Featured Speakers

Ricardo leads the Platform Infrastructure team at CERN with a strong focus on cloud native deployments and machine learning. He has led for several years the internal effort to transition services and workloads to use cloud native technologies, as well as dissemination and training efforts. Ricardo got CERN to join the CNCF and is a lead of the CNCF Research User Group. Prior to this work Ricardo helped develop the grid computing infrastructure serving the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

I am an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department, Columbia University. I am also a co-founder of Arklex.ai that centers its efforts on harnessing the power of AI Agents to empower and shape the future landscape of the workspace. Before that I was an Assistant Professor at UC Davis. I received my PhD at Language Technology Institute under School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University 2017, working with Prof. Alan W Black and Prof. Alexander I. Rudnicky. 2015 summer and 2016 summer, I interned with Prof. David Suendermann-Oeft at ETS San Francisco Office on cloud based multimodal dialog systems. 2014 Fall, I interned with Dan Bohus and Eric Horvitz at Microsoft Research on situated multimodal dialogue systems. I was featured on Forbes 30 under 30 in Science in 2018. My team also won the 2018 Amazon Alexa Socialbot Competition. Our work on Persuasive Dialog Systems also won ACL 2019 best paper nomination.

Prior to CMU, I received a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Linguistics under English Language Major from Zhejiang University in 2011. I worked with Prof. Xiaofei He and Prof. Deng Cai on Machine Learning and Computer Vision. I also worked with Prof. Yunhua Qu on Machine Translation.

Malte Pietsch is CTO & Co-Founder at deepset, where he builds Haystack and the deepset AI Platform to enable developers all over the world to build, optimize, and embed LLM applications efficiently in their products and processes. Before founding deepset in 2018, he conducted NLP research at Carnegie Mellon University and worked for multiple startups as a data scientist. He’s been crafting NLP/LLM applications for all kinds of businesses for more than 10 years and is a big believer in open technology. Besides the open source framework Haystack, he published several popular transformer models (GermanBert, gelectra, several QA models …).

Chang She is the CEO and cofounder of LanceDB, the developer-friendly, open-source database for multi-modal AI. A serial entrepreneur, Chang has been building DS/ML tooling for nearly two decades and is one of the original contributors to the pandas library. Prior to founding LanceDB, Chang was VP of Engineering at TubiTV, where he focused on personalized recommendations and ML experimentation.

With nearly 20 years at the forefront of research and technology, my mission is to drive intentional disruption where 𝗔𝗜 and 𝗤𝘂𝗮𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗺 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 collide and to architect exponential innovation that compounds towards progress, not peril.

I specialize in shaping the future before disruption becomes destiny and lead where bold strategy, emerging technology and governance must align to turn uncertainty into competitive advantage. As a 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝘀𝘁, I design ecosystems where exponential forces accelerate each other responsibly, ensuring that innovation is not just fast, but wise.

I operate at the intersection of 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲, 𝗔𝗜-𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗿𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝘀 and 𝗴𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀 designed for a AI-accelerated world. I bring cohesion to complexity where most see silos. Whether building resilient data ecosystems, embedding accountability into innovation pipelines or guiding enterprises through frontier technologies, I align technical depth with strategic clarity. Along the way, I’ve been recognized as a thought leader in 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮, ensuring that as systems evolve, the human element remains intelligently integrated, not overlooked.

Mark Collier is a longtime open-source strategist and the current General Manager, AI & Infrastructure at the Linux Foundation. He co-founded both the OpenStack project and the OpenInfra Foundation, guiding a small NASA–Rackspace collaboration into one of the most active open-source communities in history igniting a multi-billion-dollar cloud market. At the Linux Foundation he now focuses on the next wave of open technology—AI—working with companies, researchers, and developers to build a vendor-neutral stack that keeps intelligence infrastructure accessible to all. A regular keynote speaker and commentator, Mark translates deep technical shifts into clear strategic insight and for rallying diverse communities to deliver the future of computing in the open.

Verena Dittmer is an ML Engineering Manager at Canva, where she leads one of the company’s core AI Platform teams supporting over 100 ML engineers and applied researchers working across generative AI and traditional machine learning. Her focus includes distributed training, inference optimization, and enhancing developer experience.
With more than six years of experience in both startups and enterprise environments, Verena brings deep technical expertise in delivering production-grade ML systems across NLP, computer vision, and 3D modeling.