Ankur Gupta

Senior Vice President and General Manager

Siemens EDA

Ankur Gupta is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Digital Design Creation at Siemens EDA. This includes Test, Embedded Analytics, Digital IC design, Power Optimization, and Power Integrity Analysis. Formerly he was head of Product Management and Applications at Ansys, Semiconductor and Head of Applications Engineering for Digital Implementation & Signoff at Cadence Design Systems.

Ankur has 20+ years of experience in EDA, working on some of the industry’s most innovative Test, Digital Design, Implementation and Signoff products. He holds a Master’s Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, from Iowa State University.

Thomas Sohmers

Founder and CEO

Positron AI

Thomas Sohmers is an innovative technologist and entrepreneur, renowned for his pioneering work in the field of advanced computing and artificial intelligence. Thomas began programming at a very early age, which led him to MIT as a high school student where he worked on cutting-edge research. By the age of 18, he had become a Thiel Fellow, marking the beginning of his remarkable journey in technology and innovation. In 2013, Thomas founded Rex Computing, where he designed energy-efficient processors for high-performance computing applications. His groundbreaking work earned him numerous accolades, including a feature in Forbes' 30 Under 30. After a stint exploring the AI industry, working on scaling out GPU clouds and large language models, Thomas founded and became CEO of Positron in 2023. Positron develops highly efficient transformer inferencing systems, and under Thomas's leadership, it has quickly become one of the most creative and promising startups in the AI industry.

Jia Li

Co-Founder, Chief AI Officer & President

LiveX AI

Jia is Co-founder, Chief AI Officer and President of a Stealth Generative AI Startup. She is elected as IEEE Fellow for Leadership in Large Scale AI. She is co-teaching the inaugural course of Generative AI and Medicine at Stanford University, where she has served multiple roles including Advisory Board Committee to Nourish, Chief AI Fellow, RWE for Sleep Health and Adjunct Professor at the School of Medicine in the past. She was the Founding Head of R&D at Google Cloud AI. At Google, she oversaw the development of the full stack of AI products on Google Cloud to power solutions for diverse industries. With the passion to make more impact to our everyday life, she later became an entrepreneur, building and advising companies with award-winning platforms to solve today's greatest challenges in life. She has served as Mentor and Professor-in-Residence at StartX, advising founders/companies from Stanford/Alumni. She is the Co-founder and Chairperson of HealthUnity Corporation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. She served briefly at Accenture as a part-time Chief AI Follow for the Generative AI strategy. She also serves as an advisor to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). She is a board member of the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose. She was selected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a recognition bestowed on 100 of the world’s most promising business leaders, artists, public servants, technologists, and social entrepreneurs in 2018. Before joining Google, She was the Head of Research at Snap, leading the AI/AR innovation effort. She received her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.

Partha Ranganathan

VP & Engineering Fellow

Google

Parthasarathy (Partha) Ranganathan is currently a VP & Engineering Fellow, Google where he is the area technical lead for hardware and datacenters, designing systems at scale. Prior to this, he was a HP Fellow and Chief Technologist at Hewlett Packard Labs where he led their research on systems and data centers. Partha has worked on several interdisciplinary systems projects with broad impact on both academia and industry, including widely-used innovations in energy-aware user interfaces, heterogeneous multi-cores, power-efficient servers, accelerators, and disaggregated and data-centric data centers. He has published extensively (including being the co-author on the popular "Datacenter as a Computer" textbook), is a co-inventor on more than 100 patents, and has been recognized with numerous awards. He has been named a top-15 enterprise technology rock star by Business Insider, one of the top 35 young innovators in the world by MIT Tech Review, and is a recipient of the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes award, Rice University's Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni award, and the IIT Madras distinguished alumni award. He is one of few computer scientists to have his work recognized with an Emmy award. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM, and has also served on the board of directors for OpenCompute.

Maria Barisano

Managing Director and Partner

Boston Consulting Group (BCG)

Maria Barisano is a Managing Director and Partner, based in the San Francisco office. She has been with BCG since 2013. As a core group member of BCG's Technology Media and Telecommunication (TMT) Practice Area, she works mainly for companies in the technology / high-tech industry.

Maria is leading the Women in Tech effort on the West Coast within BCG. Maria consistently engages with numerous high-profile women C-suite personnel in the tech industry. Maria is immensely knowledgeable in a broad set of topics, with a strong focus on growth/Go To Market acceleration.

Nikhil Sukhtankar

Head of Product Conversational AI & Messaging Platforms

PayPal

As Head of AI & Messaging Platforms org at PayPal, Nikhil leads Product Management & Conversational AI Design teams. Nikhil is responsible for defining the vision & strategy to bring advancements in AI, especially Generative AI & NLU/NLP to power intuitive & intelligent experiences for PayPal's Consumers & Small-Medium Business Merchants. He brings over two decades of experience in building and growing enterprise scale consumer products across technology start-ups, growth companies and S&P 500 large companies. In recent years, my focus has been on building enterprise-scale vertical Applied AI platforms that offer capabilities & services such as AI powered Chatbot, Voice / IVR applications, Semantic & Lexical Search, Agent Assist Solutions (Smart Replies, Summarization) etc within Consumer Wallet, Payments, SMB Merchants, Shopping / Rewards & Customer Success domains. Nikhil also is a Product Advisor to a handful of startups leaders and CEOs. Nikhil has a technical background with Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and has also earned an AI & ML certification from MIT.

Ved Upadhyay

Senior Data Scientist

Walmart Global Tech

Ved Upadhyay is a seasoned professional in the realm of data science and artificial intelligence (AI). With a focus on addressing complex challenges in data science on an enterprise scale, he boasts over 7 years of hands-on experience in crafting AI-powered solutions for businesses. Ved’s expertise spans diverse industries, including retail, e-commerce, pharmaceuticals, agrotech, and socio-tech, where he has successfully productized multiple machine learning pipelines. Currently serving as a Senior Data Scientist at Walmart, Ved spearheads multiple data science initiatives centered around customer propensity and responsible AI solutions at enterprise scale. Prior to venturing into the industry, Ved earned his master’s degree in Data Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and contributed as a Deep Learning researcher at IIIT Hyderabad. His research contributions are reflected in multiple publications in the field of applied AI.