Tony Chan Carusone
CTO
Alphawave Semi
Tony Chan Carusone was appointed Chief Technology Officer in January 2022. Tony has been a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto since 2001. He has well over 100 publications, including 8 award-winning best papers, focused on integrated circuits for digital communication. Tony has served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society and on the Technical Program Committees of world’s leading circuits conferences. He co-authored the classic textbooks “Analog Integrated Circuit Design” and “Microelectronic Circuits” and he is a Fellow of the IEEE. Tony has also been a consultant to the semiconductor industry for over 20 years, working with both startups and some of the largest technology companies in the world.
Tony holds a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto.
Sviat Dulianinov
Chief Strategy Officer
Bright Machines
Sviat is a seasoned strategy executive with 10 years of strategic management, management consulting, and startup experience across the United States and Europe. Prior to joining Bright Machines, he served as Chief Strategy Officer at Dutch retailer SPAR. Previously, Sviat had a distinct consulting career at Bain & Company and co-founded an airport mobility company. Sviat holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics and Foreign Languages from MGIMO University and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Preet Virk
Co-Founder & COO
Celestial AI
John Overton
CEO
Kove
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.
Mirko Prezioso
CEO
Mentium Technologies
Mirko Prezioso has a M. Sc. in condensed matter physics from the University of Parma, Italy, where he also earned his PhD in advanced materials science and technology, in 2008. He then worked on spintronics, memory effects and memristor, bringing him, in 2013 to the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here he worked on devices and algorithms for neuromorphic computation. He is the lead author of the first demonstration of in-memory computing based on integrated memristive devices. In 2017 Dr. Prezioso became the co-founder and CEO of Mentium Technologies and has led the company since then.
Manoj Wadekar
AI Systems Technologist
Meta
Jinwook Oh
Co Founder and CTO
Rebellions
Jinwook Oh is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Rebellions, an AI chip company based in South Korea. After earning his Ph.D. from KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), he joined the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, where he contributed to several AI chip R&D projects as a Chip Architect, Logic Designer, and Logic Power Lead. At Rebellions, he has overseen the development and launch of two AI chips, with a third, REBEL, in progress. Jinwook's technical leadership has been crucial in establishing Rebellions as a notable player in AI technology within just three and a half years.
Tom Sheffler
Solution Architect, Next Generation Sequencing
Former Roche
Tom earned his PhD from Carnegie Mellon in Computer Engineering with a focus on parallel computing architectures and prrogramming models. His interest in high-performance computing took him to NASA Ames, and then to Rambus where he worked on accelerated memory interfaces for providing high bandwidth. Following that, he co-founded the cloud video analytics company, Sensr.net, that applied scalable cloud computing to analyzing large streams of video data. He later joined Roche to work on next-generation sequencing and scalable genomics analysis platforms. Throughout his career, Tom has focused on the application of high performance computer systems to real world problems.
Ankur Gupta
Senior Vice President and General Manager
Siemens EDA
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.
Jay Dawani
CEO
Lemurian Labs
Jay Dawani is co-founder & CEO of Lemurian Labs, a startup at the forefront of general purpose accelerated computing for making AI development affordable and generally available for all companies and people to equally benefit. Author of the influential book "Mathematics for Deep Learning", he has held leadership positions at companies such as BlocPlay and Geometric Energy Corporation, spearheading projects involving quantum computing, metaverse, blockchain, AI, space robotics, and more. Jay has also served as an advisor to NASA Frontier Development Lab, SiaClassic, and many leading AI firms.
Steven Brightfield
Chief Marketing Officer
BrainChip
Steven Brightfield has over 20 years of success defining and bringing to market new semiconductor products with companies such as Qualcomm, SiMA.ai. LSI Logic, Plessey and Zoran for mobile, AR/VR, wearable, edge ML, cable/sat set-top and digital camera chips. He has 10 years of experience launching programmable semiconductor IP cores for CPU/GPU/DSP/NPUs at LSI Logic,ARC, MIPS, Silicon Arts, Improv, and BOPS and licensing into end products that are ubiquitous today. Steven’s technical foundation in digital signal processing led to using (DSPs in innovative products that digitized the world of speech, audio, multimedia, graphics, camera and video processing, most recently applying AI/ML in these same domains. Steven recently joined the BrainChip leadership team to further drive BrainChip’s brand recognition, go-to-market strategy and customer acquisition as BrainChip enters a growth phase for their flagship Akida products. Steven has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.
Matthew Burns
Technical Marketing Manager
Samtec
Matthew Burns develops go-to-market strategies for Samtec’s Silicon to Silicon solutions. Over the course of 20+ years, he has been a leader in design, technical sales and marketing in the telecommunications, medical and electronic components industries. Mr. Burns holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University.
Karl Harvard
COO
Nscale
Karl has over 25 years of experience in the IT, Cloud and Al industry. He previously held senior leadership roles inside AWS and Google as well as building and leading start-up businesses in the HPC and Generative Al cloud service provider industry.
Tim Mamtora
Chief of Innovation and Engineering
Imagination
Evangelos Eleftheriou
Co-Founder and CTO
Axelera AI
Evangelos Eleftheriou, an IEEE and IBM Fellow, is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Axelera AI, a best-in-class performance company that develops a game-changing hardware and software platform for AI.
As a CTO, Evangelos oversees the development and dissemination of technology for external customers, vendors, and other clients to help improve and increase Axelera AI’s business.
Before his current role, Evangelos worked for IBM Research – Zurich, where he held various management positions for over 35 years. His outstanding achievements led him to become an IBM Fellow, which is IBM’s highest technical honour.
In 2002, Evangelos became a Fellow of the IEEE, and later in 2003, he was co-recipient of the IEEE ComS Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award. He was also co-recipient of the 2005 Technology Award of the Eduard Rhein Foundation. In 2005, he was appointed an IBM Fellow and inducted into the IBM Academy of Technology. In 2009, he was co-recipient of the IEEE Control Systems Technology Award and the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award. In 2016, Evangelos received an honoris causa professorship from the University of Patras, Greece. In 2018, he was inducted into the US National Academy of Engineering as Foreign Member. Evangelos has authored or coauthored over 250 publications and holds over 160 patents (granted and pending applications).
His primary interests lie in AI and machine learning, including emerging computing paradigms such as neuromorphic and in-memory computing.
Evangelos holds a PhD and a Master of Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Carleton University, Canada, and a BSc in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece.
Gerald Friedland
Principal Scientist Auto ML
AWS
Dr. Gerald Friedland is a Principal Scientist at AWS working on Low-Code, No-Code Machine Learning. Before that he was CTO and founder of Brainome, a no-code machine learning service for miniature models. Other posts include UC Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and the International Computer Science Institute. He was the lead figure behind the Multimedia Commons initiative, a collection of 100M images and 1M videos for research and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles in conferences, journals, and books. His latest book "Information-Driven Machine Learning" was released by Springer-Nature in Dec. 2023. He also co-authored a textbook on Multimedia Computing with Cambridge University Press. Dr. Friedland received his doctorate (summa cum laude) and master's degree in computer science from Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany, in 2002 and 2006, respectively.
Hasan Siraj,
Head of Software and AI Infrastructure Products
Broadcom
Hasan Siraj is the Head of Software and AI Infrastructure Products at Broadcom, focused on the company's extensive Ethernet portfolio serving broad markets including the hyperscale, service provider, data center and enterprise segments. Prior to joining Broadcom in 2018, he served in a variety of product management leadership roles at Cisco Systems, including leading the Enterprise Switching, Enterprise Routing / SDWAN products teams - two largest businesses at the company. Mr. Siraj earned a master’s in electrical engineering from Cornell University and an M.B.A. from The Wharton School.
Phil Pokorny
Chief Technology Officer
Penguin Solutions
Phil Pokorny is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for SGH / Penguin Solutions. He brings a wealth of engineering experience and customer insight to the design, development, support, and vision for our technology solutions.
Phil joined Penguin in February of 2001 as an engineer, and steadily progressed through the organization, taking on more responsibility and influencing the direction of key technology and design decisions. Prior to joining Penguin, he spent 14 years in various engineering and system administration roles with Cummins, Inc. and Cummins Electronics. At Cummins, Phil participated in the development of internal network standards, deployed and managed a multisite network of multiprotocol routers, and supported a diverse mix of office and engineering workers with a variety of server and desktop operating systems.
He has contributed code to Open Source projects, including the Linux kernel, lm_sensors, and LCDproc.
Phil graduated from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology with Bachelor of Science degrees in math and electrical engineering, with a second major in computer science.
Hyunsik Choi
Head of SW Platform
Furiosa AI
Donald Thompson
Distinguished Engineer
LinkedIn
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.
Dan Rabinovitsj
VP, Infrastructure
Meta
Dan has 30+ years’ experience in developing technology that connects people, with a particular focus on market disruption and innovation. Dan has served in executive leadership roles in Silicon Labs, NXP, Atheros, Qualcomm, Ruckus Networks and Facebook/Meta. Dan joined Meta in 2018 to lead Facebook Connectivity, a team focused on bringing more people online at faster speeds and changing the telecom industry through the Telecom Infra Project. Dan is now supporting a team developing and sustaining data center hardware and AI systems.
Thomas Sohmers
Founder and CEO
Positron AI
Thomas Sohmers is an innovative technologist and entrepreneur, renowned for his pioneering work in the field of advanced computing and artificial intelligence. Thomas began programming at a very early age, which led him to MIT as a high school student where he worked on cutting-edge research. By the age of 18, he had become a Thiel Fellow, marking the beginning of his remarkable journey in technology and innovation. In 2013, Thomas founded Rex Computing, where he designed energy-efficient processors for high-performance computing applications. His groundbreaking work earned him numerous accolades, including a feature in Forbes' 30 Under 30. After a stint exploring the AI industry, working on scaling out GPU clouds and large language models, Thomas founded and became CEO of Positron in 2023. Positron develops highly efficient transformer inferencing systems, and under Thomas's leadership, it has quickly become one of the most creative and promising startups in the AI industry.
Mark Russinovich
CTO and Technical Fellow, Azure
Microsoft
Mark Russinovich is Chief Technology Officer and Technical Fellow for Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s global enterprise-grade cloud platform. A widely recognized expert in distributed systems, operating systems and cybersecurity, Mark earned a Ph.D. in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He later co-founded Winternals Software, joining Microsoft in 2006 when the company was acquired. Mark is a popular speaker at industry conferences such as Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Build, and RSA Conference. He has authored several nonfiction and fiction books, including the Microsoft Press Windows Internals book series, Troubleshooting with the Sysinternals Tools, as well as fictional cyber security thrillers Zero Day, Trojan Horse and Rogue Code.
Arun Nandi
Senior Director and Head of Data & Analytics
Unilever
Arun is a visionary AI and Analytics expert recognized as one of the Top 100 Influential AI & Analytics leaders. He is the Head of Data & Analytics at Unilever today. With over 15 years of experience driving analytics-driven value in organizations, he has built AI practices from the ground up on several occasions. Arun advocates the adoption of AI to overcome enterprise-wide challenges and create growth. Beyond his professional achievements, Arun loves to travel, having explored over 40 countries and is passionate about adventure motorbiking.
Rochan Sankar
Co-Founder & CEO
Enfabrica
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.
Eric Stotzer
Software Engineering Group Director
Cadence
Eric Stotzer is a Software Engineering Group Director at Cadence Design Systems, where he is responsible for the Neuroweave SDK and Xtensa Neural Network Compiler (XNNC). Eric worked for 30 years at Texas Instruments developing system software tools for DSPs and MCUs. Before coming to Cadence, he was at Mythic working on a neural network compiler for mixed-signal AI accelerators. He is a coauthor of the book Using OpenMP - The Next Step: Affinity, Accelerators, Tasking, and SIMD, (MIT Press 2017). Eric holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Houston.
Brett Simpson
Co-Founder & Senior Analyst
Arete Research
Brett is a co-founder of Arete (formed in 2000) and is based in the firm's London office. He focuses on the global semiconductor component sector. Brett is a regular public speaker at industry events and after 17 years looking at the sector, has a wealth of experience to draw on. Prior to Arete, Brett spent two years at Goldman Sachs in an equity analyst role, specialising in European technology following three years with Ericsson UK, working in business development, covering all aspects of wireline and wireless telecom infrastructure.
Andrew Ng
Founder & Executive Chairman
LandingAI
Dr. Andrew Ng is a globally recognized leader in AI (Artificial Intelligence). He is Founder of DeepLearning.AI, Founder & CEO of Landing AI, General Partner at AI Fund, Chairman & Co-Founder of Coursera and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University’s Computer Science Department.
In 2011, he led the development of Stanford University's main MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform and taught an online Machine Learning course that was offered to over 100,000 students leading to the founding of Coursera where he is currently Chairman and Co-founder.
Previously, he was Chief Scientist at Baidu, where he led the company’s ~1300 person AI Group and was responsible for driving the company’s global AI strategy and infrastructure. He was also the founding lead of the Google Brain team.
As a pioneer in machine learning and online education, Dr. Ng has changed countless lives through his work in AI, and has authored or co-authored over 200 research papers in machine learning, robotics and related fields. In 2013, he was named to the Time 100 list of the most influential persons in the world. He holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and the University of California, Berkeley.
Anton McGonnell
Head of SW Products
SambaNova
Anton McGonnell is SambaNova’s Head of SW Products and leads the team defining their
cutting-edge full-stack chips-to-model platform. Prior to SambaNova, Anton played a pivotal
role in shaping the development and implementation of advanced machine learning
technologies at UIPath. Anton received his Bachelor’s in Computer Science from Queens
University in Belfast and his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He is a native of County
Tyrone, Ireland and currently resides in Palo Alto, CA.
Baskar Sridharan
Vice President, AI/ML Services & Infrastructure
AWS
Baskar Sridharan is the Vice President for AI/ML and Data Services & Infrastructure at AWS, where he oversees the strategic direction and development of key services, including Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, and essential data platforms like Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and AWS Glue.
Prior to his current role, Baskar spent nearly six years at Google, where he contributed to advancements in cloud computing infrastructure. Before that, he dedicated 16 years to Microsoft, playing a pivotal role in the development of Azure Data Lake and Cosmos, which have significantly influenced the landscape of cloud storage and data management.
Baskar earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University and has since spent over two decades at the forefront of the tech industry.
He has lived in Seattle for over 20 years, where he, his wife, and two children embrace the beauty of the Pacific Northwest and its many outdoor activities. In his free time, Baskar enjoys practicing music and playing cricket and baseball with his kids.