Governing Board, Elected Officers, & Staff

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.

In her role at Red Hat, Carla advocates open source principles and practices by contributing to external open source communities focused on Financial Services and Climate Sustainability.  Her community leadership includes: FINOS Open Source Readiness Co-Chair, FINOS Technical Steering Committee and Technical Lead and founding charter member for the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG.

Carlo A. Curino received a Bachelor in Computer Science at Politecnico di Milano. He participated to a joint project between University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and Politecnico di Milano, obtaining a Master Degree in Computer Science at UIC and the Laurea Specialistica (cum laude) in Politecnico di Milano.

During the PhD at Politecnico di Milano, he spent almost two years as a visiting researcher at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) working with prof. Carlo Zaniolo (UCLA) and prof. Alin Deutsch (UCSD). He then spent two years as Post Doc Associate at CSAIL MIT working with prof. Samuel Madden and prof. Hari Balakrishnan.

At MIT he was also the primary lecturer for the course on databases CS630, taught in collaboration with Mike Stonebraker. He spent a year as Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research.

Carlo’s recent research interests include: large scale distributed systems, performance tuning, scheduling. In the past he worked on: mobile+cloud platforms, entity dedup at scale, relational databases and cloud computing, workload management and performance analysis, schema evolution, temporal databases.

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.

Passionate about helping people discover the exciting world of artificial intelligence, Ezequiel is a frequent AI conference presenter and the creator of use cases, tutorials, and guides that help developers adopt open source AI tools. He has worked at Intel as an Open Source AI Evangelist since May 2022. Prior to that, he held positions as Presales Engineer (CISCO Collaboration and HPC/AI) at BVS Technology Solutions and AI Senior Solutions Consultant MCLA Region (Andean + Southern Cone) at Genesys.

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.

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 Operations 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.

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.

In her role at Red Hat, Carla advocates open source principles and practices by contributing to external open source communities focused on Financial Services and Climate Sustainability.  Her community leadership includes: FINOS Open Source Readiness Co-Chair, FINOS Technical Steering Committee and Technical Lead and founding charter member for the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG.

Passionate about helping people discover the exciting world of artificial intelligence, Ezequiel is a frequent AI conference presenter and the creator of use cases, tutorials, and guides that help developers adopt open source AI tools. He has worked at Intel as an Open Source AI Evangelist since May 2022. Prior to that, he held positions as Presales Engineer (CISCO Collaboration and HPC/AI) at BVS Technology Solutions and AI Senior Solutions Consultant MCLA Region (Andean + Southern Cone) at Genesys.

Susan Kahler is an AI/ML Products and Solutions Marketing Manager at Intel. Prior to that, she was a Global Product Marketing Manager for AI at SAS, focusing on deep learning and computer vision. She has her Ph.D. in Human Factors and Ergonomics, having used analytics to quantify and compare mental models of how humans learn complex operations. Throughout her well-rounded career, she has held roles in user centered design, product management, customer insights, consulting and operational risk. Susan has a Master of Science in Analytics, focusing on health care analytics.

Mark has a proven track record of fostering organizational growth in neighboring open source foundations. Mark co-founded the Open Stack Foundation (now OpenInfra Foundation) and as its board chair, played a key role in the development and global success of OIF. Over the past 13 years, he established it as a leading cloud platform and one of the most dynamic projects in the history of open source computing. Since its modest beginnings under Mark’s leadership in 2012 OSF/OIF has expanded into a community of 8 platinum, 10 gold and 66 silver corporate members.

Mark’s robust knowledge of AI, including a central role in shaping the definition of open source AI through the Open Source Initiative, makes him an ideal leader for LF AI & Data.

John is an open source veteran with a career spanning two decades. He has been a part of multiple aspects of open source communities, including a contributor, community leader, and in open source foundation leadership and strategy. His ability to engage software engineers, full engineering teams, while understanding highly scalable product architecture gives him the ability to cross the chasm between business and technology with ease. He passion is working with open source and technology communities – he believes that bringing technology communities closer to real life business use cases will help drive higher productivity and drive more success for organizations around the world. He sees the value of each individual in the community – and especially of diversity of race/sex/nationality/background/life experiences. In particular he’s interested in those suffering from the effects of trauma in open source communities and how to bridge the differences.

Tracey specializes in achieving results in complex, cross-functional environments; when the stakes are high, multiple players are in the mix, and executive eyes are focused on the end-result, that’s when she gets called. She has over 20 years of experience working in the financial services and technology industries, and has spent her career accelerating execution and driving successful outcomes. She enjoys cutting through the clutter and working with the various stakeholders to deliver a product that meets overall objectives without sacrificing individual goals. She has  extensive experience working closely with senior leaders on strategic initiatives and time-sensitive deliverables, as well as a passion for recruiting and developing talent, with over a decade of experience leading exceptional people. Prior to joining the Linux Foundation in May 2024, she worked as Vice President of Program Management at Fidelity Investments and before that, Senior Manager of Global Strategic Partner Marketing at Red Hat.

Nathan Southern has over 19 years of experience in the multinational, nonprofit and startup sectors, orchestrating work across the full project life cycle. Most recently, Nathan has spent nearly two years at the Linux Foundation – first as Project Coordinator and then as Senior Project Coordinator. In this role, Nathan has supported initiatives including openIDL (Insurance Data Link), DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit), The Open Voice Network, and LF AI & Data Foundation. His core specialties are stakeholder management and communications management.