Governing Board, Elected Officers, & Staff

Ali has held many leadership roles at Microsoft, built multiple businesses from the ground up and scaled them, driven product incubations, and most recently, scaled Microsoft’s AI business to hundred of millions of dollars, as VP of Azure AI Strategy & Commercialization. He led the Ambient Intelligence AI product team, and was responsible for the product & business vision & strategy, product management. He also led the team to innovate on Computer Vision in retail, resulting in many patents. As Chief of Staff & GM, Business Operations & Strategic Initiatives for Applications & Services Group (ASG), he oversaw a $30B+ P&L and developed the AI strategy with Dr. Qi Lu for Microsoft, then EVP of ASG, leading to the formation of the AI & Research division.

Ali was also responsible for the technical program governance for the Office of the Microsoft CEO, working directly with Bill Gates, who was the Technical Advisor to Satya Nadella, to facilitate the cross-Microsoft technical strategy development and alignment.

His prior roles at Microsoft include GM of Microsoft’s Sharing Economy strategic initiative, where he built the overarching Microsoft company-wide strategy, and helped incubate calendar.help, an AI-powered virtual assistant, which resulted in today’s Microsoft 365 Freelance Toolkit. He was a founding member of Microsoft Middle East & Africa (MEA), as GM of the North Gulf; then moved to the UK, as GM of Operations, Systems, & Tools, overseeing a $11B business; then as GM of Enterprise & Partner Group (EPG) Specialist Sales across EMEA, running the enterprise business worth over $10B today.

Anni Lai is the Head of Futurewei Open Source Operations and Marketing. She drives Futurewei’s open source governance, process, compliance, training, project alignment, and ecosystem building. Anni has a long history of serving on various open source foundation boards such as LF CNCF, LF OCI, LF Edge, and OpenStack Foundation, and is currently on the LF AI & Data,  Open Metaverse Foundation, LF Europe Advisory boards, and Kaiyuanshe.org Advisory Committee. Anni has been instrumental in growing various open source projects and building ecosystems in the areas of Cloud Native, Edge, AI, and Metaverse.

Prior to Futurewei, Anni worked at companies such as Oracle, Salesforce.com, Savvis (acquired by Centurylink), Fast Search and Transfer (acquired by Microsoft), and Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle) in the areas of product mgt/marketing, technology evangelism/developer relations, partner strategy/recruitment/mgt, and enterprise business development & consulting.

Anni firmly believes in creating great technology via open innovation and collaboration with the global community. She has traveled to 30+ countries, and 5 continents as a technology evangelist, consultant, strategist, and executive. Beyond professional commitments, Anni was able to utilize her community-building skills from Open Source to serve her local community as a trustee at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History for 3 years.

Anni holds an MS & a BA degree in Computer Science and is currently working in Silicon Valley, USA. Anni has completed NACD (National Association of Corporate Directors) Director Professionalism Training.

As VP of Data Center and Artificial Intelligence at Intel Corporation, Bill Pearson leads teams delivering Data Center and AI solutions for the ecosystem.

In prior roles at Intel, Pearson led the team responsible for delivering software tools and solutions to help developers get their jobs done in creating wonderful end-to-end solutions and solving their biggest problems.  He also led developer programs and engineering for the Internet of Things, delivering technical application enabling and scale of edge-to-cloud ecosystem applications deployments. Other roles at Intel include leading developer experience and strategy, product management, developer programs, and community support for the complete product portfolio for Server, PC, and Mobile segments and related open-source projects.

Dr. Brad Topol is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Director of AI and Cloud Open Technologies who also serves as IBM’s Chief Developer Advocate.  In his current role, he leads the global IBM team developing open source technologies and working in open communities.  He has overall responsibility for IBM’s open source strategy, upstream development, community building, education, and client initiatives. He leads a development team with responsibility for contributing to and improving several AI and cloud-native open source technologies including PyTorch, KubeFlow, KServe/ModelMesh, Ray, Kubernetes, Tekton, OpenTelemetry, and Operator Framework. He also serves as a LF AI & Data Governing Board Member, and as a CNCF alternate Governing Board Member. He is a co-author of Hybrid Cloud Apps with OpenShift and Kubernetes, a book published by O’Reilly Media in 2021.  In addition, he is a co-author of Kubernetes in the Enterprise, a book published by O’Reilly Media in 2018. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1998.

Brian Granger is a leader of the Python project, co-founder of Project Jupyter, and an active contributor to a number of other open-source projects focused on data science in Python. In 2016, he co-created the Altair package for statistical visualization in Python. He is an advisory board member of the NumFOCUS Foundation, a faculty fellow of the Cal Poly Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the Sr. Principal Technologist at Amazon Web Services.

As the Chief Executive Officer of Neural Magic, Brian brings vast experience in open source, enterprise, and hyper-scale cloud to the team. Before joining Neural Magic, Brian was Vice President and CTO of Google Cloud and Executive Vice President and CTO of Red Hat. Brian leads Neural Magic as it continues to create groundbreaking algorithms and tools that bring software, rather than specialized hardware, back to center stage in machine learning infrastructure.

Denny Lee is a long-time Apache Spark™ and MLflow contributor, Delta Lake maintainer, and a Sr. Staff Developer Advocate at Databricks. A hands-on distributed systems and data sciences engineer with extensive experience developing internet-scale data platforms and predictive analytics and AI systems. He has previously built enterprise DW/BI and big data systems at Microsoft, including Azure Cosmos DB, Project Isotope (HDInsight), and SQL Server. He was also the Senior Director of Data Sciences Engineering at SAP Concur. He also has a Masters of Biomedical Informatics from Oregon Health and Sciences University and has implemented powerful data solutions for enterprise Healthcare customers. His current technical focuses include AI, Distributed Systems, Delta Lake, Apache Spark, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, and Genomics.

FrenchBen is an open source enthusiast with a proven track record of contributions to cloud-native projects and enterprise-grade infrastructure solutions. He currently works as Director of Engineering at NVIDIA, focusing on AI&ML Platforms. Prior to this, FrenchBen  was a Sr Engineering Manager at Apple, focusing on containerization technologies and cloud platforms.

Junping Du is the founder and CEO of Datastrato. His rich and broad Open Source experience spans numerous roles, including: Enterprise Open Source Department Officer, Open Source Foundation Officer, Community Organizer & Evangelist and Technical Expert. He received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Tianjin University, and his Masters in Computer Science from Peking University.

Wei Meng, Director of Standard and Open Source Planning at ZTE. He is based in Nanjing, China. He has led technical pre-research of ZTE on artificial intelligence since 2016. He is committed to the research of “AI in 5G” and has been elected as the chairman of ITU-T FG-ML5G WG3 (Working Group of Architecture of Machine Learning in future network at ITU-T) in 2018. Most recently, he was elected as a vice chairman of general WG at AIIA (Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance). In these roles, he has chaired and organized multiple conferences in AI and 5G fields. Mr. Wei Meng is the author of several standards at IETF and ITU-T on AI/NFV and has been granted more than 20 China and international patents.

Zhipeng Huang currently serves as Open Source Operation Manager for Huawei. Zhipeng has been involved with various major open source communities and is now the Project Team Lead of the OpenStack Cyborg project, co-chair of OpenStack Public Cloud WG, and co-lead of the Kubernetes Policy WG.

Zhipeng began his career in 2014, as Team Lead of the Open Source Team at Huawei’s Cloud & AI BG Open Source Ecosystem Department. He received his Bachelor of Science in Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and his Master of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of California Irvine.

Anni Lai is the Head of Futurewei Open Source Operations and Marketing. She drives Futurewei’s open source governance, process, compliance, training, project alignment, and ecosystem building. Anni has a long history of serving on various open source foundation boards such as LF CNCF, LF OCI, LF Edge, and OpenStack Foundation, and is currently on the LF AI & Data,  Open Metaverse Foundation, LF Europe Advisory boards, and Kaiyuanshe.org Advisory Committee. Anni has been instrumental in growing various open source projects and building ecosystems in the areas of Cloud Native, Edge, AI, and Metaverse.

Prior to Futurewei, Anni worked at companies such as Oracle, Salesforce.com, Savvis (acquired by Centurylink), Fast Search and Transfer (acquired by Microsoft), and Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle) in the areas of product mgt/marketing, technology evangelism/developer relations, partner strategy/recruitment/mgt, and enterprise business development & consulting.

Anni firmly believes in creating great technology via open innovation and collaboration with the global community. She has traveled to 30+ countries, and 5 continents as a technology evangelist, consultant, strategist, and executive. Beyond professional commitments, Anni was able to utilize her community-building skills from Open Source to serve her local community as a trustee at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History for 3 years.

Anni holds an MS & a BA degree in Computer Science and is currently working in Silicon Valley, USA. Anni has completed NACD (National Association of Corporate Directors) Director Professionalism Training.

Arnaud has over 25 years of experience in standards and open source development, contributing as a staff member of standards development organizations (SDOs) such as W3C and the X Consortium and as a representative for IBM. His work has encompassed all aspects of the open technology development process, including technical, strategic, political, and legal domains. Arnaud served as editor for several key web standards, including HTML4 and DOM, and participated in the development of XML. His involvement in open source projects includes work on Xerces, the Apache XML parser. Arnaud’s contributions to open source date back to 1990 with the release of the XPM library, which is still in use today. He is currently focusing on Open Source Security with the OpenSSF and AI.

Specialties: Open standards, open source, HTML, XML, RDF, Linked Data, Web services technology, software engineering, blockchain, security.

Junping Du is the founder and CEO of Datastrato. His rich and broad Open Source experience spans numerous roles, including: Enterprise Open Source Department Officer, Open Source Foundation Officer, Community Organizer & Evangelist and Technical Expert. He received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Tianjin University, and his Masters in Computer Science from Peking University.

Richard Sikang Bian is an experienced Software Engineer specialized in shipping FinTech big data services, cloud data services, end-to-end (E2E) web services, and high quality UX projects. He is currently Senior Manager, New Strategic Initiatives / Head of Open Source Program Office at The Ant Group.

Wei Meng, Director of Standard and Open Source Planning at ZTE. He is based in Nanjing, China. He has led technical pre-research of ZTE on artificial intelligence since 2016. He is committed to the research of “AI in 5G” and has been elected as the chairman of ITU-T FG-ML5G WG3 (Working Group of Architecture of Machine Learning in future network at ITU-T) in 2018. Most recently, he was elected as a vice chairman of general WG at AIIA (Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance). In these roles, he has chaired and organized multiple conferences in AI and 5G fields. Mr. Wei Meng is the author of several standards at IETF and ITU-T on AI/NFV and has been granted more than 20 China and international patents.

Nancy Rausch is a Program Manager for Data Science at the Linux Foundation. She is also an Advisory board member for the NSF-funded non-profit LASER Institute promoting Learning Analytics in STEM Education Research. She has authored over 20 research papers and publications and presented at numerous conferences on various topics related to the intersection of AI and Data. She has expertise in databases and data engineering, programming in multiple languages including SQL, SAS, and Python, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, and experience in consulting domains including Energy analytics, Health care analytics, Cybersecurity, and Cloud computing. She has multiple cloud certifications in MS Azure, and experience with GCP and AWS. I hold a Master of Analytics degree from Capella University, A Master of Science from Duke University in Computer Engineering, and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Michigan Technological University.

She has a passion for continuous learning, especially online learning. Today there are endless opportunities to learn. Ask me for a list of links to learning opportunities. Never stop learning!