Featured Keynote Speakers

Brittany Kaiser is Chief Executive Officer of Alpha Compute Corp. (Nasdaq: ALP), where she leads strategy in confidential computing, data sovereignty, and AI infrastructure. A globally recognized authority on data rights, digital assets, and AI governance, she became a leading voice in the modern privacy movement after serving as a whistleblower in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Kaiser is the author of the international bestseller Targeted and the principal subject of the Emmy- and BAFTA-nominated Netflix documentary The Great Hack. She has advised U.S. congressional committees, governments, and regulators on data ownership, digital asset policy, and responsible AI, and co-authored legislation shaping the digital economy. A serial entrepreneur and advocate, she is also Co-Founder and President of the Own Your Data Foundation and a sought-after keynote speaker worldwide.

Hugo Romero is Corporate Vice President of the Product Security Office at AMD, where he leads AMD’s end-to-end product security strategy across hardware and software. In this role, he drives security across SoC Security Architecture, Confidential Computing, Root of Trust, Security Product Management, Offensive Security Research, Secure Development Lifecycle, and PSIRT. Hugo brings deep experience in silicon and platform security, including 24 years at Qualcomm, where he led teams developing ARM-based products and later oversaw SoC Security Architecture and offensive security research. At AMD, he is focused on advancing security from silicon to software and helping customers deploy trusted platforms for the next generation of cloud, AI, and confidential computing workloads.

Mike Bursell is the Executive Director of the Confidential Computing Consortium, having been involved since its foundation in 2019. He is one of the co-founders of the open source Enarx project and was CEO and co-founder of the start-up Profian and currently holds advisory board roles with various start-ups. Previous companies include Red Hat, Intel and Citrix, with roles in security, virtualisation and networking. He regularly speaks at industry events in Europe, North America and APAC and has a YouTube channel dedicated to cybersecurity education.

Professional interests include: Confidential Computing, the EU Cybersecurity Resilience Act (CRA), Linux, trust, open source software and community, security, decentralised and distributed systems, Web3, blockchain.

Mike has an MA from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from the Open University, and is author of “Trust in Computer Systems and the Cloud”, published by Wiley. He holds over 100 patents and previously served on the Red Hat patent review committee.

Monique Dumais joined Encore Capital Group® in 2019 and serves as Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer for Encore Capital Group and Midland Credit Management. In this role, Ms. Dumais is responsible for enabling the business to achieve its goals by delivering strategic technology solutions through a robust infrastructure, secure framework, stable applications and business intelligence.

Ms. Dumais comes to Encore from Bank of America, where she gained 16 years of experience in the financial services industry serving in senior and executive roles. Most recently at Bank of America, Ms. Dumais served as Senior Vice President, Technology Executive. In this role, Ms. Dumais was responsible for enterprise document, content and record services, and led a diverse, global team of 500 IT professionals across sites in the U.S. and India. Prior to this, Ms. Dumais served in leadership roles responsible for business process operations and loss mitigation technology for the bank. Ms. Dumais also served in an executive capacity with Balboa Insurance Group, which was acquired by Bank of America in 2008.

Ms. Dumais graduated from Sault College of Applied Arts and Technology in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada.

Anand Pashupathy is an Intel Vice President and Intel Product Assurance and Security General Manager responsible for the Intel’s Product Security and Confidential Compute roadmaps, implementation and operationalization of proactive security and risk-prioritized measures, security governance and oversight, and continuing to foster a security first culture in Intel’s product development. He’s held various technology planning, engineering and end-to-end solution management roles leading large teams, that included driving revenue-based services.

Jim’s career spans three of the largest technology trends to rise over the last decade: mobile computing, cloud computing and open source software. Today, as executive director of The Linux Foundation, he uses this experience to accelerate innovation in technology through the use of open source and Linux.

At The Linux Foundation, Jim works with the world’s largest technology companies, including IBM, Intel, Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, and others to help define the future of computing on the server, in the cloud, and on a variety of new mobile computing devices. His work at the vendor-neutral Linux Foundation gives him a unique and aggregate perspective on the global technology industry.

Jim has been recognized for his insights on the changing economics of the technology industry. His writing has appeared in Businessweek, Wired, and other top technology journals, and he is a regular keynote speaker at industry events. He advises a variety of startups, including Splashtop, and sits on the boards of the Global Economic Symposium, Open Source For America, and Chinese Open Source Promotion Union.

Mark Russinovich is Chief Technology Officer and Technical Fellow for Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s global enterprise-grade cloud platform. A widely recognized expert in distributed systems, operating systems and cybersecurity, Mark earned a Ph.D. in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He later co-founded Winternals Software, joining Microsoft in 2006 when the company was acquired. Mark is a popular speaker at industry conferences such as Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Build, and RSA Conference. He has authored several nonfiction and fiction books, including the Microsoft Press Windows Internals book series, Troubleshooting with the Sysinternals Tools, as well as fictional cyber security thrillers Zero Day, Trojan Horse and Rogue Code.

Dr. Najwa Aaraj is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research pillar of the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), the overarching advanced technology body in Abu Dhabi responsible for driving research and development for transformative technology outcomes. Dr. Aaraj also serves as the CEO of QuantumGate, part of VentureOne, ATRC’s commercialization arm, delivering post-quantum cryptography and quantum-resilient security solutions to protect organizations’ critical data for the post-quantum era.

Aaron Fulkerson has built and scaled category-defining enterprise platforms around a simple principle: trust unlocks growth. As founder of MindTouch and later at ServiceNow—where he led the creation and growth of ServiceNow Impact and was part of the leadership team scaling Customer Workflows into a multi-billion-dollar business—his work has centered on turning trust into measurable enterprise outcomes. Today as CEO of OPAQUE, he applies that discipline to the defining constraint of the AI era: moving AI from experimentation to production in environments where risk, governance, and scrutiny are non-negotiable, so organizations can capture AI’s upside without compromising their data, reputation, or future.

Ion Stoica is a Professor in the EECS Department and holds the Xu Bao Chancellor Chair at the University of California at Berkeley, the Director of Sky Computing Lab, and the Executive Chairman of Databricks and Anyscale. He is currently doing research on AI systems and cloud computing, and his work includes numerous open-source projects such as SkyPilot, vLLM, ChatBot Arena , Ray and Apache Spark. He is a Member of National Academy of Engineering, an Honorary Member of the Romanian Academy and an ACM Fellow. He also co-founded three companies, Anyscale (2019), Databricks (2013) and Conviva (2006).