John L. Hennessy
Chairman
Alphabet Inc.
John L. Hennessy is the Chairman of Alphabet Inc., Board Member of Cisco Systems, the former President of Stanford University, a co-founder of MIPS Computer Systems & Atheros, and a recent Turing Award laureate for his pioneering development of RISC architecture, alongside David Patterson. Dr. Hennessy was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 2012 and was appointed a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2007, among a multitude of accolades for his leadership in the field of computer science, architecture & engineering.
In 2016, he co-founded the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program, which has a $750 million endowment to fully fund graduate students at Stanford for up to three years.
Robert Gendron
Corporate Vice President for Product Marketing & Business Development
Vicor
Mr. Gendron is the Corporate Vice President for Product Marketing & Business Development at Vicor Corporation. Vicor is focused on delivering 48V high density/high efficiency power module products within datacenter, industrial, LED lighting, and automotive applications. Prior to joining Vicor, Mr. Gendron has held senior marketing and sales roles at various semiconductor companies including Analog Devices, STMicroelectronics, Fairchild Semiconductor, International Rectifier, and Volterra. Mr. Gendron also serves on the Industrial Advisory Board for the University of New Hampshire Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Mr. Gendron holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson University, a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University, a M.B.A. from the Whittemore School of Business at the University of New Hampshire, and is a registered Professional Engineer by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Eric Chung
Principal Researcher & Manager
Microsoft
Eitan Medina
Chief Business Officer
Habana
Prior to Habana, Eitan Medina was the VP and GM of the Fingerprint Business Unit at TDK-InvenSense. Prior to the TDK acquisition he was VP of Marketing at InvenSense and VP of Engineering at Audience Inc. (acquired by Knowles).
Victoria Rege
Director of Alliances & Strategic Partnerships
Graphcore
Victoria has over a decade of experience in the semiconductor space. She currently heads up Strategic Partnerships at Graphcore, working with key customers and leading Research & Universities AI engagements. Previously she held several leadership positions at NVIDIA from global alliances, product marketing and campaigns to the founding of the GPU Technology Conference. Prior to joining NVIDIA, Victoria worked in the hedge fund space, as Executive Director for the Hedge Fund Business Operations Association. Victoria is a frequent contributor to ACM SIGGRAPH and is Immersive Chair for the SIGGRAPH 2019 Conference. She's also an active member of the Consumer Technology Association's AI Working Group.
Misha Smelyanskiy
Director, AI System Co-Design
Facebook
Misha Smelyanskiy is a Director of AI System Co-Design Group at Facebook. The group delivers innovative, high-performance optimizations of key AI services on existing platforms, as well as co-designs future AI systems at datacenter scale. Before joining Facebook in early 2017, Misha spent 13 years at Intel. First at Intel Parallel Computing Labs, leading application-driven parallel architecture research, which resulted in significant contribution to the definition of Intel first Many-Integrated Core architecture. And later as the director of Exascale SW/HW co-design group, working with external HPC and Machine Learning customers to derive system-level hardware. Misha has published 50+ papers in top-tier architecture, supercomputing and ML conferences and journals. Misha won Green500 competition in 2012, developed world fastest distributed quantum system simulator in 2016, and was 2014 Gordon Bell Award Finalist.
Carlos Macian
eSilicon
Naveen Rao
CEO
Stealth Start-Up
Naveen Rao is corporate vice president and general manager of the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel Corporation.
Trained as both a computer architect and neuroscientist, Dr. Rao joined Intel in 2016 with the acquisition of Nervana Systems. As chief executive officer and co-founder of Nervana, he led the company to become a recognized leader in the deep learning field. Before founding Nervana in 2014, Rao was a neuromorphic machines researcher at Qualcomm Inc., where he focused on neural computation and learning in artificial systems. Rao’s earlier career included engineering roles at Kealia Inc., CALY Networks and Sun Microsystems Inc.
Rao earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Duke University, then spent a decade as a computer architect before going on to earn a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Brown University
Thomas Andersen
VP, AI and Machine Learning
Synopsys
Dr. Andersen heads the artificial intelligence and machine learning design group at Synopsys, where he focuses on developing new technologies in the AI and ML space to automate the future of chip design. He has more than 20 years of experience in the semiconductor and EDA industry. Dr. Andersen started his career at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, followed by managing synthesis/place-and-route engineering at Magma Design Automation and Synopsys. He holds a Master’s degree from the University of Stuttgart and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany.
Cheng Wang
Co-Founder & SVP, Architecture & Engineering
Flex Logix
Originally from Shanghai, PRC. Cheng has led the architecture, silicon implementation and software development for eFPGA over multiple generations from 180nm-16nm and now AI inferencing development at Flex Logix. Two years as VLSI designer at Zoran. BSEECS, UC Berkeley. MSEE, EE PhD UCLA: designed 5 FPGA chips from 90nm to 40nm. 2013 Distinguished PhD Dissertation Award. 2014 ISSCC Lewis Winner Award for Outstanding Paper. Multiple patents at UCLA and Flex Logix.
Chris Eliasmith
Co-CEO
Applied Brain Research
Chris is the co-inventor of the Neural Engineering Framework (NEF), the Neural Engineering Objects (Nengo) software environment, and the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA), all of which are dedicated to understanding how the brain works. His team has developed the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network (Spaun) which is the most realistic functional brain simulation yet developed. He won the prestigious 2015 NSERC Polanyi Award for his research.
Chris is the Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Neuroscience. At the University of Waterloo, Chris is jointly appointed in the Philosophy and Systems Design Engineering departments, as well as being cross-appointed to the Computer Science department. Chris has supervised students in each of these departments as well as in Biology and Psychology. Chris is the director of the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience (CTN) at the University of Waterloo. The Centre brings together researchers across many faculties as diverse as math, engineering, arts and science who are interested in computational and theoretical models of neural systems.
The Computational Neuroscience Research Group (CNRG) is Chris’ research lab which is associated with the CTN. The CNRG site contains the most up-to-date information on Chris’ team’s research. Chris has published two books: How to Build a Brain (Oxford University Press) and his seminal Neural Engineering.
When he is not pushing the boundaries of theoretical neuroscience forward or hanging out with his team at the CNRG, Chris spends time with his family and occasionally straps on the blades for a game of hockey near his home in Waterloo. He has a Bacon-Erdos number of 8.
Ingolf Held
CEO
GrAI Matter Labs
Mr. Ingolf Held has been Chief Executive Officer of GrAI Matter Labs (GML) since January 2018. Prior to GML, he was responsible for technology strategy and product marketing of imaging and computer vision at Intel. He holds an MScEE from Erlangen University and an MBA from Rotterdam School of Management.
David Kanter
Founder & Executive Director
MLCommons
David founded and leads MLCommons, to make machine learning better for everyone through benchmarks, such as MLPerf, and building datasets and tools for data-centric AI.
The mission of MLCommons™ is to make machine learning better for everyone. Together with its 50+ founding Members and Affiliates, including startups, leading companies, academics, and non-profits from around the globe, MLCommons will help grow machine learning from a research field into a mature industry through benchmarks, public datasets and best practices. MLCommons firmly believes in the power of open-source and open data. Our software projects are generally available under the Apache 2.0 license and our datasets generally use CC-BY 4.0.
Bryan Bowyer
Director of Engineering
Mentor, A Siemens Business
Bryan Bowyer leads the HLS Product Design team in the Digital Design & Implementation Solutions' Division of Mentor, A Siemens Company. Bryan has created a wide range of hardware using HLS, from FFTs to AXI Interfaces in C++ and SystemC, and has worked on HLS tools for the past 20 years. Bryan received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Oregon State University
Sylvain DuBois
VP Business Development & Marketing
Crossbar
Sylvain Dubois joined the Crossbar management team in 2013 as Vice President of Strategic Marketing and Business Development. With over 17 years of semiconductor experience in business development and strategic product marketing, he brings a proven ability to analyze market trends, identify new, profitable business opportunities and create precise product positioning that is in perfect sync with market demands to drive market share leadership and business results.
Prior to joining Crossbar, Mr. Dubois led strategic product positioning and market engagement for developing new products at Spansion. Responsible for identifying new growth opportunities and expanding the product portfolio, Mr. Dubois was instrumental in defining the Spansion Flash memory product roadmap.
From 2002-2006, Mr. Dubois was a System-on-Chip architect of OMAP application processors at Texas Instruments. Mr. Dubois was in charge of the architecture and technology roadmap of DRAM and Flash memory controllers, and developed strategic relationships with major DRAM and Flash memory suppliers.
Sylvain Dubois holds a Master of Science in Microelectronics from E.S.I.E.E. (Paris), University of Southampton (UK) and Universidad Pontifica Comillas (Spain).
Mike Henry
Co-Founder & CEO
Mythic
Karl Freund
Founder & Principal Analyst
Cambrian AI Research
Karl Freund is the founder and principal analyst of Cambrian AI Research. Prior to this, he was Moor Insights & Strategy’s consulting lead for HPC and Deep Learning. His recent experiences as the VP of Marketing at AMD and Calxeda, as well as his previous positions at Cray and IBM, positions him as a leading industry expert in these rapidly evolving industries. Karl works with investment and technology customers to help them understand the emerging Deep Learning opportunity in data centers, from competitive landscape to ecosystem to strategy.
Karl has worked directly with datacenter end users, OEMs, ODMs and the industry ecosystem, enabling him to help his clients define the appropriate business, product, and go-to-market strategies. He is also recognized expert on the subject of low-power servers and the emergence of ARM in the datacenter and has been a featured speaker at scores of investment and industry conferences on this topic.
Accomplishments during his career include:
- Led the revived HPC initiative at AMD, targeting APUs at deep learning and other HPC workloads
- Created an industry-wide thought leadership position for Calxeda in the ARM Server market
- Helped forge the early relationship between HP and Calxeda leading to the surprise announcement of HP Moonshot with Calxeda in 2011
- Built the IBM Power Server brand from 14% market share to over 50% share
- Integrated the Tivoli brand into the IBM company’s branding and marketing organization
- Co-Led the integration of HP and Apollo Marketing after the Boston-based desktop company’s acquisition
Karl’s background includes RISC and Mainframe servers, as well as HPC (Supercomputing). He has extensive experience as a global marketing executive at IBM where he was VP Marketing (2000-2010), Cray where he was VP Marketing (1995-1998), and HP where he was a Division Marketing Manager (1979-1995).