Mike Bursell

David McIntyre

Jorn Smeets

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

Manoj Wadekar

Mark Wade

Mark is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Ayar Labs. His prior roles at Ayar Labs include Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Engineering. He is recognized as a pioneer in photonics technologies and, before founding the company, led the team that designed the optics in the world's first processor to communicate using light. He and his co-founders invented breakthrough technology at MIT and UC Berkeley from 2010-2015, which led to the formation of Ayar Labs. He holds a PhD from the University of Colorado.

Preet Virk

Zaid Kahn

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

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

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