2019 Speakers

Srini Addepalli has over 22+ years of experience in networking, security, analytics and automation. He has been in Intel for last 3 years working as Sr. Principal Engineer & Chief Architect. In his current role, he technically leads the software engineering & architecture activities related to network orchestration, analytics and network/infrastructure security with specific focus on ONAP, edge and Kubernetes. Previously he worked in many roles including CTO of a network security software company Intoto Inc (acquired by Freescale), Fellow & Chief architect at Freescale leading advanced technology group. In his previous jobs, he was instrumental in strategy & creation of UTM solutions, autonomous acceleration of L3, L4, IPsec, Openflow, & Cloud RAN functions, network security/packet-processing software solutions, automation and infrastructure security solutions.

Vijay Ramakrishnan is a machine learning researcher at Cisco. He is a core member of the Mindmeld team within Cisco, developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications for Cisco’s flagship products. He is an expert practitioner in developing NLP models and a leading figure in building deep domain conversational AI products. He has built voice and chat assistants for fortune 500 companies at Mindmeld Inc. before it was acquired by Cisco in July 2017. His work combines basic research and software to build state-of-the art AI models for conversational products.

Samah Alafeef Project Management Coach and Tech consultant. Founder of Metanoia Training and Consulting A computer engineer holds a master’s degree in project management engineering and a diploma in humanitarian logistics and supply chain. Samah is PMP certified, certified Microsoft innovative educator and certified green IT professional. After extensive work with United Nations and other international organizations, she started establishing her own Training and Consulting business. Further, she is serving currently as second country officer in the International Federation of Global and Green ICT and nominated by the GGA to be a Global goodwill ambassador of Jordan. Samah Alafeef brings a broad range of technological and project management skills to help individuals and organizations to apply the best practices and builds their professional image in a today’s challenging market. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samah-alafeef-pmp®-6357b837/

Ash - CTO @ ZoeWave building physiologically intelligent clothing called ZoeWear. Combining biotech, mobile and fashion to build clothing that keeps people healthy while looking great*. Zoe(“life”)Wear “wearable for life” is built on his experience in all three fields: BioTech - A researcher @ RxDigita / TDI working on medical biomarkers. Researching human physiology and physical biochemistry for early detection of diseases (scientific publications & posters). Mobile - A developer @ YLabz building both native iOS & Android apps. Enthusiastic author, teacher, and speaker helping promote the ecosystem (patents, JavaOne Rock Star & 3x Amazon Code Ninja). Fashion - Designed a 15 week wearable course "Technology is the new Black" researching Techo Fashion for AAU. How to build products that incorporate the “Beauty of Fashion” infused with the “Magic of Technology” to promote “Life Care”. I speak (a lot): https://goo.gl/7Wi8cF ~~~ From all accounts should have been killed ☠️by all three phases of water 🌊. Solid: Boarding blizzard snow 🏂, Liquid: Surfing storm waves 🏄‍ and Vapor: Sailing hurricane winds ⛵️ ... Lucky & Glad to be alive!

Shounak Athavale leads AI & Computing Research at Ford’s Palo Alto Greenfield Lab. Prior to his current role Dr. Athavale was responsible for establishing Software & Computing Research group at Palo Alto. He has worked in several functions, including, Research and Advanced Engineering, Advanced Manufacturing, Systems Thinking/System Dynamics, Strategy, Enterprise Technology Research, and Business Innovation. Dr. Athavale was recipient of ASME’s Blackall Award. He holds PhD from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC and MBA from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

Sawyer Bateman studied Computer Science at the University of Alberta in 2001 before joining Dreammates - an early dating website as their CTO. After his stint in matchmaking he ran MaxGames.com and one of the largest networks of online flash gaming websites. In early 2013 he met Jarrett and joined him in creating EasyPost because he believed that logistics should be developer friendly. They started by making shipping easier, and in 2016 decided they were also the best positioned company to make it faster and cheaper with the introduction of their fulfillment network. Today Sawyer leads 60 of the best shipping engineers on earth to solve those three problems - easy, fast, and cheap.

Rachel Batish is an accomplished entrepreneur and author specializing in the voice and voice search spaces. At Audioburst Batish is responsible for driving product strategy with some of the biggest brands including Samsung, LG, Hyundai and Bytedance. Prior to Audioburst Batish ran her own company as the co-Founder and CRO of Conversation.one, the build-once-deploy-everywhere-platform for conversational apps. Rachel has published several online articles on voice and chat UX and the importance of AI in building conversational applications. Her book, "Voicebot and Chatbot Design" was published by PACKT Publishing House in July 2018.

Dr. Greg Benson is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco and Chief Scientist at SnapLogic. With more than two decades of experience, Greg has spearheaded research in the areas of parallel and distributed computing, programming languages, and operating systems. At SnapLogic, Greg leads SnapLogic Labs and is central to the development of the company's Iris initiative which aims to apply breakthroughs in AI and machine learning to enterprise integration. He also led key projects at SnapLogic including Predictive Field Linking, Clustering for Data Integration, the first SnapLogic MapReduce implementation called SnapReduce, and the Document Model for data integration. Greg is also one of the architects for the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform. Greg received his Ph.D in Computer Science at the University of California, Davis.

Nisha (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_f_2E5cAAAAJ&hl=en) is a senior software engineer at PayPal working on building the next-generation analytics and experimentation platform. She is a passionate technologist with an academic background and industry experience in AI/Machine Learning. In her career spanning over 8+ years, she has significant experience in building and deploying ML models and systems to production. She has experience with big data systems like Spark, Hadoop and has recently ventured into streaming with Kafka, Spark etc. She has worked in search and ranking for e-commerce, customer insights domain and is currently involved in building intelligent products for PayPal’s experimentation platform. She has presented her master’s thesis Lie to Me: Deceit Detection via Online Behavioral Learning in IEEE conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition in 2011.

Dev Bhattacharya, is currently a chair of Consumer Electronics Society of IEEE section of Santa Clara Valley. He has over 20 years of experience in leading the system, hardware and firmware development of complex IoTs and embedded systems based on various sensors and devices. Dev has a master’s degree of Science in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has successfully led and managed development of system architecture, system hardware, firmware of consumer grade and complex embedded system products with sensors, networking, wireless and multi-media from concept to volume production at various companies including Cisco, Intel, Logitech, Moog Crossbow and Rockwell Collins.

Adam Blum is the CEO of Auger.AI. He has been CTO/CEO/co-founder of various successful startups. He has been adjunct professor at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University. He published the first applied machine learning book (Neural Networks in C++, Wiley, 1992) and holds several patents.

Ian Brooks holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science, and his current role is a Data Scientist and Solutions Engineer at Cloudera. He has a passion for Machine Learning and Big Data. He currently resides in Arlington VA, but he is a proud Texan.

Antony Brydon is the CEO and co-founder of Directly, a leader in customer support automation that works with enterprise companies to launch and train virtual agents that double their automation rate. Companies like Airbnb, Microsoft and Samsung use Directly’s expert-in-the-loop AI platform to tap the expertise of their most experienced customers, delivering content, training and answers to their virtual agent to significantly boost performance. Prior to founding Directly in 2011, Antony served as: - Acting CEO for ShopWell, a web and mobile site focused on personal nutrition and food shopping; - Partner at Social Venture Partners, an LLC to invest in and develop internet companies; - CEO and Co-founder of Visible Path, a corporate social networking company funded by Kleiner Perkins and acquired by the Hoovers division of Dun & Bradstreet in January 2008; and - CEO and marketing lead for one of the first music websites, IUMA, which was acquired by EMusic in 1999. Antony graduated from Yale University with a BA in Psychology and Philosophy, and currently resides in San Francisco, CA.

Jorge Castañón hails from Mexico City and received his Ph.D. in Computational and Applied Mathematics from Rice University. He has a genuine passion for data science and machine learning applications of any kind, especially practical customer related problems. Since 2007, he is been developing numerical optimization models and algorithms for machine learning and regularized inverse problems. At IBM, Jorge joined the Analytics team at Silicon Valley Laboratory where he is building the future of machine learning and cognitive tools.

Adam Cheyer is currently a Vice President of R&D at Samsung. Previously, he was co-founder and VP Engineering of Viv Labs, an artificial intelligence company acquired by Samsung in 2016. Adam was also co-founder and VP Engineering of Siri, acquired by Apple in 2010 to build their virtual personal assistant. Adam is a founding member and first developer at Change.org, the world's largest petition platform with more than 300 million members. Adam also co-founded Sentient Technologies, which applies distributed machine learning algorithms to discover novel solutions to complex problems. Previously, Adam was VP Engineering at Verticalnet (enterprise software) and Dejima (mobile software). Adam has authored more than 60 publications and 25 patents. At SRI International, he was Chief Architect of CALO, the largest AI project in US history. Adam graduated with highest honors from Brandeis University and received the “Outstanding Masters Student” award from UCLA’s School of Engineering.

John DesJardins is currently VP Solution Architecture and CTO for North America at Hazelcast, where he champions growth and adoption of our in-memory computing platform. His expertise in large scale computing spans Microservices, Big Data, Internet of Things, Machine Learning and Cloud. He is an active blogger and speaker. John brings over 25 years of experience in architecting and implementing global scale computing solutions with top Global 2000 companies while at Hazelcast, Cloudera, Software AG and webMethods. He holds a BS in Economics from George Mason Unive

Susan Diamond is the Senior Technical Staff Member and architect of Watson Deep Learning as a Service platform. She led the Watson product engineering team to work with IBM research to create and productize the Deep Learning as a Service platform. The DLaaS platform is being used by Watson service model training as well as Watson customers. Previously, she was one of the handful people that started the Watson Developer Cloud, a cloud platform that hosts Watson cognitive applications

Zongjie, aka ”Z”, is currently a Director of Product Strategy at Cisco’s Data Center Compute product group (DCC). DCC provides world leading compute solutions to enterprise and SMB customers. DCC’s leading products include Unified Compute Systems (UCS), Cisco Converged Infrastructure (FlexPod, FlashStack, VBlock, etc.) and Cisco’s own HyperConverged solution – HyperFlex. Z is known as an “Intrapreneur”, who helps drive Cisco compute core product strategy, as well as identifying adjacent and new market opportunities to drive business growth. She also leads the Product Management team for Cisco’s AI/ML infrastructure products, aiming at helping Cisco’s customers deploy AI/ML in both on-prem and multi-cloud environment. Prior to Cisco, Z worked at McKinsey & Company as an Engagement Manager. She was appointed to be the first Engagement Manager at McKinsey’s Fast Growth Tech Practice, specialized in serving start-ups and high growth early stage companies. Prior to McKinsey, she spent 6 years in Singapore as a Product Engineer at Avago and a Supply Chain consultant at iCognitive.

Edell is a veteran speaker and writer on the topics of machine learning, metadata, and content management. He was the co-founder and CEO of Machine Box, Inc., an award-winning startup that builds production-ready machine learning models that anyone can integrate, deploy and scale which was acquired by Veritone in September of 2018. Previously, he helped found and grow Graymeta, Inc., a machine learning and metadata company. Prior to that Edell was at Oracle, Front Porch Digital, Neulion, and SAMMA Systems in various roles from senior solutions architect to product manager. Aaron has published papers on metadata and machine learning and consulted major media and entertainment companies on content management since 2005.

Alex Ermolaev has developed and led a variety of AI projects over the last 20 years, including enterprise AI, platforms/tools, NLP, imaging and self-driving cars. Alex is one of the most frequent “AI in Healthcare” speakers in the Silicon Valley. Change Healthcare is one of the largest healthcare technology companies in the world.

Self-motivated Scientist with a curious, analytical mind and a passion for machine learning and AI. Experience in managing and analyzing data using Python, R, MATLAB, Mathematica and developing algorithms and software. Extensive experience with advanced mathematics, statistics and visualizing complex concepts.

Mohamed Fawzy leads the Distributed AI Group at Facebook. The Distributed AI group is focused on scaling and product-ionizing machine learning training at facebook scale by building platform and infrastructure to support large scale distributed training on heterogeneous hardware.

Uma Maheswara Rao G is an Apache Software Foundation Member. An Apache Hadoop committer, a member of the Apache Hadoop PMC, and a long-term active contributor to the Apache Hadoop project. He is also a PMC member for the Apache BookKeeper project. Uma is a Software Architect at Intel, works on open source technologies.

Martin is passionate about science, technology, coding, algorithms and everything in between. He graduated from Mines Paris Tech with a major in computer vision, enjoyed his first engineering years in the computer architecture group of ST Microlectronics and then spent the next 11 years shaping the nascent eBook market, starting with the Mobipocket startup, which later became the software part of the Amazon Kindle and its mobile variants. He joined Google Developer Relations in 2011 and now focuses on parallel processing and machine learning (Dataflow and Tensorflow).

Emrah Gultekin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Chooch.AI. As a serial entrepreneur has more than 20 years building startups and businesses from engineering consultancy to real estate development to commercial and social investment consulting under his belt. Before launching Chooch AI, Gultekin was CEO of Terra Invest, creating, developing a platform where commercial and social endeavors deliver value to investors and stakeholders alike. Prior he served as a board member of the governmental DEIK - Foreign Economic Relations Board. In his early life he was a successful entrepreneur in Turkey and the US. Gültekin was educated at Brown University and MIT.

Gautam is a technology leader with 16 years of experience in building and delivering technology solutions in data engineering, AI/ML modeling and cloud. He has worked in multiple geographies across Europe, Asia and USA. He is a seasoned professional in Fintech and Telcom billing domains with experience of companies like- Lending Club, Amdocs and Oracle.

Sandeep Gupta is a Product Manager for TensorFlow at Google, where he helps develop and drive the roadmap for TensorFlow (Google’s open-source library and framework for machine learning) for supporting machine learning applications and research. His current focus is on TensorFlow’s 2.0 release, improving TensorFlow’s usability and driving adoption in the community and enterprise, and on TensorFlow.js - a library bringing Machine Learning to JavaScript developers. Sandeep is excited about how Machine Learning and AI are transforming our lives in a wide variety of ways, and works with the Google team and external partners to help create powerful, scalable solutions for all. Prior to joining Google, Sandeep was the technology leader for advanced imaging and analytics research and development at GE Global Research with specific emphasis on medical imaging and healthcare analytics.

Ashutosh is Lead Engineer for Analytics at Avi Networks (Acquired by VMware), which offers Cloud-Native, SDN based Application Delivery and Firewall solutions, At Avi, he is focussing on problems in Application Security and Continuous Delivery space and stays optimistic that ML/AI techniques will transform these domains. He has multiple patents and IETF publications in Computing and Network Virtualization domains.

Dr Mo Haghighi is IBM lead developer advocate in Europe, former Research Scientist at INTEL and former Java and Open Source developer at Sun Microsystems. He leads several teams of developer advocates in Benelux, DACH, UKI, France and Israel, as well as overseeing all advocacy operations and DevRel activities across Europe. Mo's expertise primarily lies in the areas of distributed computing, blockchain, embedded systems and AI, with several publications and patents in those areas. He has been involved in various projects involving the UK government, European commission and large technology corporations around IoT, AI and network security.  Mo has been a regular keynote speaker at various conference including IEEE/ACM conferences, JavaOne, Pycon, DevRelCon, CloudConf, The Next Web, Open Data Science Conference and O’Reilly

Over the last 20 years, Rashed has helped companies transform and create sustained competitive advantage through innovative applications of data solutions – artificial intelligence, dynamic optimization, advanced analytics, and data engineering. Prior to joining Publicis Sapient, Rashed did research in theoretical physics at the Los Alamos National Lab and the Institute for Theoretical Science.

Michael John is a Teaching Professor at UC Santa Cruz, specializing in video game development. Prior to UCSC, he worked in the commercial games industry for more than 20 years, for companies such as Sony, Electronic Arts and others.

Maygol has a M.S. in Computer Science and 6 years in performance benchmarking.

Satyananda Kashyap is a Research Staff Member at IBM Research focusing on developing novel machine learning techniques to tackle problems in healthcare. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa where he worked on developing machine learning techniques for graph search based segmentation algorithms to assess osteoarthritis degeneration on knee MRIs. Currently, his research focuses on the problem of chest x-ray specifically on developing explainable AI methods for classifying the various diseases so that the machine diagnosis can be interpreted and trusted by humans.

Devaraj Kavali is currently working a software engineer with Intel Corporation and has been working on designing and developing of large scale distributed systems for more than 10 years. He is also an Apache Hadoop Committer & PMC member.

Naman Kohli received the MS & PhD degrees from West Virginia University, USA, in 2019. He is currently an AI & Computing Research Engr at Ford Greenfield Labs at Palo Alto, CA. His research interests include biometrics, computer vision and deep learning. He is a member of the Phi Kappa Phi, Upsilon Pi Epsilon, and the Eta Kappa Nu Honor Societies. He is a recipient of the Best Paper award at WACV 2016, Best Poster award at IJCB 2017 and Upsilon Pi Epsilon Scholarship Award 2018.

MS in Computer Science from MIPT and Skoltech (Russia) and MIT (US). Head of Data at Astro Digital - Satellite Mission as a Service company. I’ve designed and developed the high-level product vision, data processing infrastructure and use of data workflows. Previously I was a co-founder and CTO of ImageAiry - recommendation system of satellite data services. I designed business and technical logic of the recommendation system. Won NGA's Expedition Competition with the image detection tool for medium-resolution data in 2016.

Lin Sun obtained B.S from Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), M.S and PhD from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). His supervisor is the Prof. Bertram Shi and Prof. DY Yeung. His research interests include computer vision, machine learning and deep learning, particularly, action recognition, large scale image classification and retrieval, object detection and tracking; He has 9+ years of research and industry experience, published more than 30 papers in top conferences and journals and held more than 20 China and US patents; He was a research scholar in Stanford Vision and Learning (SVL) lab in 2017 supervised by Prof. Silvio Savarese. Currently, he is a senior staff researcher in Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center (SSIC), leading the perception algorithm innovation for autonomous driving.

Chris Maxwell graduated with an MBA from Bentley University in 1998, the same year he discovered Web development, and he knew then that he had found his calling: programming. Chris has pursued that path until today without ever looking back. Unfortunately, by 2000, he began to experience pain in his hands and arms due to repetitive stress injuries (RSI), which progressively got worse! Early on in his career as a developer it reached a point where he could no longer touch a mouse or keyboard. To this day he cannot do either, but despite this limitation he has been able to work for Fidelity Investments as a developer, as a freelance consultant for a multitude of companies, and ultimately founded a Web development company and a coding boot camp. Chris overcame repetitive stress injuries by using off-the-shelf speech recognition software and a system of word macros, coupled with specialized equipment: like an infrared head tracking camera, or a Wacom pen tablet. Although adequate, suffice it to say, speaking code has never been graceful or easy. It is tedious and a practice in patience. Mousing as well: the infrared camera led to a neck RSI, and these days using a pen tablet is causing problems. It has long been said: “necessity is the mother of all invention,” and with the advent of deep learning, a new possibility has opened up for interacting with a computer. Chris is attempting to invent a better tool for this, in general, and specifically for programming, using Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning. Towards this quest he has founded Primary.AI, and has recently moved from Florida to the Bay Area in pursuit of this goal.

Bhairav Mehta works as Data Science Manager at Apple Inc. Experienced engineer, entrepreneur and seasoned Statistician / programmer with 14 years of combined experience working on product service/ channel /warranty management in electronics consumer products industry at Apple Inc. (4 years), yield engineering in semiconductor manufacturing at Qualcomm (6 years) and quality engineering in automotive industry at Ford Motor Company (OEM, Tier2 Suppliers) (3 years). MBA from Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, 3 Master of Science (MS) degrees in diverse engineering and mathematical sciences. Industrial Systems Engineering (Rochester '02), Applied Statistics (Cornell '04) and MBA (Cornell '14) Developed skills in Big Data, Hadoop, NoSQL, Spark for Scalability and implementation of big data solution for the enterprises. Cloudera certified Hadoop developer, Cloudera certified Data Scientist and Amazon AWS Certified Solutions Architect- Associate.

Ryan Micallef is a research engineer at Cloudera Fast Forward Labs. He researches emerging machine learning technologies and helps clients apply them. Ryan is also an attorney barred in New York. He was an intellectual property litigator focused on technical cases for almost a decade before joining Fast Forward Labs. Ryan has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and a Juris Doctor degree from Brooklyn Law School. Ryan spends his free time soldering circuits and wrenching motorcycles. He teaches microcontroller programming at his local hackerspace, NYC Resistor.

Moshe brings over 15 years of experience in leadership, engineering and operational roles in public and private companies. Prior to founding Applitools, Moshe held leadership roles at Wave Systems Corp., Safend, Amdocs (NASDAQ:DOX) and Sat-Smart Ltd. Moshe holds a Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems from the Technion Israel’s Institute of Technology and MBA from IDC (Wharton Business School GCP program).

Technology leader with over 20 years of experience executing large scale platform/product initiatives in the areas of AI/ML, big data & micro-services. Engineering leader with a solid track record of building and managing large engineering teams delivering enterprise platforms, which has transformed and increase revenue or improving efficiencies to the business. Demonstrated an ability to structure an organization and optimize it for execution, including attracting top tier talent and filling out gaps in the existing team. Set standards for building software, deployments, infrastructure reliability, security, and scalability.

David has more than 20 years experience in Sales, Business Development, Social Media Marketing, Artificial Intelligent (Ai) Chat BOTs with companies like Facebook, Apple, HP, EDS and many start-ups. His focus has been on: 1) Ai-Enabled Chat BOTs for Retail & Service focused on Automotive vertical 2) Social Media & Digital Marketing 3) Strategic Sourcing in Marketing, IT, HR, SG&A, SaaS, Professional Services 4) Business Development & Sales 5) Startup Advisory and Due Diligence

Daniel Myers is a Developer Advocate at Google on the Google Assistant and Actions on Google team. He's held roles in product development, engineering, product marketing, and business management from startups including LiveWire Hosting and PetroCloud to Fortune 500 companies like Google, Cisco, and Fujitsu. Daniel is an inventor of 3 patents and has a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering plus an MBA from the University of Texas at Dallas. If you don’t find Daniel coding, you’ll probably find him talking about a new investment or business idea.

Shyam is author of Architecting the Industrial Internet book where he covers the techno-functional topics of Industrial IoT. He is Founder of BIWA User Community and a regular speaker at large conferences on IoT.

Sankaet Pathak is Founder and CEO of Synapse Financial Technologies, Inc. (Synapse). A native of India, Sankaet's experience of not being able to open a bank account due to his immigrant status, prompted him to launch a financial services company that could reduce barriers of entry for underbanked or unbanked folks. Through his efforts, Sankaet found that the true barrier to entry was an outdated infrastructure that kept everyday people from accessing best-in-class financial products. Today, Synapse services over 1.8 million end-users and processes over $10 billion in deposits. Many of Synapse’s clients are small FinTech companies offering innovative financial solutions that are both accessible and affordable for end users.

Jeff Patterson is the co-founder and head of product at Directly, a leader in customer support automation that works with enterprise companies to launch and train virtual agents that double their automation rate. Companies like Airbnb, Microsoft and Samsung use Directly’s expert-in-the-loop AI platform to tap the expertise of their most experienced customers, delivering content, training and answers to their virtual agent to significantly boost performance. Prior to co-founding Directly in 2011, Jeff served as: - Consultant for ShopWell, a web and mobile site focused on personal nutrition and food shopping; - Partner at Social Venture Partners, an LLC to invest in and develop internet companies; - VP of Products and Co-founder of Visible Path, a corporate social networking company funded by Kleiner Perkins and acquired by the Hoovers division of Dun & Bradstreet in January 2008; and - Co-founder, President, CTO and VP of Engineering for one of the first music websites, IUMA, which was acquired by EMusic in 1999. Jeff graduated from the University of California with a degree in computer science, and currently resides in San Francisco, CA.

A full-stack developer with two decades of industry experience, Jon Peck now focuses on bringing scalable, discoverable, and secure machine-learning microservices to developers across a wide variety of platforms via Algorithmia.com - Speaker (conferences): DeveloperWeek 2018+19, SeattleJS, Global AI Conf 2018+19, AI Next 2019+19, Nordic APIs 2018+19 (keynote), ODSC East+West, API World - Educator: Cascadia College, Seattle C&W, consultant - Lead Developer: Empower Engine, Giftstarter, Mass General Hospital, Cornell University

I like to spend my time brainstorming strategies for better software development and connecting with industry professionals. I was the Regional Chapter Member of the Computer Society of India and awarded the Best Contributor Award for the year 2017. I was honored with the Inspire Award for Excellence by the Indian Institute of Technology in the year 2010. I believe that, even the toughest situations can be dealt with a smile on the face.

Gaurav Rastogi is Sr. Director, Engineering at Avi Networks (VMware). Avi Networks brings the benefits of hyperscale application delivery to every enterprise, at any scale. He leads Analytics, UI, and automation services team to build deep automation solutions to deploy and secure cloud applications. Prior to Avi Networks Gaurav was Sr. Engineering Manager at Adobe where he led team to build SaaS based Adobe Primetime Publishing Services focused at video monetization for large media companies. He has more than 10 years of software development experience in distributed systems and networking platform including High TPS and I/O intensive Video Streaming servers, IP and Storage Networking. He has MS in Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. He received his undergraduate (B.Tech) degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur.

Alka is a product and technology leader at AT&T Foundry. She was the lead technology strategist for wireless core and transport for Cingular Wireless and Director of New Technology & Product Development for Cloud Enablers and Enterprise Conversational Voice Apps for AT&T. She has led numerous technology initiatives and published position papers for video streaming and video delivery for AT&T and holds patents for security gateway and data policy management. Alka holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Notre Dame and an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and was one of the recipients of the Rising Star, National Women of Color in Technology Outstanding Contribution Award. Alka has served on boards of several non-profit organizations and human rights organizations and is passionate about mentoring, coaching and exploring the intersections between art, technology & ethics.

Ebrahim is a Senior Data Scientist at Juniper, focusing on knowledge discovery from big data using machine learning and large-scale data mining where he has developed, and implemented several key production components including company's chat bot inference engine and anomaly detections. Ebrahim has won Microsoft research award for his work on Information Retrieval and Recommendation systems in graph-structured networks. Ebrahim holds a Ph.D. degree on Cognitive Learning Networks from Stevens Institute of Technology.

Adrien Schmidt is an internationally recognized engineer, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Aristotle, an enterprise software company in San Francisco, CA, that delivers a personal voice analytics assistant to convert data analytics into meaningful conversation. As a thought leader in the AI/Voice space, his work can be found in major publications such as Forbes, Inc, The Huffington Post, and Business2Community. He is listed in Inc Magazine as an "AI Entrepreneur to Watch".

AI enthusiast

Raju Shreewastava is the founder of Big data Trunk(www.BigDataTrunk.com , a Big Data Training and consulting firm with offices in the United States.Former Big data and Business Intelligence for Autodesk (BI/DW/ODS, Big Data, and Enterprise Architecture). Author ( Contributed on Big data High Availability on Sams Publication book) https://www.amazon.com/Raju-R-Shreewastava/e/B07461QN4D/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Xu Si is a Senior Data Scientist at WalmartLabs, where she works on the end-to-end project in fraud prediction for Walmart transactions that prevents millions of revenue loss due to fraud every year. Her current research area is in applying graph deep learning on entity scoring and linkage prediction in customer activity (e.g. transaction, login, profile change) based graphs. In the Walmart Hackathon held this March, she led a team of three to win the Best in Execution Award, one of the top three awards out of 70+ teams participated. Prior to this job, she obtained her master’s degree in Electrical Engineering at Harvard University in 2018. During her master study, she was the teaching assistant for Prof. Ba’s course Biological Signal Processing and was honored the Distinction in Teaching awards. She was a Data Scientist intern at Microsoft in the summer of 2017 where she designed and deployed an NLP model to recommend math questions to teachers in K12 math classroom.

Zhangzhang Si earned his Ph.D. in Statistics at UCLA, where he explored generative hierarchical models for object recognition. He has publications in ICCV, CVPR and PAMI and has been a reviewer for CVPR, ICCV, and ECCV. He co-authored a paper in ICCV which won Marr Prize Honorable Mention. He developed algorithmic ad targeting at Apple, search ranking at Google, product search and matching at Impossible Ventures, generative models at Vicarious AI, and deep learning applications for image understanding and chatbot at HomeAway, Expedia. Before UCLA, he earned his B.S. in Computer Science at Tsinghua University.

Dr. Lawrence Spracklen leads engineering at SupportLogic, where he leads a team applying AI to the enterprise technical support space. Prior to joining SupportLogic, Lawrence lead engineering teams at two other ML startups; Alpine Data and Ayasdi. Before this, Lawrence spent over a decade working at Sun Microsystems, Nvidia and VMware, where he led teams focused on the intersection of hardware architecture and software performance and scalability. Lawrence holds a Ph.D. in Electronic engineering from the University of Aberdeen, a B.Sc. in Computational Physics from the University of York and has been issued over 60 US patents.

Kutta is a Technical Lead for AI Infrastructure at Facebook, supporting Machine Learning efforts across the company with a focus on the end-to-end platform for ML Training. The team's mission is to enable product groups to scale ML / Deep Learning systems to solve problems in ranking, personalization, site integrity, machine translation, speech, natural language processing, computer vision, RL, and VR/AR. After graduating from Caltech in 2003, Kutta joined Microsoft to work on computer graphics & console games and shipped a number of Xbox games including Halo 3, Gears of War, Mass Effect, and Fable 2. In 2009 he left to join Valve, a small game company known for Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, Dota, and the digital distribution platform Steam. While there he was the engineering lead for Portal 2, project lead for Steam Mobile, and finally the project lead for an unannounced VR game. After taking some time off to travel, he joined Facebook in 2017 to focus on large-scale distributed systems for AI.

As VP, Product Management for Vonage, Bryan Stokes focuses on delivering synergistic products combining the Company’s UCaaS and CPaaS technology. Bryan joined Vonage in 2009, serving in several leadership roles during his time with the Company. Most notable achievements during his tenure include building a project management group in customer care, leading the digital customer self-service team, and launching several of Vonage’s consumer-facing products. Prior to joining Vonage, Bryan held several technology-related roles at ad agencies, large and small, including Google subsidiary DoubleClick, as well as start-up companies in the corporate legal and political fundraising arenas. Bryan holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University.

Jacopo Tagliabue was co-founder, CTO and nerd in chief at Tooso - a Gartner “Cool Vendor” company acquired by world leading search provider Coveo. Before Tooso, he has been a Best & Brightest fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and led the Data Science team of AxonVibe in New York. In previous lives, he managed to get a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science (UNISR/MIT), do scienc-y things for a professional basketball team, simulate a pre-Columbian civilization and give an academic talk on video games (among others improbable "achievements"). His research and industry work has been featured several times in international conferences and the general press.

Jayant Thomas (JT) has a passion for AI, IoT, Machine Learning and Cloud Native architectures at scale. His passion has led him to many successful adventures at Veritas, GE, Oracle, AT&T, Nuance and other startups in building platforms at scale . JT is a MBA from UC Davis along with M.Tech from NIIT, and has more than 15 patents in the IoT, NLP processing and Cloud architectures. JT is also a enthusiastic speaker/writer in contributing to many stimulating thoughts across many conferences and meetups. JT is the Author of best selling Industrial IoT Application Development book and currently works as Head of AI/ML at Veritas. JT in addition is a active fitness and health freak dabbling in various diets and health fads . Author of Best Selling IoT Application Development book buy it at Amazon link given below https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075V92JW7/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0

Dr. Jisheng Wang has 10+ years of experience applying state-of-the-art big data and data science technologies to solve challenging enterprise problems including: security, networking and IoT. He is currently the Head of Data Science at Mist Systems, and leads the development of Marivs – the first AI-driven virtual network assistant that automates the visibility, troubleshooting, reporting and maintenance of enterprise networking. Before joining Mist, Jisheng worked as the Senior Director of Data Science in the CTO office of Aruba, a Hewlett-Packard Enterprise company since its acquisition of Niara in February 2017. As the Chief Scientist at Niara, Jisheng led the overall innovation and development effort in big data infrastructure and data science. He also invented the industry’s first modular and data-agonistic User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) solution, which is widely deployed today among global enterprises. Before that, Jisheng was a technical lead in Cisco responsible for various security products. Jisheng received his Ph.D. in Electric Engineering from Penn State University, and is also a frequent speaker at AI/ML conferences, including: O'Reilly Strata AI, Frontier AI, Spark Summit, Hadoop Summit and BlackHat.

San Wong, Director of Machine Learning San comes from a background in Engineering, Data Services and Machine Learning and is currently defining, building and leading the efforts on CloudCar’s Machine Learning platform. He is passionate about data-driven technologies and also mentoring a great group of data and machine learning engineers. San has held positions at GE, QuickLogic, BAE Systems, NVIDIA and Intel. San holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics at UC Berkeley and Master of Science in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.

Joan Xiao is a Principal Data Scientist at Linc Global, a commerce-specialized customer care automation company. In her role, she applies novel natural language processing techniques to improve customer experience. Previously she led machine learning and data science teams at various companies ranging from startup to Fortune 100. Joan received her Ph.D in Mathematics and MS in Computer Science from University of Pennsylvania.

Ming Yong is a Product manager in Google Research Perception Research leading open source efforts in computer vision. In Google, he was previously product manager in Google Search and product lead for mobile video ad formats. Before Google, Ming was cofounder Socialwok, an enterprise collaboration service for Google Apps (Finalist of the Techcrunch Disrupt 2011) and Voiceroute, a startup focused on open source VOIP telephony services for small medium enterprises. Ming received his masters of science from University of Michigan Ann Arbor.

Yiyi Zeng is a senior manager/principal data scientist at Wal-Mart Labs. Yiyi has 12 years of extensive experience in business analytics and intelligence, decision management, fraud detection, credit risk, online payment and e-commerce across various business domains including both Fortune 500 firms and startups. Yiyi and her team use supervised and unsupervised machine learning technics to detect frauds including stolen financial, account take over, identity fraud, promotion/return abuse & victim scam. Yiyi is enthusiastic about mining large-scale data and applying machine learning knowledge to improve business outcomes.

Alex Zub is the head of technology and co-founder at Handsome, a holistic experience design and innovation agency. Alex bridges the gap between the complexities and realities of software implementation and the value derived from experience, product and service design activities, allowing for best in breed products to be born. Handsome has already helped companies such as Facebook, FedEx, Audi, Silvercar, Nickelodeon, AMC Networks, Keller Williams, Dell, and other build digital products, services and experiences.

Saurav leads Asurion Labs, where he is leading efforts in conversational AI technologies. Prior to his time at Asurion, he was Chief Architect for Visa Inc., developing their first direct-to-consumer product called Visa Checkout. He was also Chief Architect at Orative Corp., which developed mobile enterprise messaging and VoIP solutions; Orative was acquired by Cisco. He was also Chief Scientist at AlterEgo Networks, which developed a platform to dynamically transform desktop web content for mobile screens; this work was based on his research work at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). AlterEgo Networks was acquired by Macromedia/Adobe. He received his Ph.D. in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.