Head of the Institute for Machine Learning, Johannes Kepler University

Sepp Hochreiter heads the Institute for Machine Learning, the LIT AI Lab, and the AUDI.JKU deep learning center at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria, and is director of the Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence. He's regarded as a pioneer of deep learning, as he discovered the fundamental deep-learning problem: deep neural networks are hard to train, because they suffer from the now-famous problem of vanishing or exploding gradients. Sepp is best known for inventing the long short-term memory (LSTM) in his diploma thesis in 1991, which was published in 1997. LSTMs have emerged as the best-performing techniques in speech and language processing.

Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Ken Goldberg is an artist, inventor, and roboticist. He's also the William S. Floyd Jr Distinguished Chair in Engineering at the University of California Berkeley, and chief scientist at Ambidextrous Robotics. He co-founded the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. As director of UC Berkeley’s AUTOLab, Ken trains the next generation of researchers and entrepreneurs. Ken and his students have published 300 peer-reviewed papers and nine U.S. patents. Ken's artwork has been exhibited internationally and he founded the Art, Technology, and Culture public lecture series in 1997. He's an adviser to RoboGlobal ETF, and has presented over 500 invited lectures worldwide. Learn more here: http://goldberg.berkeley.edu

Assistant Professor, University of California, San Diego

Rose Yu is an assistant professor in the University of California San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Her research focuses on advancing machine learning techniques for large-scale spatiotemporal data analysis, with applications to sustainability, health, and physical sciences, and with a particular emphasis on physics-guided AI that aims to integrate first principles with data-driven models. Rose has won faculty research awards from Google, Adobe, and Amazon; the NSF CRII Award; and the Best Dissertation Award in USC. She was also nominated as one of the 'MIT Rising Stars in EECS.’ She earned her Ph.D. in computer sciences at the University of Southern California in 2017. She was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology.

Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego

Rommie E. Amaro holds the Distinguished Professorship in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego. She received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering (1999) and her Ph.D. in Chemistry (2005) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Rommie was a NIH postdoctoral fellow with Prof. J. Andrew McCammon at UC San Diego from 2005-2009, and started her independent lab in 2009. She is the recipient of an NIH New Innovator Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the ACS COMP OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, the ACS Kavli Foundation Emerging Leader in Chemistry, the Corwin Hansch Award, and the 2019 Gordon Bell Special Prize for COVID19. Rommie’s scientific interests lie at the intersection of computer-aided drug discovery and biophysical simulation. Her scientific vision revolves around expanding the range and complexity of molecular constituents represented in such simulations, the development of novel multiscale methods for elucidating their time dependent dynamics, and the discovery of novel chemical matter controlling biological function.

VP of Applied Deep Learning Research, NVIDIA

Bryan Catanzaro is vice president of Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, where he leads a team solving problems in fields ranging from video games to chip design.
Catanzaro initially worked at NVIDIA as a research scientist in 2011. During this time, he wrote the prototype and drove the creation of CUDNN, the low-level library now used by most AI researchers to train neural networks. He has also worked at Baidu’s Silicon Valley AI Lab, where he built systems for efficiently training end-to-end deep learning based speech recognition on extremely large datasets, in both English and Chinese.

Catanzaro earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, where he built the Copperhead language and compiler, which allows Python programmers to use nested data parallel abstractions efficiently. He earned both his Master of Science and Bachelor of Science from Brigham Young University, where he worked on computer arithmetic for FPGAs.

Scientific Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA | Prof. of AI at USI | Co-founder of NNAISENSE

Since age 15 or so, the main goal of professor Jürgen Schmidhuber has been to build a self-improving Artificial Intelligence (AI) smarter than himself, then retire. His lab's Deep Learning Neural Networks based on ideas published in the "Annus Mirabilis" 1990-1991 have revolutionised machine learning and AI. By the mid 2010s, they were on 3 billion devices, and used billions of times per day through the users of the world's most valuable public companies, e.g., for greatly improved (CTC/LSTM-based) speech recognition on all Android phones, greatly improved machine translation through Google Translate and Facebook (over 4 billion translations per day), Apple's Siri and Quicktype on all iPhones, the answers of Amazon's Alexa, and numerous other applications. In 2011, his team was the first to win official computer vision contests through deep neural nets, with superhuman performance. In 2012, they had the first deep NN to win a medical imaging contest (on cancer detection). All of this attracted enormous interest from industry. His research group also established the fields of metalearning, mathematically rigorous universal AI and recursive self-improvement in universal problem solvers that learn to learn (since 1987). In 1990, he introduced unsupervised adversarial neural networks that fight each other in a minimax game, to achieve artificial curiosity (GANs are a special case). In 1991, he introduced deep learning through unsupervised pre-training, and neural fast weight programmers formally equivalent to what’s now called linear Transformers. His formal theory of creativity & curiosity & fun explains art, science, music, and humor. He also generalized algorithmic information theory and the many-worlds theory of physics, and introduced the concept of Low-Complexity Art, the information age's extreme form of minimal art. He is recipient of numerous awards, author of over 350 peer-reviewed papers, and Chief Scientist of the company NNAISENSE, which aims at building the first practical general purpose AI. He is a frequent keynote speaker, and also advising various governments on AI strategies.

Director of AI, NVIDIA

Sanja Fidler is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, which she joined in 2014. Sanja took the role of director of AI at NVIDIA in 2018, leading a research lab in Toronto. Previously, she was a research assistant professor at TTI-Chicago, a philanthropically endowed academic institute located on the campus of the University of Chicago, Illinois.

Director of ML Research, NVIDIA

Anima Anandkumar is the director of machine learning research at NVIDIA and a Bren Professor at the California Institute of Technology. Previously, Anima was a principal scientist at Amazon Web Services. She’s received several honors, including the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Career Award, and the Department of Defense’s Young Investigator Award. Anima has also earned faculty fellowships from Microsoft, Google, and Adobe.

Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh

Lillian Chong is an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the recipient of a Silicon Therapeutics Fellowship, National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Carnegie Science Emerging Female Scientist Award, and Hewlett-Packard Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. Lillian earned a B.S. in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Ph.D. in biophysics with Peter Kollman from the University of California in San Francisco, and completed her postdoctoral work with Vijay Pande at Stanford University and William Swope at the IBM Almaden Research Center.

Professor, University of Edinburgh and Brookhaven National Laboratory

Professor Boyle is a theoretical physicist who has worked in Lattice Gauge Theory since 1994. He obtained his PhD at the University of Edinburgh and has worked in both the US and the UK, publishing over one hundred scientific papers. He worked on the development of the QCDOC supercomputer with Columbia University and IBM and worked with IBM on the design of the BlueGene/Q computer chip. He holds a dual appointment with Brookhaven National Laboratory and Edinburgh University. He is the principal author of the Grid software library for high energy physics simulations which supports several types of GPU and CPU architectures.

Staff Research Scientist, Google Brain

Azalia Mirhoseini is a staff research scientist at Google Brain. She is the co-founder/tech-lead of the Machine Learning for Systems Team at Brain, where they focus on deep reinforcement learning-based approaches to solve problems in computer systems and metalearning. She has a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University in Texas. Azalia has received awards including MIT Technology Review's 35-under-35, the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award at Rice, and a Gold Medal in the National Math Olympiad in Iran. Her work has been covered in media outlets including MIT Technology Review and IEEE Spectrum.

Principal Research Scientist, KAUST

Hatem is the Princial Research Scientist in the Extreme Computing Research Center at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, where is also advising several KAUST students in their M.S. and Ph.D. research. Hatem’s research interests include parallel numerical algorithms, parallel programming models, performance optimizations for manycore architectures, and high performance computing. He’s contributed to the integration of numerical algorithms into mainstream vendors’ scientific libraries, such as NVIDIA cuBLAS, and has been collaborating with domain scientists — i.e., astronomers, statisticians, computational chemists, and geophysicists — on leveraging their applications to meet the challenges at exascale.

Professor, Stanford University

Dr. Daniel Rubin, M.D., M.S. is professor of biomedical data science, radiology, medicine (biomedical informatics research), computer science (courtesy), and ophthalmology (courtesy) at Stanford University. He's a radiologist and director of biomedical informatics at Stanford Cancer Institute. His NIH-funded research program focuses on developing artificial intelligence methods in medical imaging to improve health care. Daniel is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, a distinguished investigator from the Academy for Radiology & Biomedical Imaging Research, an RSNA Honored Educator, and has published over 300 papers in artificial intelligence and informatics in medical imaging.

Professor, University of Tuebingen and MPI-IS

Andreas Geiger is professor at the University of Tübingen in Germany and group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS). Prior to this, he was a visiting professor at ETH Zürich and a research scientist at MPI-IS. Andreas studied at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany, the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and received his Ph.D. from KIT in 2013. His research interests are at the intersection of 3D reconstruction, motion estimation, scene understanding, and sensory-motor control. He maintains the KITTI vision benchmark.

Richard T. Cheng Professor of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Sarita Adve is the Richard T. Cheng Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests span the system stack, ranging from hardware to applications. She co-developed the memory models for C++ and Java based on her early work on data-race-free models. She is also known for her work on heterogeneous systems and software-driven approaches for hardware resiliency. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the ACM and IEEE, and received the ACM/IEEE-CS Ken Kennedy award, the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award in innovation, and the SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award.

Chief Scientist, Co-Founder Aurora

J. Andrew (Drew) Bagnell is Chief Scientist and co-founder of Aurora (aurora.tech) where he works to develop self-driving vehicles. He also serves as Consulting Professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and Machine Learning Department. He has worked for two decades at the intersection of machine learning and robotics in both industrial and academic roles. Bagnell’s group has received over a dozen research awards for publications in both the robotics and machine learning communities including best paper awards at ICML, RSS, and ICRA. He received the 2016 Ryan Award, Carnegie Mellon’s award for Meritorious Teaching, and served as the founding director of the Robotics Institute Summer Scholars program, a summer research experience that has enabled hundreds of undergraduates throughout the world to leap into robotics research.

CTO, NVIDIA

Michael Kagan has been NVIDIA's chief technology officer since May 2020. He joined NVIDIA through the Mellanox acquisition. Michael was previously CTO of Mellanox, which he co-founded in April 1999. From 1983 until then, he held a number of architecture and design positions at Intel Corporation. There, Michael was architect of the i860XP vector processor, managed Pentium MMX design, and managed the architecture team of the Basic PC product group. He holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology.

Amy Bunszel, EVP AEC Design Solutions, Autodesk

As executive vice president, Architecture, Engineering and Construction Design Solutions, Amy manages product strategy and execution for Autodesk’s 3D design portfolio including the Autodesk Architecture, Engineering and Construction Collection, AutoCAD family, Autodesk Revit, and more. With more than 20 years of experience innovating software products across the architecture, engineering, and construction, manufacturing, and media and entertainment industries, Amy inspires innovative strategy while driving large-scale agile software development around the globe. Amy combines her roots as a startup co-founder with deep product management knowledge and large-scale product execution expertise to build high-performing teams focused on delivering value to their customers. Amy transformed the company’s bestselling AutoCAD product to a modern multi-platform offering that serves as the backbone of the company’s subscription business and led a global team in developing and delivering desktop, web, and mobile apps that have been adopted by millions of design and engineering professionals worldwide. She's now building on her track record of modernizing beloved software across Autodesk’s broad design and creation product portfolio. Before joining Autodesk, Amy co-founded Linius Technologies in 1996. The company delivered wire harness design software to the manufacturing industry. Its technology was integrated with Autodesk’s Inventor 3D mechanical design software when Autodesk acquired the company in 2003. Amy holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from Cornell University in New York and an M.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She's a member of the President’s Council for Cornell Women, the Entrepreneurship Program at Cornell, and The Athena Alliance.

Kim Libreri, Chief Technology Officer, Epic Games

Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri is responsible for continuing Epic's tradition of fusing state-of-the-art technology with the pinnacle of visual artistry, and for defining the studio's Unreal Engine as the platform of choice for all types of interactive experiences including games, movies, visualization, augmented reality and virtual reality.
Prior to joining Epic Games, Kim was the Chief Strategy Officer at Lucasfilm, where he was responsible for the company's Star Wars technology strategy and innovations in interactive storytelling, including the highly-awarded 1313 prototype. Kim’s career in digital technology and visual effects spans over 20 years, and he has credits on more
than 25 films including ‘Super 8’, ‘Speed Racer’, ‘Poseidon’ and ‘The Matrix Trilogy. He led the development team for the award-winning ‘What Dreams May Come’ as well as for the original ‘Matrix,’ developing the now-legendary Bullet Time technology. Kim is a respected member of many visual effects bodies, including the visual effects branch of the Academy. He has received numerous awards for his work and contributions to Motion Picture technology including an Oscar nomination in 2006 and two Academy Awards in 2000 and 2015.

Chris Wright, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Red Hat

Chris Wright is senior vice president and chief technology officer (CTO) at Red Hat. He leads the Office of the CTO, which is responsible for incubating emerging technologies and developing forward-looking perspectives on innovations like artificial intelligence, cloud and edge computing, distributed storage, software-defined networking and network functions virtualization, containers, automation and continuous delivery, and distributed ledgers.

During his 25 years as a software engineer, Wright has worked in the telecommunications industry and beyond on high-availability and distributed systems. He is passionate about open-source software as the foundation for next-generation IT systems.

Kate Kallot, Head of Emerging Areas, NVIDIA

Kate is currently Head of Emerging Areas at NVIDIA. In this role, Kate oversees ecosystem, strategic alliances and developer relations for emerging markets, segments and use cases. She works closely with partners and influencers to create disruptive AI applications and aims to build a truly global and inclusive AI community.
Prior to NVIDIA, Kate spent close to a decade at various semiconductor companies holding product, ecosystem and business positions in AI, computer vision, and IoT.
Kate has won multiple accolades throughout her career, including Business Insider Top 100 Business Transformers 2020 and VentureBeat Women in AI Rising Star 2020.

Krish Prasad, Senior Vice President and General Manager Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware

Krish is the SVP and GM of VMware’s Cloud Platform Business Unit with responsibility for the vSphere product line. Krish drives our strategy, roadmap, and delivery of the vSphere platform that powers the VMware Hybrid Cloud, spanning on-premises, edge, and the VMware Public Cloud offerings. Krish Prasad has extensive experience in the enterprise software business, having held senior/executive management positions for the past 15 years. Prior to VMware, he worked at HP and BMC Software. During his 25+ years in the software industry, he has built a well-rounded background combining R&D with general management experience. Krish lives in Los Gatos, California with his wife and daughter.

Soumith Chintala, Research Engineer, Facebook AI

Soumith Chintala is a researcher at Facebook AI Research, where he works on high-performance deep learning. Soumith created PyTorch, a deep learning framework that has traction among researchers. Before joining Facebook in August 2014, he worked at MuseAmi, where he built deep learning models for music and vision targeted at mobile devices. He holds a master's degree in computer science from New York University, and spent time in Yann LeCun’s NYU lab building deep-learning models for robotics, pedestrian detection, natural image optical character recognition, and depth images, among others.

Michael Kagan, CTO, NVIDIA

Michael Kagan is NVIDIA CTO (Chief Technology Officer) since May 2020. He joined NVIDIA through Mellanox acquisition. Michael Kagan was previously Mellanox CTO and a co-founder of Mellanox that was founded in April 1999. From 1983 to April 1999, Mr. Kagan held a number of architecture and design positions at Intel Corporation. While at Intel Corporation, Mr. Kagan was architect of the i860XP vector processor, managed Pentium MMX design, and managed the architecture team of the Basic PC product group. Mr. Kagan holds a BSc. in Electrical Engineering from the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology.

Vicki Dobbs Beck, Executive In Charge, ILMxLAB

Vicki Dobbs Beck has more than 30 years of broad-based management experience in the entertainment industry. Variety named her a “Digital Innovator to Watch in 2020,” and in 2019 the Advanced Imaging Society recognized Vicki with a Distinguished Leadership Award for being a significant “entertainment industry growth catalyst.” Currently, Vicki is the executive in charge of ILMxLAB, the award-winning division launched by Lucasfilm in 2015 to pioneer in immersive storytelling. ILMxLAB wants to make it possible for people to "step inside our stories" in ways never before possible. Using new technologies like virtual and augmented reality, ILMxLAB aspires to create connected experiences that transform places, spaces, and our daily lives as we transition from story-telling to story-living. Under Vicki’s leadership, ILMxLAB created the groundbreaking VR installation "Carne y Arena," which was the vision of Alejandro Iñárritu in association with Legendary Entertainment and Fondazione Prada. "Carne y Arena" was chosen as the first-ever VR Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival (2017) and was awarded a special Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, “in recognition of a visionary and powerful experience in storytelling.” In addition to producing multiple promotional VR experiences supporting major film releases and experiments in “all shades of reality,” ILMxLAB has collaborated with the VOID to develop and produce the critically acclaimed hyper-reality experience "Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire," as well as "Ralph Breaks VR" and "Avengers: Damage Control." Most recently, ILMxLAB released "Vader Immortal," a three-part original VR story series for the Oculus Quest and Rift/Rift S headsets. Episode I of "Vader Immortal" won the inaugural PGA Innovation Award in 2020, GDC Best VR/AR Game (2020), was a 2019 Emmy Finalist for Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Media, and won VR Experience of the Year from the London-based VR Awards (2019). Vicki is a member of the Television Academy; the Producers Guild of America; a BAFTA Associate Member; and has served on the BAFTA Immersive Entertainment Advisory Group. She's also chair of AIXR’s VR Advisory Group and an advisory board member for the Los Angeles-based Infinity Festival. Vicki has spoken extensively at industry events and in business forums including CNBC’s Squawk Alley, the BBC, Fortune Brainstorm Tech Conference, Bloomberg Design Conference, Vancouver Film Festival, Infinity Film Festival and YPO’s Global EDGE conference. As a member of Lucasfilm’s Franchise Team, ILM’s senior staff and CG Operations Team, Vicki has received credits on more than 24 films. Vicki received her M.B.A. from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business where she also completed her undergraduate studies, earning a B.A. with distinction in international relations.

Shailesh Shukla, VP, Product Management and GM, Networking, Google Cloud

Shailesh Shukla is the vice president for product management and general manager for networking for Google Cloud. He's responsible for Google Cloud networking and network infrastructure products that power Google services such as YouTube and Search. Before joining Google, Shailesh was vice president and general manager of the security solutions business at Neustar, a $1 billion company that’s a pioneer in DNS. Prior to joining Neustar, he was the chief operating officer at Instart Logic, a fast-growing Silicon Valley, California company disrupting content and application delivery through a cloud-based digital experience platform delivered through a software-as-a-service business model. Instart Logic raised $140 million from premier investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and Stanford University, and has been ranked as the No. 1 startup to work for in America by Glass Door and Business Insider. Previously, Shukla was VP/GM of Cisco's Software and Applications Group in the Service Provider Business, with a portfolio of software products enabling monetization and optimization across mobile, wireline and web players. Before that, he served as VP/GM of the $2 billion+ Converged Optical and Routing Business Unit, responsible for the core routing and optical business for Cisco. In addition, he was VP/GM of the $2 billion+ Edge Routing Business Unit, responsible for a broad portfolio of edge products for the global enterprise, service providers, and public sector markets. Prior to joining Cisco, Sailesh was part of the management team at two Silicon Valley networking companies: Juniper Networks for three years and Redback Networks for seven years, in a variety of roles including vice president of marketing, strategy and corporate development. Previously, he was a partner at Mercer Management Consulting (now Oliver-Wyman) in its communications, information, and entertainment industry practice. He has also worked at Booz-Allen and Hamilton in a similar capacity. Before his consulting career, Sailesh was at Sprint Corporation as a software engineer. He holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from BITS Pilani, India; an M.S.E in electrical engineering from the University of Kansas; and an M.B.A. (S.M.) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. He's a charter member of TiE and advises multiple startup companies.

Ganesh Harinath, Vice President & CTO, 5G MEC, AI Platforms & Next-Gen Applications, Verizon Media.

Ganesh Harinath has been focused on orchestrating strategies and building revenue generating AI based products for Verizon & Verizon media. Dubbed Orion, the massive AI platform was operationalized for Verizon in 2015. He is also accountable for multiple AI based products for Enterprise which generates 10’s of millions of dollars for Verizon Media Group. Currently, he is focused on executing a multi billion dollar Enterprise Edge Intelligence strategy dubbed Leo. While he orchestrated the entire strategy he is leading Architecture, Engineering, Operations & GTM.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ganeshharinath/

Jie Chen, Managing Director in Corporate Model Risk, Wells Fargo

Jie Chen is managing director in the Advanced Technologies for Modeling (AToM) Group of Corporate Model Risk at Wells Fargo. Jie is leading the Statistics and Machine Learning team, developing cutting-edge models, algorithms, and a computing platform to advance the bank’s practice in the areas of credit, operational, and market risk management. She has over 10 years of experience in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and advanced statistics in the banking industry. Jie holds a Ph.D. in statistics from the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Gary Marcus, Founder and CEO, Robust.AI

Gary Marcus, recently named one of 10 voices to watch in AI in 2021, is a scientist, bestselling author, and entrepreneur. He's the founder and CEO of Robust.AI, which aims to revolutionize how intelligent robots are built. Before that, he was founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company acquired by Uber in 2016. Gary is the author of five books, including "The Algebraic Mind," "Kluge," "The Birth of the Mind," and New York Times bestseller "Guitar Zero," as well as editor of "The Future of the Brain" and "The Norton Psychology Reader."

Rob Armstrong, Director Data Science, Tesco

Tesco’s Director of Data Science, Robert Armstrong, is responsible for the development of algorithmic product features which support and automate decision making globally and developing an industry leading Data Science capability housed in hubs across Britain, Central Europe and India. This work focuses on the ever-evolving needs of in-store and online operations, spanning fulfilment and distribution, store operations, customer, commercial and finance domains. Highlights include serving billions of online recommendations, optimizing the last mile delivery of millions of orders per week and building out an intelligent edge within stores.

Prior to joining Tesco, Robert held a variety of data focused roles at Veritas, Symantec and Virgin Media.He holds a BSc in Physics from The University of Warwick and an MSc in Management Science and Operational Research from Warwick Business School.

Jim Swanson, Chief Information Officer, Johnson & Johnson

Jim Swanson is a global business and technology leader and currently Chief Information Officer of Johnson & Johnson, the world’s premier healthcare company. Based at the company headquarters in New Jersey, Jim is responsible for amplifying Johnson & Johnson’s business impact and shaping its direction through the strategic use of technology.

Jim joined Johnson & Johnson from Bayer Crop Science, a $20 billion division of Bayer, where he served as a member of the Executive Leadership Team and as CIO and Head of Digital Transformation. In this role, he inspired teams across the world to use digital innovation and data science to transform and deliver world-class products and services sustainably. Jim and the Information Technology organizations he has led have received industry accolades for their contributions in leadership, application of technology to deliver substantial business value, best places to work in IT, and support of STEM for emerging talent.

Previously, Jim served as CIO at Monsanto for five years before the company was acquired by Bayer. In addition, he had nine years of experience working as Vice President and CIO for Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development, where he advanced technology throughout the company’s R&D organization.

He also amassed a breadth of experience at Merck, where he led the R&D and Commercial IT organizations, and SmithKline Beecham, where he was a bench scientist before transitioning to IT. During his career, Jim has had extensive international experience, including living in the UK and Germany.
Jim holds a bachelor's degree in Bioscience and Biotechnology and a master's degree in Computer Science, both from Drexel University.

Jim is married with three daughters. In his free time, he enjoys running, biking, skiing, scuba diving, and boating, as well as volunteering with United Way Ready by 21 and the American Heart Association.

Vinod Philip, EVP, Chief Technology and Strategy Officer, Siemens Energy

Vinod Philip is the executive vice president and chief technology and strategy officer at Siemens Energy in Berlin, Germany. Vinod started working for Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1997. After moving to Siemens, he quickly assumed management positions with increasing responsibility, among them head of gas turbine engineering (2010-13), CEO of the generator business segment (2013–15), and chief technology officer for power and gas from 2015-17. Vinod holds a master’s degree in materials science and engineering from the University of Central Florida and also received a master’s degree in business administration in international business from Rollins College, Florida.

Bilge Acun, Research Scientist, Facebook

Bilge Acun is a research scientist at Facebook AI Research. Her research interests include systems for machine learning, parallel and distributed computing, and energy-efficient computing. She's working on making large-scale machine learning systems fast and efficient. Particularly, she works on two optimization areas to improve the system throughput and efficiency. Bilge received her Ph.D. in 2017 from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation received the 2018 ACM SigHPC Dissertation Award Honorable Mention. Before joining Facebook, she worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center as a research staff member.

Kit Colbert, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Platform, VMWare

Kit Colbert is VP and CTO of the Cloud Platform business unit at VMware, driving technical strategy for vSphere and hybrid cloud offerings such as VMware Cloud on AWS. Previously, he was GM of Cloud-Native Apps, CTO for End-User Computing, the chief architect for Horizon Workspace, and the lead management architect for the vRealize Operations Suite. Earlier, Kit was the technical lead behind the creation, development, and delivery of the vMotion and Storage vMotion features in vSphere. Kit holds a B.S. in computer science from Brown University in Rhode Island and is a recognized thought-leader. He speaks regularly at industry conferences, including on the main stage at VMworld.

Victoria Uti, Director, Principal Research Engineer, Kroger

Dr. Uti is an accomplished computer scientist leading new discoveries and implementations of advanced technologies at Kroger. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence, is a National Science Foundation and Ford Foundation Fellow and is a founding member of Kroger’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Advisory Council, moving the company toward a more equitable future. Dr. Uti is Kroger’s lead scientist and researcher for Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Video Analytics, and techniques of Sense and Respond systems. She evaluates and recommends new technologies to Kroger leadership teams, translates business needs into innovative technical solutions and infuses AI into the company. Prior to joining Kroger, Victoria founded and managed two successful technology startup companies for web hosting and entertainment.

Ian Buck, General Manager & VP of Accelerated Computing, NVIDIA

Ian Buck is the general manager and vice president of accelerated computing at NVIDIA. He is responsible for the company’s worldwide data center business, including server GPUs and the enabling of NVIDIA computing software for AI and HPC used by millions of developers, researchers, and scientists. Ian joined NVIDIA in 2004 after completing his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in California, where he was the development lead for Brook, the forerunner to generalized computing on GPUs. He is also the creator of CUDA, which has become the world’s leading platform for accelerated parallel computing. Ian has testified before the U.S. Congress on AI and has advised the White House on the topic. He received a B.S. in computer science from Princeton University in New Jersey.

Jack Dangermond, Founder and President, Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri)

A landscape architect by training, Jack Dangermond founded Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri) in 1969 with a vision that computer mapping and analysis could help design a better future. Under Dangermond's leadership, that vision has continued to guide Esri in creating cutting-edge GIS and geodesign technologies used in every industry to make a difference worldwide.

Dangermond fostered the growth of Esri from a small research group to an organization recognized as the world leader in GIS software development. The company employs more than 4,000 people worldwide, many who shared his passion for GIS in the early days are still with the company and remain dedicated to helping our users be successful. Dangermond’s vision for Esri goes beyond building the leading GIS technology. He keeps the company mindful of global challenges and the needs of specific industries. The ongoing drive is to engineer ArcGIS to aggregate and integrate increasing quantities of data, to visualize and analyze the data to gain holistic understanding, and to help individuals and organizations make impactful evidence-based decisions.