Meet the Speakers

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.

Richard Socher is the founder and CEO of You.com. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO/CTO of AI startup MetaMind, acquired by Salesforce in 2016. Richard received his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford. He is widely recognized as having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing, inventing the most widely used word vectors, contextual vectors and prompt engineering. He has over 170,000 citations and served as an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Stanford. Outside of work, Richard enjoys paramotor adventures and photography.

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.

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Bio Coming Soon!

Bio Coming Soon!

Bio Coming Soon!

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.

Bio coming soon!

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.

Bio Coming Soon!

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.

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.

Bio coming soon!

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.