jeff was the CEO and Founder of Best Energy USA, where he focused on driving Net Zero initiatives and helping organizations reduce their energy footprint. He also previously served as President of LightEdge Solutions, where he led the company’s transformation into a leading enterprise cloud services provider and raised over $200 million in funding. Jeff has a proven track record of building high-performing teams, scaling businesses, and delivering strong investor returns.