Speakers & Panelists

Rama Akkiraju

VP AI/ML for IT, NVIDIA         

Rama Akkiraju is Vice President of AI for IT at NVIDIA. Previously, she held several leadership roles during her 20+ years at IBM, including IBM Fellow, Master Inventor, and CTO of Watson AI Operations. At IBM, Rama led AI initiatives like Personality Insights, Tone Analyzer, and scaled Watson's AI services to dozens of languages. She has authored 100+ technical papers and holds 50+ patents with 25+ pending. Recognized as a top innovator, Rama was named one of Forbes' "Top 20 Women in AI Research" and honored with awards such as UC Berkeley’s Athena Award and the "AI Industry Leader of the Year" by WLDA. She holds an MBA from NYU, where she received a gold medal for academic excellence.

Jasmine Jaksic

Senior Director, NVIDIA

Jasmine Jaksic is a Senior Director of Engineering at NVIDIA, where her work focuses on product strategy at the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and the safe deployment of autonomous agents. Previously, she held product and engineering roles at Google, Stripe, and SambaNova, bringing emerging infrastructure and AI technologies into production. Jasmine was a founding member of Istio, the open source service mesh for securing and managing cloud-native applications. Her current work connects advances in agentic AI with the security and operational requirements of enterprise deployment.

Rachel Allen

Engineering Manager, NVIDIA

Rachel is an engineering manager at NVIDIA leading teams across cybersecurity AI and agentic AI applications. Her work spans the research and development of GPU-accelerated machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI solutions, from long-running enterprise agents to cybersecurity threat detection. Prior to NVIDIA, Rachel was a lead data scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton, where she designed capabilities for advanced threat hunting and network defense. She holds a bachelor's degree in cognitive science and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Virginia.

Chenxi Wang

Founder and General Partner at Rain Capital

Dr. Chenxi Wang is the Founder and General Partner of Rain Capital, a  Silicon Valley-based venture fund. A well-known investor, technologist, and thought leader in the AI and Cybersecurity markets, Dr. Wang served on the Board of Directors for MDU Resources (NYSE: MDU), a Fortune 500 company. The recipient of the 2023 Venturebeat Women in AI award, Chenxi started her career as a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department. She later serviced as VP of Research at Forrester Research, VP of strategy with Intel, and a number of C-level positions with various companies. With Rain Capital, Chenxi has invested in a dozen early stage  startups, and spearheaded late-stage investments into Coreweave, Anthropic, xAI, Scale AI, and other growing AI companies. Chenxi was named by Fortune as one of the Top Cyber Investors in the world and recognized by trade media as Women Investor of 2022, and Women-of-Influence of 2024. 

Chenxi is a sought-after keynote speaker and has headlined events worldwide, including the RSA conference, BSides, Blackhat Middle East. Chenxi holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia.

Marudan Kiji

Chief Science Officer at LangGenius Inc. & CEO at LangGenius K.K. Japan

Dr. Marudan Kiji is the CEO of Dify Japan and a co-founder of LangGenius, where he leads the development and adoption of enterprise AI agent platforms. He previously worked at Honda R&D and Tadano, specializing in AI, robotics, autonomous systems, and intelligent perception. With a PhD in Intelligent Systems, Marudan is a recognized expert in generative AI, physical AI, and enterprise AI orchestration, and is active in building the AI ecosystem in Japan through industry collaborations and the Dify Association.

Hooman Sedghamiz

Senior Director AI/ML at Bayer

Hooman is Sr. Director of AI/ML at Bayer AG and Product Owner of myGenAssist, an enterprise-scale generative AI and agentic platform he leads the development of, serving Bayer employees globally. He served as Co-Chair of the EMNLP 2023 GEM Industrial Track, establishing the workshop's inaugural industrial forum. Prior to Bayer, he held research positions at the University of California San Diego (AI/ML Advisor) and LivaNova (Senior Research Scientist), where he developed algorithms deployed in FDA-approved medical devices, including cochlear implants, vagus nerve stimulators, and pacemakers. His work has been published in EMNLP, BMC Systems Biology, and Frontiers journals. He holds a granted international patent for medical device innovations and authored BioSigKit, an open-source biomedical signal processing toolkit with 45,240+ downloads. Hooman holds an M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from Linköping University, Sweden.