Governing Board, Elected Officers, & Staff

Starlord is the founder of Zilliz, an open source software company with a mission to reinvent data science. He has more than 20 years of experience in database, distributed system, and AI. Before Zilliz, he worked many years at Oracle headquarters, developing the Oracle 12c cloud database system.

He 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.

Craig Rubendall is a Vice President in SAS’ Research and Development division. He manages the Platform Research and Development group, which is responsible for providing the SAS Platform technologies, including the broad areas of Data Management and Storage, Computing Infrastructure and Management, Software Deployment technologies and Application Integration Services.

In this role, he is responsible for guiding SAS software development to provide products and technology that enables our customers to solve their analytical business problems while optimizing their IT investments and positioning themselves for future industry changes and market demands. He and his team accomplish this by actively engaging with existing customers and prospects, being active in SAS’ partner community and continually researching emerging technologies.

Craig joined SAS from IBM in 1993. He began his SAS career as a mainframe programmer, supporting SAS on the mainframe. Soon after joining SAS, he became one of the founding members of its Data Warehouse initiative, which resulted in delivering key technologies such as SAS Data Integration Studio, SAS Metadata Management and Metadata Server, and SAS Management Console, as well as critical interfaces to ERP systems, among others.

In addition, Craig was one of the lead architects of SAS 9® — an important milestone in the evolution of business intelligence applications because it brought the power of business analytics to a broader IT base. Craig is also a multi-patent holder in the areas of metadata and security management. Craig graduated from Penn State with a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science.

Open source enthusiast and Head of Open Source Initiatives in Nokia, Jonne serves as a board member of Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) and Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP). Prior to Nokia, he worked in different positions with Nokia: Nokia Siemens Networks, Renesas Mobile, and Broadcom and has an extensive history in telecommunications ranging over 15 years.

Liam Zheng is the director of OPPO’s machine Learning department, overseeing the development of Starfire machine Learning platform, GXL, Dense scene solutions and Sparse scene solutions. His research mainly focuses on general artificial intelligence of computer vision, nature language processing, and recommendation system. He founded the project of the collaborative machine learning platform between edge and cloud, which now represents a broad spectrum of OPPO technology.

Dr. Yanjun Ma is director of Baidu’s Deep Learning Platform, overseeing the development of deep learning framework PaddlePaddle. His research mainly focuses on Machine Translation and Natural Language Processing, which is widely used in a range of products including Baidu web search, news feed and Duer. He founded Xiaodu Robot project, which now represents a broad spectrum of Baidu AI technology. He also led the research and development of content understanding technology for Baidu news feed.

Yanjun Ma has authored and co-authored over 20 research publications, and served on the editorial board of Machine Translation Journal, as well as area co-chairs for a number of international conferences including ACL, IJCAI etc.

Nancy Rausch is a Senior Software Manager and Data Scientist in Research and Development at SAS Institute. She leads a team of engineers that develop SAS’ Data Governance products, with a focus on leveraging AI and Machine Learning methods for automation.

She is also a researcher in SAS’ energy technology sector, applying machine learning methods to energy forecasting in support of the smart grid. Nancy is an Advisory board member for the NSF funded non-profit LASER Institute promoting Learning Analytics in STEM Education Research. She is a mentor in SAS’ industry/education partnership program, supporting researchers at North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science. She has authored over 20 research papers and publications and presented at numerous conferences on a wide variety of topics related to the intersection of AI and Data Management.

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.

Starlord is the founder of Zilliz, an open source software company with a mission to reinvent data science. He has more than 20 years of experience in database, distributed system, and AI. Before Zilliz, he worked many years at Oracle headquarters, developing the Oracle 12c cloud database system.

He 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.

Nancy Rausch is a Senior Software Manager and Data Scientist in Research and Development at SAS Institute. She leads a team of engineers that develop SAS’ Data Governance products, with a focus on leveraging AI and Machine Learning methods for automation.

She is also a researcher in SAS’ energy technology sector, applying machine learning methods to energy forecasting in support of the smart grid. Nancy is an Advisory board member for the NSF funded non-profit LASER Institute promoting Learning Analytics in STEM Education Research. She is a mentor in SAS’ industry/education partnership program, supporting researchers at North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science. She has authored over 20 research papers and publications and presented at numerous conferences on a wide variety of topics related to the intersection of AI and Data Management.

Ibrahim Haddad (Ph.D.) is the General Manager of the LF AI & Data Foundation.  His work, and the work of the Foundation as a whole, support companies, developers, and the open source community in identifying and contributing to the technological projects that address the challenges of industry for the benefit of all participants. He is the creator and maintainer of the Open Source AI & Data landscape, an industry reference to critical open source AI and Data projects. Prior to the LF AI & Data, Haddad served as Vice President of R&D and Head of the Open Source Division at Samsung Electronics. Throughout his career, Haddad has held several technology and portfolio management roles at Ericsson Research, the Open Source Development Lab, Motorola, Palm, Hewlett-Packard and the Linux Foundation. He graduated with Honors from Concordia University (Montréal, Canada) with a Ph.D. in Computer Science, where he was awarded the J. W. McConnell Memorial Graduate Fellowship and the Concordia University 25th Anniversary Fellowship.

Lucy Hyde is a Program Manager specializing in Machine Learning for the LF AI & Data Foundation that supports and sustains open source innovation in artificial intelligence and data. She is an accomplished professional highly regarded for technical expertise, community growth, and establishing an ecosystem across teammates, members, and industry leaders.

Lucy previously worked in roles with a focus on data science, software engineering, and technical exploitation. She started her career with the Department of Defense as an active duty service member and later as a government civilian working in multiple agencies and units, followed by time in the private sector in digital forensics.

She graduated with undergraduate degrees in Psychology, the Arabic language with an emphasis in several dialects, and Intelligence Operations from multiple universities; an MS in Analytics from American University; and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Computational Science and Informatics from George Mason University as well as a second MS degree in Artificial Intelligence from Johns Hopkins University. In her free time, she is active in her local community with volunteer work, loves to hike and garden, and enjoys spending as much as time as possible outdoors with her family and friends.

Reden Martinez serves as a dedicated Project Coordinator at LF AI & Data Foundation, a leading organization supporting open source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and data. With extensive professional experience, Reden brings a wealth of expertise to his role.

Throughout his career, Reden has successfully implemented programs across industries, focusing on identifying and achieving key performance indicators (KPIs) and deliverables. His work is driven by a deep passion for the mission at hand, viewing discovery, innovation, and technology as powerful tools to address some of society’s greatest challenges.