We are excited to welcome three newly elected leaders to the LF AI Foundation. We look forward to their leadership in the upcoming year and for their help in supporting open source innovation and projects within the artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) space.
A huge thank you to previously elected leaders for all of their contributions, and congratulations to the newly elected Governing Board Chairperson, Treasurer, and Technical Advisory Council Chairperson. For more details on the leadership roles, please take a look at the LF AI Foundation Charter available here. Learn more about each leader below:
Charles “Starlord” Xie, Chairperson, Governing Board
Starlord, Founder and CEO of Zilliz, was elected as the new Chairperson of the LF AI Governing Board. Starlord will lead community partners to further enhance the leading position of the open source AI community in the industry.
Starlord is an expert in database and AI with more than 18 years of experience. He is the founder and CEO of Zilliz, an open-source software company with a mission to reinvent data science. Before Zilliz, Starlord worked many years at the Oracle US headquarters, developing Oracle’s relational database systems. Starlord is a founding member and a key contributor of the Oracle 12c cloud database project. Oracle 12c is a huge success and has realized more than $10B of accumulated revenue. Starlord received a master’s degree in computer science from University of Wisconsin-Madison and a bachelor’s degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
Starlord said: “It is a great honor to be elected as the chairman of the LF AI Governing Board, and I thank the global open source AI community for their support and trust. In the past two years, the LF AI foundation has developed rapidly and has incubated a group of people from Microsoft, IBM, Facebook , Tencent, Baidu, AT&T, ZTE and Zilliz and other excellent AI projects. Let us work together to build a wider and more dynamic open source AI community!”
Jonne Soininen, Treasurer, Governing Board
Jonne Soininen has been re-elected as Treasurer of the LF AI Governing Board for the third year.
Jonne is an open source enthusiast and Head of Open Source Initiatives in Nokia. In addition to the LF AI Governing Board, Jonne serves as Treasurer of the Linux Foundation Networking (LFN) Governing Board and the Chair of the Strategic Planning Committee (SPC). Prior to his current position at Nokia, he worked in different positions within Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks, Renesas Mobile, and Broadcom, and has an extensive history in telecommunications ranging over 20 years.
Jonne said: “I am very grateful for the renewed opportunity to serve the LF AI community as the Treasurer of the LF AI Governing Board. The LF AI has evolved tremendously over the first two years of existence. I am both excited and humbled for being trusted to continue contributing to the development of this community.”
Jim Spohrer, Chairperson, Technical Advisory Council (TAC)
Jim Spohrer, Director of the Cognitive Opentech Group (COG) at IBM Research, has been elected as Chairperson for the LF AI’s Technical Advisory Council (TAC).
Dr. Spohrer directs IBM’s open source Artificial Intelligence developer ecosystem effort – including IBM’s Center for Opensource Data and AI Technologies (CODAIT). At IBM, he was CTO IBM Venture Capital Relations Group, co-founded IBM Almaden Service Research, and led IBM Global University Programs. After his MIT BS in Physics, he developed speech recognition systems at Verbex (Exxon) before receiving his Yale PhD in Computer Science/AI. In the 1990’s, he attained Apple Computers’ Distinguished Engineer Scientist and Technologist role for next generation learning platforms. With over ninety publications and nine patents, he received the Gummesson Service Research award, Vargo and Lusch Service-Dominant Logic award, Daniel Berg Service Systems award, and a PICMET Fellow for advancing Service Science.
Dr. Spohrer said: “Grateful to be elected to serve the community as LF AI TAC Chairperson, while we work together to advance open source data and AI technologies at this exciting time in the history of Artificial Intelligence. AI is hard, and will take decades to solve, but the foundations are being put in place at LF AI today with open source projects such as ONNX, Horovod, Angel, Acumos, Ludwig, ForestFlow, Adlik, EDL, NNStreamer, Marquez, Milvus, Pyro, and sparklyr.”
Join the LF AI Community!
The LF AI Foundation is committed to building an open source AI community in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL). LF AI drives open source innovation in the field of AI by creating new opportunities for all community members to collaborate with each other. Interested in joining the LF AI community as a member? Learn more here.
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