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 Engineering Director at NVIDIA

Jasmine Jaksic is a senior engineering director at NVIDIA, where she leads IT product development and management. Previously, she worked at Google, Stripe and SambaNova where she was instrumental in building and launching several pioneering products and technologies. She is a founding member of Istio, the leading open-source service mesh that helps organizations run distributed, microservices-based applications anywhere. She co-founded Posture Monitor, an application for posture correction that won Intel’s innovation award. She is also a contributing writer for The New York Times, Wired, NPR, Huffington Post, Newsweek and InfoQ. She is the author of “Life of a Silicon Valley Hipster” — a parody of all things Silicon Valley.

Qiaozhu Mei

Associate Dean for Research and Innovation at the University of Michigan School of Information

Qiaozhu Mei is a professor at the University of Michigan and serves as the Associate Dean for Research and Innovation at the School of Information. Previously, they were the founding director of the Master of Applied Data Science program, one of the university’s first online degree offerings. Before joining Michigan, they earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor's degree from Peking University. Their research spans multiple areas of artificial intelligence, including data mining, information retrieval, machine learning, and natural language processing. They develop innovative techniques for analyzing large-scale text, networks, and behavioral data, with applications in web search, social networks, scientific discovery, healthcare, and other domains—aiming to create meaningful impact in everyday life.

Jaewon Yang

Principal Machine Learning Engineer at Pinterest

Jaewon Yang is a Principal Machine Learning Engineer at Pinterest, where he specializes in advancing machine learning technologies for recommender systems, generative AI, and representation learning across Pinterest’s products. Before joining Pinterest, he was a Distinguished Machine Learning Engineer at Nextdoor and a Principal ML Engineer at LinkedIn. Jaewon holds a Ph.D. in Machine Learning and a Master’s in Statistics from Stanford University’s Infolab. He has published over 50 papers with more than 9,000 citations and has served on the program committees of top-tier conferences such as SIGKDD, WSDM, WWW, and CIKM for over a decade. His contributions have been recognized with five best paper awards from SIGKDD, WSDM, and ICDM, including three test-of-time awards.

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.

Zheng Wang

VP of Strategy at Dify.ai

Zheng Wang (WZ) is the VP of Strategy at Dify.ai, an intuitive AI application development platform, where WZ closely follows the market to devise strategies around the product. Before joining Dify, WZ held senior AI/ML technical roles in the industry. At Meta, WZ ran the UGC ecosystem research program for Facebook; at ByteDance, WZ spearheaded a proof-of-concept team that put state-of-the-art NLP frameworks to work. Later on, WZ shifted towards a Strategy Manager role, where he supported AI-native product initiatives within the social media company. From engineering to strategizing, the majority of WZ's career was spent in various ways of turning transformer-based models into real-world values, a topic that WZ is still curious and passionate about after all these years.

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