Keynote, Day 2

As VP, Platform Engineering at Uber, Albert leads the Core Infrastructure, Data and Storage, Developer Platform, Engineering DEI, Engineering Security, IT Engineering, Quality, and Strategy and Execution teams responsible for building the platforms, tools, and processes that enable Uber developers to build a best-in-class experience for users. He sets the vision for Uber’s architecture, aims to build the most reliable platform, and has a passion for developer experience and productivity. In addition, Albert serves as a member of Uber’s Executive Leadership Team and Uber’s Engineering Leadership Team.

Prior to joining Uber, Albert held leadership roles at Microsoft, Bell Labs, and AT&T Labs Research. He has earned a variety of accolades including the IEEE Kobayashi Award, ACM Sigcomm Award, and ACM Test of Time Paper Award, and is an ACM Fellow and National Academy of Engineering member.

Albert is based in Seattle, Washington, and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

Brian "Bam" McClendon leads ARGeo at Niantic, which includes AR, mapping, research and webAR (8th Wall). He was part of the founding team at Keyhole, which would become Google Earth. Bam led the Geo team at Google that built Google Maps, Google Earth and Street View, before leading engineering at Uber.

Hien Luu is a Sr. Engineering Manager at DoorDash, leading the Machine Learning Platform team. He is particularly passionate about the intersection between Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. He is the author of the Beginning Apache Spark 3 book. He has given presentations at various conferences such as Data+AI Summit, XAI 21 Summit, MLOps World, YOW Data!, appy(), QCon (SF,NY, London).

Zhitao is a Principal Software Engineer / TLM currently leading Uber’s AI infrastructure. His team focuses on model training, inference and accelerator infrastructure. Priorly, he worked as a TLM in Google’s TensorFlow Extended(TFX) team focusing on end-to-end MLOps externally and internally to Google.

Before ML infra, Zhitao came from a Compute Infrastructure background. He was a member of the initial container team at Uber which introduced and productionized containers for all aspects of engineering, and also worked at Facebook’s early stage of service discovery, RPC and some ML systems.

Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Hard Thing About Hard Things and What You Do Is Who You Are. He also created the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund to connect the greatest cultural leaders to the best new technology companies, and enable more young African Americans to enter the technology industry.

Prior to a16z, Ben was cofounder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007, and was appointed vice president and general manager of Business Technology Optimization for Software at HP. Earlier, he was vice president and general manager of America Online's E-commerce Platform division, where he oversaw development of the company's flagship Shop@AOL service. Previously, Ben ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications. He also served as vice president of Netscape's widely acclaimed Directory and Security product line. Before joining Netscape in July 1995, he held various senior product marketing positions at Lotus Development Corporation.

Ben has an MS and a BA in computer science from UCLA and Columbia University, respectively.

Ben serves on the board of Anyscale, Caffeine, Databricks, Mayvenn, NationBuilder, Navan, Okta ($OKTA), Sisu, Tanium, and UnitedMasters.

Se Won Jang is the engineering manager of the ML Data Platform team at Pinterest. His team focuses on building large-scale infrastructure for producing, managing and distributing ML features and datasets at Pinterest. Before this role, he was the tech lead and founding engineer of the Pinterest ML Platform org.

Robert Nishihara is one of the creators of Ray, a distributed system for scaling Python and machine learning applications. He is one of the co-founders and CEO of Anyscale, which is the company behind Ray. He did his PhD in machine learning and distributed systems in the computer science department at UC Berkeley. Before that, he majored in math at Harvard.

Alex Spiridonov is a Machine Learning Group Product Manager for Google Cloud AI Accelerators. Alex leads product development for Inference, ML Ecosystem integrations, and ML Frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow). Alex is passionate about making Google Cloud the best platform for AI and ML developers, researchers, and enthusiasts all over the world.

Allen Wang is a Software Engineer at Google working on Cloud ML Compute Services. He is currently the TL for Ray on Cloud TPUs, aiming to bring the user-friendly and performant experience of Ray to Cloud TPU users.

Ersin Yumer is currently the Senior Director of AI/ML Platform and Data at Adobe, where he leads both Research and Generative AI compute platforms and technology stack, as well as Data for Generative AI. He is a boomerang at Adobe, with a long stint in autonomous vehicle industry in between. Before Adobe, he was most recently the EVP of Operations at TuSimple, leading commercialization of L4 autonomy, where he also previously served as the VP of Algorithm. Ersin has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in real-time 3D computer vision.

Rich Heaton is Director of Engineering and Head of Software for the AWS Neuron SDK, the software for the AWS Trainium and Inferentia family of chips that power EC2 Trn1 and Inf2 instances. The Neuron SDK includes the ML compiler, Runtime/Driver, Tools, as well as TensorFlow and PyTorch framework support and enables applications and ML models. Prior to Amazon, Rich was CEO of Blue Willow Systems, a technology provider acquired by Philips Healthcare. Rich has also been an engineer leader, founder and executive with multiple startups as well as Cisco systems.