Meet the Speakers

Elected in November 2016, Senator Scott Wiener represents District 11 in the California State Senate. District 11 includes all of San Francisco, Broadmoor, Colma, and Daly City, as well as portions of South San Francisco.

Senator Wiener is a major leader on AI legislation & author of California AI Testing bill.

Bio coming soon!

Jerry is the co-founder/CEO of LlamaIndex, the data framework for building LLM applications. Before this, he has spent his career at the intersection of ML, research, and startups. He led the ML monitoring team at Robust Intelligence, did self-driving AI research at Uber ATG, and worked on recommendation systems at Quora.

Chip Huyen works to accelerate data analytics on GPUs at Voltron Data. Previously, she was with Snorkel AI and NVIDIA, founded an AI infrastructure startup, and taught Machine Learning Systems Design at Stanford. She’s the author of the book Designing Machine Learning Systems, an Amazon bestseller in AI.

Emmanuel Ameisen is a Research Engineer at Anthropic, where he has worked on training the Claude 2 and Claude 3 AI models, with a focus on improving their coding, SQL, and tool use abilities. Previously, he was a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Stripe, authored the book "Building Machine Learning Powered Applications," and led over 50 applied AI projects as Head of AI at Insight Data Science.

With more than 25 years of engineering and leadership expertise, Mo is the President and CTO at Cruise, an autonomous vehicle company. Over the last six years, he has played a pivotal role in driving Cruise's engineering advancements, while scaling the team from hundreds to thousands of engineers. Mo currently leads Cruise’s engineering, operations, and product teams – those who are responsible for all aspects of our autonomous vehicles development and deployment, including AI, robotics, simulation, product, program, data and machine learning platforms, infrastructure, security, safety, operations, and hardware.

Prior to Cruise, Mo led global technologies for Amazon ReCommerce Platform, Warehouse Deals, and Liquidations: a massive scale global business that enables Amazon to evaluate, price, sell, liquidate, and donate millions of used products daily. In addition, over the past decade, Mo was a technical co-founder and CTO for three tech startups, the latest of which is a cloud-based financial services development platform used by top financial institutions.

Solomon Hykes is the co-founder and CEO of Dagger.io, the first programmable CI/CD engine. Before that, he was the co-founder of Docker, where he served for 10 years as CEO then CTO, and a founding member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee. Solomon grew up in France, and now lives in San Francisco

Shreya Rajpal is the creator and maintainer of Guardrails AI, an open source platform developed to ensure increased safety, reliability, and robustness of large language models in real-world applications. Her expertise spans a decade in the field of machine learning and AI. Most recently, she was the founding engineer at Predibase, where she led the ML infrastructure team. In earlier roles, she was part of the cross-functional ML team within Apple's Special Projects Group and developed computer vision models for autonomous driving perception systems at Drive.ai.

Dr. Amr Awadallah is the CEO and cofounder of Vectara, a company that is enabling organizations to leverage Trusted GenAI in business applications by reducing risks from hallucinations, bias, copyright infringement, and intellectual property pollution.

Amr previously served as VP of Developer Relations for Google Cloud. Prior to joining Google in Nov 2019, Amr co-founded Cloudera in 2008 and as Global CTO, he spent 11 years working closely with enterprises around the world on how to ingest and extract value from big data (he famously coined the concept of “schema-on-read vs schema-on-write”).

He also served as vice president of product intelligence engineering at Yahoo! from 2000-2008. Amr joined Yahoo after they acquired his first startup, Aptivia, in mid-2000 which was a search engine for online product information. Amr received his PhD in EE from Stanford University, and his Bachelor and Master Degrees from Cairo University, Egypt.

Lukas Biewald is the CEO and co-founder of Weights & Biases, the AI developer platform. He also co-founded Figure Eight (formerly CrowdFlower), a pioneer in the data-labeling space. Figure Eight was acquired by Appen (APX) in 2019. Lukas has dedicated his career to optimizing AI workflows, teaching AI practitioners, making artificial intelligence more accessible to all, and occasionally tinkering with robots.

Daniel is a co-founder and CEO of Superlinked - an open-source vector compute framework for building RAG, RecSys, Search & Analytics systems with complex semi-structured data. Superlinked works with Vector Database providers to make it easier to build vector-powered software.

Previously, Daniel was an ML Tech Lead in YouTube Ads infrastructure, building systems that enable the purchase of $10B / year of YouTube Ads.

Kirk Marple is the founder and CEO of Graphlit, an end-to-end API that leverages RAG to that ingests unstructured data and leverages retrieval augmented generation to improve accuracy, domain specificity, adaptability, and context understanding in vertical AI app dev. His 30 year career in data and software leadership includes serving at Microsoft and General Motors.

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Collin Otis is the Director of Autonomy at Kodiak, a leader in self-driving commercial vehicles, and a Founding Engineer. Prior to Kodiak, Collin held positions as Chief of Staff at Uber Advanced Technologies Group and Director & Principal Scientist at Target Corporation. He was Founder and CEO of Powered Analytics, a provider of adtech for large retailers, which was acquired by Target. As an aerospace engineer, Collin previously held Research Scientist positions at NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory. He earned his BS, MS, and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in the area of computational fluid dynamics for hypersonic vehicle applications.

Linus is a Research Engineer at Notion AI. He has spent the last few years building and experimenting with new kinds of tools for thought and software interfaces for creation, like a canvas for exploring the latent space of generative models and writing tools where your ideas connect themselves. His current work focuses on rich language model-based productivity tools and applications of mechanistic interpretability in user interfaces for AI.

Doug Aley has spent his 25 year career helping to found, lead, and scale technology ventures. He is currently Paravision's CEO and an operating partner at Atomic VC. Prior to Paravision, Mr. Aley held positions in product management at Amazon ($AMZN), was VP of Marketing, Product, and Business Development at the voice recognition company, Jott Networks (acquired by $NUAN), helped Zulily scale from $100M to $700M in sales as VP of Product and Corporate Development in the run up to the company’s IPO ($QVCA.O), held the same roles at Room77 (acquired by $GOOG), and started and led Minted’s (private company) digital growth team. At 19, he co-founded and was CEO of his first company, Level Access (sold majority stake to JMI Equity in 2017). He is an investor and advisor in numerous technology startups and sat on the Board of Trustees at The Marin Montessori School for the past 6 years (stepped down in 2023). Mr. Aley holds a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, and lives in Marin County, CA with his wife, Susan, and their two boys.

Todd Underwood leads reliability for the Research Platform at Open AI, working to improve the reliability and usability of the software and systems that train some of the best models in the world.

Prior to that, he was a Senior Engineering Director at Google leading ML capacity engineering in the office of the CFO at Alphabet. Before that, he founded and led ML Site Reliability Engineering, a set of teams that build and scale internal and external AI/ML services and are critical to almost every Product Area at Google. He was previously the Site Lead for Google’s Pittsburgh office. He recently published Reliable Machine Learning: Applying SRE Principles to ML in Production (O’Reilly Press, 2022).

Todd has primary expertise in distributed systems, especially for Machine Learning / AI pipelines, although he also has a background in systems engineering and networking. In addition to Reliable Machine Learning, Todd has presented work on ML at various conferences and forums including OPML20 and TWIMLCon 21 and 22. He has presented work on the future of systems and software reliability engineering at LISA13, LISA16 and SREConEU15, SREConEU 22. He is a co-author of a chapter in the O'Reilly SRE Book. He has published three articles in Usenix’s; login: magazine. He has presented work related to Internet routing dynamics and relationships at NANOG, RIPE, and various Internet interconnection meetings. He served on the Program Committee for OPML, was Chair of the NANOG Program Committee, and helped found the RIPE Programme Committee.

He is interested in how to make computers and people work much, much better together.

Salma is a co-founder of Remyx AI, leading the development of agent-guided MLOps. Previously, she worked at Databricks where she helped customers architect their ML infrastructure. She also runs a research blog, smellslike.ml, where she shares and open sources experiments in applied ML.

Chad Sanderson, CEO of Gable.ai, is a prominent figure in the data tech industry, having held key data positions at leading companies such as Convoy, Microsoft, Sephora, Subway, and Oracle. He is also the author of the upcoming O'Reilly book, "Data Contracts” and write about the future of data infrastructure, modeling, and contracts in his newsletter “Data Products.”

Mohamed is passionate about advancing AI capabilities, leading a career marked by pivotal roles in some of the world's top tech companies. He is CTO and Co-founder of Monta AI, a product studio for global AI solutions.

Formerly, as the Head of Alexa Speaker Recognition at Amazon, he led teams that delivered groundbreaking developments in voice AI and redefined customer interaction with the technology. Earlier at Cisco, he was Director of AI, following the acquisition of Voicea (a company he co-founded) to unlock insights and actions otherwise lost in enterprise conversations.

At LinkedIn and Microsoft, Mohamed led AI and big data teams, serving hundreds of millions of users through his work on LinkedIn's newsfeed personalization, Outlook.com, and Visual Studio. His academic pursuits at Stanford University as a student and a part-time Teaching Assistant for Machine Learning (CS229) and Deep Learning (CS230) reflect his commitment to nurturing the next generation of AI experts.

Mohamed co-authored Computing with Data, a guidebook to wrangling big data effectively, and is currently working on another book titled Machine Learning in the Real World, set to hit bookshelves in 2024. Through his career and writings, Mohamed is driven by a mission to empower people around the globe to collaborate more effectively using software that provides great experiences.

Felix Heide is an Assistant Professor at Princeton University, Head of AI at Torc Robotics, and Founder of the self-driving vehicle startup Algolux (now part of Diamler Trucks and Torc Robotics). Felix researches the theory and application of computational imaging and computer vision systems. Exploring imaging, vision, and display systems end-to-end, his work lies at the intersection of optics, machine learning, optimization, computer graphics, and computer vision.

Julia is the co-CEO and co-founder of Storia AI, building an AI copilot for image editing. Previously, she spent 8 years at Google, where she worked on machine-learning related projects including federated learning and BERT, one of the big large language models that started the LLM revolution. She holds a Computer Science degree from University of Cambridge, and a Masters degree in Machine Translation from University of Oxford.

Kai Wang is the lead product manager of Uber’s AI platform team, managing Uber’s end-to-end ML platform called Michelangelo. Today, 100% of Uber's most business critical ML use cases, including GenAI use cases, are managed and served on Michelangelo, driving Ubers both top line and bottom line business metrics. Kai has 12 years of engineering and product management experience in high tech, with a EE PhD degree from the State University of New York - Buffalo.

Bio Coming Soon!

Joe Reis, a "recovering data scientist" with 20 years in the data industry, is the co-author of the best-selling O'Reilly book, "Fundamentals of Data Engineering." His extensive experience encompasses data engineering, data architecture, machine learning, and more. Joe regularly keynotes major data conferences globally, advises and invests in innovative data product companies, and hosts the popular data podcasts "The Monday Morning Data Chat" and "The Joe Reis Show." In his free time, Joe is dedicated to writing new books and brainstorming ideas to advance the data industry.

Chang is the CEO and Co-founder of LanceDB, the Database for AI. Chang was one of the original coauthors of Pandas and has been building tools for data science and machine learning for almost two decades. Most recently he was VP of Eng at TubiTV where he focused on personalized recommendations and ML experimentation.

Technical Founder with 2 prior exits building OSS product experiments at the intersection of AI agents and devtools. Previously Amazon, Microsoft.

Charles builds and helps people build applications of neural networks. He completed a PhD on neural network optimization at UC Berkeley in 2020 before working at MLOps startup Weights & Biases and on the popular online courses Full Stack Deep Learning and Full Stack LLM Bootcamp. He currently works as an AI Engineer at Modal Labs, a serverless computing platform.

Stephanie Kirmer is a senior machine learning engineer at DataGrail, a company committed to helping businesses protect customer data and minimize risk. She has almost a decade of experience building machine learning solutions in industry, and before going into data science she was an adjunct professor of sociology and higher education administrator. She brings a unique mix of social science perspective and deep technical and business experience to writing and speaking about the challenges facing the machine learning and AI industry today. Learn more at www.stephaniekirmer.com or www.datagrail.io.

Faizaan is an Product lead working on Personalization and Generative AI use cases for Creators and Content Understanding at LinkedIn. He's been in the field of machine learning for 8+ years now and recently launched some of LinkedIn’s first user-facing Gen AI products in early 2023.

Bio Coming Soon!

Raajay is a Senior Staff Engineer in Uber's AI platform team for over 5 years now, working on various components of Machine Learning infrastructure.

Mohamed is the Co-founder & CEO of Kolena and the author of Manning's book: Deep Learning for Vision Systems. Previously, he built and managed AI/ML organizations at Amazon, Twilio, Rakuten, and Synapse (acquired by Palantir). Mohamed regularly speaks at AI conferences, including Amazon's DevCon, O'Reilly's AI conference, and Google's I/O.

Natasha Mascarenhas is a reporter covering the intersection of venture capital and startups, from the dizzying AI boom to the correction rocking venture. She previously covered the tech beat for the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle & TechCrunch. She lives in San Francisco by way of New Jersey.

After being burned one too many times by unexpected model performance in mission-critical production scenarios, Gordon co-founded Kolena to fix fundamental problems with ML testing practices across the industry. Kolena is doing this by building an ML testing and evaluation platform that tells you what you need to know before your model hits the real world.

Prior to Kolena, Gordon designed, implemented, and deployed computer vision products for defense and security as Head of Product at Synapse (acq. by Palantir) and at Palantir.

Alon is the CTO at Aporia, an AI performance platform designed to empower organizations to trust their AI. Alon spent the last decade leading multiple software engineering teams, working closely with organizations in every industry on their Data & Machine Learning platforms.

Joshua is a seasoned Developer Advocate who leads Developer Relations at PremAI. Joshua has spent his time empowering developers to create innovative solutions using cutting-edge open-source technologies. Previously, Joshua worked at Wix, leading Product and R&D engagements for their Developer Relations Team, and at Bytedance. He successfully created content, tutorials, and curated events for the developer community.

Claire is the Chief Product Officer at LaunchDarkly, leading the tech team across product, engineering, ecosystem, and design. She brings a breadth of startup leadership experience, including roles as CPO at Color Health, and Optimizely, which acquired Experiment Engine, a company she founded and led as CEO, in 2017. Outside her role at LaunchDarkly, Claire is an active speaker, advisor, board member, and angel investor, as well as the founder of ChatPRD, an AI copilot for PMs.

Being in the software industry for over 18 years, Cindy is a problem solver and domain expert on building large scale enterprise & cloud product to customers. In 2021, Cindy contributed to the Azure OpenAI service and was one of the early engineers. She is also an active member, architect, and user group co-chair in the Kubernetes, CNCF and LFEdge/Akraino communities.

Currently Cindy is working at Google Kubernetes Engine group. Her team's mission is to onboard GenAI customers (developers, data scientists, ML Engineers, etc.) to GKE by addressing friction points. One of the goals is to curate Open Models and empower customers to make the right choice.

AI Engineer & Researcher at Groq Inc. working on the inference stack in general and on Tool use/Function calling in particular. Prev. founder of Orchest (Apache Airflow alternative github.com/orchest). Studied MSc. Computer Science @ TU Delft & MBA @ RSM Erasmus University.

At Kolena, Skip's role as Head of Developer Relations. His objective is to help ML/AI engineers and data scientists more effectively test and refine their models so that they perform robustly in the real world.

Remy Thellier is a recognized expert in AI and ML, currently serving as the Head of Growth and Strategic Partnerships at Vectice. He leads the largest community of AI top leaders in the USA and is a sought-after speaker at major AI and ML events. His topics of predilection focus on leadership, managerial, technological, and regulatory challenges, specifically in the AI/ML space and its ever-evolving ecosystem of vendors

Oana is an ML engineer with operating experience in enterprise software and investment experience from Pre-Seed to Series B. She invests early stage with a focus on developer tools, open source and AI. Oana dedicates her free time to even up the playing field for women in tech, with her personal project https://www.ready2.build/

James Cham is a venture capital investor with Bloomberg Beta, an early-stage venture capital firm backed by Bloomberg L.P, focused on investing in the future of work. James invests in companies working on applying machine intelligence to businesses and society. He's currently invested in companies like Weights & Biases, Lambda Labs, Streamlit, and Kolena. James speaks and writes on the implications of AI for companies, including a landscape of machine intelligence companies. In the past, he's been involved in investments with companies like LifeLock, LinkedIn, Twilio, DropCam (now Nest), and Skybox Imaging. James was a software developer and management consultant before he started investing. James lives in Palo Alto. He was previously an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners and Trinity, a management consultant at The Boston Consulting Group, and a software developer. He went to Harvard and MIT

Erica Brescia joined Redpoint Ventures as a managing director in 2022, where she leads investments in infrastructure, AI, developer tools and security. She currently serves on the boards of Dagger, Railway, Xata, Zed and Poolside and has led other unannounced infrastructure investments. Prior to Redpoint, Erica was the COO of GitHub. Prior to GitHub, Erica was the co-founder and COO of Bitnami, an open source application packaging and deployment company, which was acquired by VMware. She was also co-founder and CEO of BitRock, which developed software packaging technology. Erica has been a leader in the open source community for over 15 years and has served on the board of the Linux Foundation since 2016. She lives in Walnut Creek, CA with her husband, son and their hilarious lab-chihuahua mix.

Rajpreet Thethy has 20 years of experience working in Tech. She currently serves as a Staff TPM of Data at AssemblyAI, a series C startup building industry-leading Speech ASR models. Prior to AssemblyAI, she was at Google for ~20 years working across various functions including Operations, Finance, and Machine Learning / AI. She holds a Bachelors in Computer Science and MBA from Santa Clara University in California. When she’s not working with data, Rajpreet is an avid painter and loves being in front of a canvas.

Peter Kant is the Founder and CEO of Enabled Intelligence, Inc, an artificial intelligence technology company providing accurate data labeling and AI technology development for U.S. defense and intelligence agencies while providing meaningful high-tech employment to veterans and neurodiverse professionals.

Peter has two decades of experience at the nexus of business, government, technology and policy including leadership positions in state and federal government, large companies, start-ups, and non-profits. He also currently serves on multiple corporate boards and advisory boards of venture funds including: Culpepper Garden, Distributed Spectrum, Ditto, Picogrid, and Spectrohm.

Olga has over 20 years of experience in Language Technology, NLP, Machine Learning, Global Content Transformation and AI Data development and is passionate about both growing businesses through driving change and innovation, and mentoring the next generation of the industry talent. Olga started her career in language technology working on Rule-based machine translation, gradually expanding her expertise into other broader applications of NLP and Machine Learning to enterprise localization workflows. Olga has also served as President of AMTA, currently serves as a Technology Program Sponsor for Women in Localization. Olga is a frequent presenter at industry events, such as TAUS, GALA, Localization World, and various podcasts and webinars, and an active contributor to technology publications. Olga received her MA, Linguistics/Germanic Studies at UC- Berkeley and BA/MA in Linguistics from St. Petersburg State University.

Dr. Ashley Antonides is the Associate Research Director for AI/ML at Two Six Technologies, where she spearheads research initiatives in AI security. With over two decades of experience leading R&D teams in machine learning and data science, her past roles include Research Scientist at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Principal Data Scientist at Maxar, and Chief AI Officer at Anno.ai. She earned her BS from Stanford University and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Antonides has served on the board of the Data Ethics Consortium for Security (DECS), as a co-chair of the Open Geospatial Consortium GeoAI working group, and on the American Statistical Association's Committee on Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.

Savin is the co-founder and CTO of Outerbounds - where his team is building the modern ML stack to accelerate the impact of data science. Previously, he was at Netflix, where he built and open-sourced Metaflow, a full-stack framework for data science

Dr. Ashley Antonides is the Associate Research Director for AI/ML at Two Six Technologies, where she spearheads research initiatives in AI security. With over two decades of experience leading R&D teams in machine learning and data science, her past roles include Research Scientist at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Principal Data Scientist at Maxar, and Chief AI Officer at Anno.ai. She earned her BS from Stanford University and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Antonides has served on the board of the Data Ethics Consortium for Security (DECS), as a co-chair of the Open Geospatial Consortium GeoAI working group, and on the American Statistical Association's Committee on Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.

Erica Greene is a director of engineering at Yahoo where she works on the ML models that power Yahoo News. Erica has worked in the tech industry for 15 years at companies including Etsy and The New York Times. She is based out of New York City where she can be found playing cards, shopping at vintage stores and cooking. She writes a weekly-ish newsletter about AI and the media called Machines on Paper.

Tessa is a research scientist at Databricks working on retrieval augmented generation. Previoiusly she was at the New York Times using computer vision for sports journalism. She has a masters degree in Computer Science from Brown University and has worked in data science roles at Meta, Spacex, Tinder and Snapchat.

Will is the Co-Founder of Coactive AI, helping enterprises unlock the value of their visual data. A former Data Scientist at eBay, Will has previously held various roles as a visiting researcher. His most recent work focuses on the intersection of AI and data systems, including performance benchmarks for data-centric AI and computer vision (e.g., DMLR @ ICML 2023, DataPerf @ ICML 2022, the Dollar Street dataset @ NeurIPS 2022). His previous work spans from IoT electronics to design and performance benchmarking of deep learning in neuromorphic systems. Will holds a PhD from Northwestern University and a BS from MIT.

Florent Blachot is the VP of Data Science & Engineering at Fandom, the world's largest fan platform. In his role, Flo leads the data science and data engineering teams that define the global data vision for Fandom’s portfolio of businesses. He is tasked with building data products and services that enhance revenue and user experience and improving the advertising and engagement features across Fandom’s portfolio of businesses. Flo is based in San Francisco and reports to Adil Adjmal, Chief Technology Officer at Fandom.

Prior to joining Fandom, Flo worked as the Director of Data Science at Ubisoft, a video game company with several development studios across the world. Reporting to the VP of Audience Management and Acquisition, he managed and grew a data science department, delivered actionable insights to all marketing departments, and enabled direct uses of data for CRM, media, and digital marketing.

Barr Moses is CEO & Co-Founder of Monte Carlo, creator of the AI-first data observability leader, backed by Accel, GGV, Redpoint, ICONIQ Growth, Salesforce Ventures, IVP, and other top Silicon Valley investors. Previously, she was VP Customer Operations at customer success company Gainsight, where she helped scale the company 10x in revenue and, among other functions, built the data/analytics team. Prior to that, she was a management consultant at Bain & Company and a research assistant at the Statistics Department at Stanford University. She also served in the Israeli Air Force as a commander of an intelligence data analyst unit. Barr graduated from Stanford with a B.Sc. in Mathematical and Computational Science.

Karthik Kalyanaraman is the Co-founder and CTO of Langtrace AI/Scale3 Labs. With a decade of engineering & leadership experience, Karthik has previously worked and contributed to several projects at companies such as Coinbase, HP, and VMware. He possesses extensive expertise in software design, observability, and infrastructure. Additionally, Karthik is an active member of the Open Telemetry working group, where he plays a key role in developing semantic naming conventions for the Gen AI stack.

Patryk Pijanowski is a young entrepreneur who founded his first company, a software agency, at the age of 17. Within two years, he expanded his team to 20 members and achieved an annual revenue of over $500,000. His experience at the agency inspired him to develop Codejet, an AI Code Generator that empowers designers and developers with enhanced collaboration tools.

Vishakha Gupta-Cledat is Co-founder and CEO of ApertureData. Prior to that, she worked at Intel Labs for over 7 years where she led the design and development of VDMS (the Visual Data Management System) which forms the core of ApertureData’s product, ApertureDB. Vishakha holds a Ph.D in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a M.S. in Information Networking from Carnegie Mellon University. She has worked on scheduling in heterogeneous multi-core environments, graph based storage and applications on non volatile memory systems, and visual data management challenges for analytics use cases.