Cassandra Summit

Chip Huyen is a co-founder of Claypot AI, a platform for real-time machine learning. Previously, she was with Snorkel AI and NVIDIA. She teaches CS 329S: Machine Learning Systems Design at Stanford. She’s the author of Designing Machine Learning Systems (O’Reilly, 2022).

LinkedIn included her among Top Voices in Software Development (2019) and Top Voices in Data Science & AI (2020). She’s the author of four Vietnamese books.

Jeff Boudier builds products at Hugging Face, the #1 open platform for AI builders.

Previously Jeff was a co-founder of Stupeflix, acquired by GoPro, where he served as director of Product Management, Product Marketing, Business Development and Corporate Development

Jorge O. Castro is a community manager, specializing in Open Source. He’s basically a cat herder – a combination of engineering, developer relations, and user advocacy.

Starting as a system administrator at Oakland University in Rochester Hills, Michigan, Jorge joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu for about 10 years before moving to Heptio to work on Kubernetes. Heptio was then acquired by VMware in December 2018 where he learned about Enterprise software (oh boy!). Then he did a tour at Stacklet working on the Cloud Custodian project, saving you some dollar bills. These days Jorge is a Developer Advocate at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, where he’s tasked with helping make open source sustainable.

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.

I am currently a Principal Research Software Engineer at the Human-AI eXperiences (HAX) team, Microsoft Research where I focus on Generative AI. My research interests are at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI), computational social science, and applied machine learning. My research has been published at conferences such as ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, and CHI and has received multiple best paper awards. My work has also been featured in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and VentureBeat. I am an IEEE Senior member, a Google Certified Professional (Data Engineer, Cloud Architect) and currently a Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning.

I Hold a PhD in Information Systems from City University of Hong Kong (recipient of the HKPFS scholar award by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council). My dissertation studied developer contribution behaviour in software crowdsourcing contests – factors influencing participation, the impact of incentives on participation behaviour and the problem solving process within crowdsourcing contests. Prior to City University, I studied at the Information Networking Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where I earned a Masters degree in Information Networking. I previously worked as a Principal Research Engineer at Cloudera Fast Forward Labs, Research Staff Member at IBM Research, Technical Lead for MIT Global Startup Labs, Researcher at the Innovation Management Lab, Athens Information Technology Athens Greece, and founder/lead developer for a small startup focused on West African markets.

In my free time, I enjoy music (some self taught guitar, piano), sports (participated in the Hong Kong Marathon thrice) and exploring art (some drawing, 3d modelling, african mask art).

Brian Granger is a Senior Principal Technologist at Amazon Web Services and a professor of physics and data science at Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, CA. He works at the intersection of UX design and engineering on tools for scientific computing, data science, machine learning, and data visualization. Brian is a co-founder and leader of Project Jupyter, co-founder of the Altair project for statistical visualization, and creator of the PyZMQ project for ZMQ-based message passing in Python. At AWS he is a technical and open source leader in the AI/ML organization. Brian also represents AWS as a board member of the PyTorch Foundation. He is a winner of the 2017 ACM Software System Award for his work on Project Jupyter and has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Chet Kapoor is Chairman and CEO of DataStax, the real-time AI company. With more than two decades of leadership across tech giants like Google, IBM, and BEA Systems, Chet has always thought about infusing AI into businesses at scale. With his roots at Steve Jobs’ company NeXT, Chet learned the power of working with incredible people who want to change the world. This insight helped fuel his career and he ultimately took the helm of Apigee as CEO in 2007 where he saw APIs as a platform for bringing AI to the enterprise.

After a successful IPO and eventual acquisition of Apigee by Google, Chet dug in and recognized the solution to deeply enabling AI at scale was to start with data. His journey culminated when he became the CEO of DataStax in October 2019. With a focus on strategy, operations, and people, the company launched Astra DB—a pioneering DBaaS powered by Apache Cassandra—and seamlessly integrated real-time AI with streaming capabilities and event processing engine, Kaskada’s, feature store. Now, with vector search for generative AI, DataStax customers can build massively scalable AI agents and deliver powerful apps leveraging generative AI.

Last year, in the pre-ChatGPT desert, I cofounded Lamini, an LLM startup based on my PhD thesis. Wish me luck and hope to see some of you along the journey!

Follow some things I do or care about at twitter.com/realSharonZhou.

Josh is a committer and PMC member who has worked on Apache Cassandra since early 2014 for various companies and in various roles. He’s the author of Change Data Capture, Denylisting, multiple guardrails, the JVM Stability inspector, and generally has his fingers in a lot of pies. He currently works for Apple on their Cassandra Storage team.

Praveen Viswanath is a co-founder and Chief Architect at Alpha Ori Technologies, a company that is transforming the maritime industry with smart digital solutions.

Vidhya Arvind is a Senior Software Engineer for Netflix building abstractions. She is a founding member of Netflix’s data abstraction platform, which supports common patterns including KeyValue, Tree, TimeSeries, Table Metadata, and more. She loves learning, debugging, scaling systems, and solving hard problems. Vidhya currently spends most of her time providing scalable abstractions for thousands of developers at Netflix.

Himanshu Jindal is a Senior Software Engineer at AWS with over 10 years of experience building large scale distributed systems across different AWS services like AWS IoT, Amazon RDS and AWS Analytics. In her current role, he is working with the Amazon Keyspaces team to build a managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service.

Bret joined DataStax 8+ years ago and has worked on various Apache Cassandra drivers in the last 4 years. He’s one of the core maintainers for java driver, python driver, NodeJS driver and C++ driver of Apache Cassandra.

His primary interests are the design and construction of distributed and/or highly concurrent systems. He also has a strong interest in the security implications of distributed systems as well as the programming languages and platforms used to implement such systems.

Lindsey is a Software Engineer on Bloomberg’s NoSQL Infrastructure team, building Cassandra as a Service for internal application teams. She previously presented her team’s work at ApacheCon NA 2022.

Timothy Tran is a Data Engineering Manager at Alpha Ori Technologies, a company that is transforming the maritime industry with smart digital solutions.

Jake is the DB Tech Lead and Chief Architect at DataStax with over 20 years of experience in the areas of distributed systems, finance, and manufacturing. He is a member of the Apache Foundation and is on the project committee of the Apache Cassandra, Arrow, and Thrift projects. Jake has a reputation for developing creative solutions to solve difficult problems and fostering a culture of trust and innovation. He believes the best software is built by small diverse teams who are encouraged to think freely. Jake received his B.S. in Computer Science from Lehigh University along with a minor in Cognitive Science.

Hello! I’m Stefano, software engineer at DataStax with a strong interest in Apache Cassandra™ and distributed data systems in general.

My current work area revolves (mostly) around creating integrations between our DBaaS and other services/tools, specifically around Generative AI.My past work experiences include teaching, academic research (I’m a physicist by education), and developer advocacy.

I live and work at the foot of the Alps, in Italy, and enjoy invertebrate biology as a hobby.

Ekta Sachan is a engineering leader with diverse experiences over the last 20 years across verticals like retail, fintech, utility, and now building cloud database services at AWS. In her current role she leads three engineering teams for Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra). In her role at Puget Sound Energy she built a service that enabled outage communication using Cassandra and Cassandra was an integral part of the architecture for their self-service website availability goal of 99.99%.

As the Head of Engineering at Skypoint, I lead a team of talented engineers who build and maintain scalable, reliable, and state-of-the-art data and AI solutions. I have a B.Tech. in Computer Engineering from Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, and have previously helped scale and build Platform and Infrastructure teams at top startups.

Colleen Velo has been with SmartThings for over 7 years. As a member of the Cloud Data Engineering team, she has been working with Cassandra for all of that time. Prior to working at SmartThings, she has been involved with both the Health Industry verticals as well as the digital news vertical (including doing both summer and winter olympics websites for NBC). She can be found on Twitter and Github as: cmvelo Speaking Sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se32sXCKb9g