
Charles Xie (Starlord)

Craig Rubendall

Jonne Soininen

Junping Du

Liam Zheng

Ma Yanjun

Nancy Rausch

Seth Dobrin

Wei Meng

Wenting Sun

LF AI & Data General Member Representative - Founder at Zilliz Corp
Charles Xie (Starlord)
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.

Vice President, Research and Development at SAS Institute
Craig Rubendall
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.

Head of Open Source Initiatives at Nokia
Jonne Soininen
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.

LF AI & Data Governing Board Chairperson - General Manager of Huawei Cloud & AI Open Source Department
Junping Du
Junping Du is General Manager of Huawei Cloud & AI Open Source Department. He has 10+ years open source development experience, and now serves as ASF Member, PMC & Committer for Apache Hadoop, Submarine and Incubator and Mentor of Apache NuttX, YuniKorn, etc. He is also Chair of TOC in OPENATOM Foundation.
Prior to Huawei, he worked as Chair of Tencent Open Source Alliance & Director of Tencent Big Data Department, Hortonworks Hadoop Core Team (US) leader, VMware Engineering lead, etc. He has long term technical experience in Cloud Computing, Big Data and Open Source area where he gains vision and widely influence on industry. He received a master’s degree in computer science from Peking University and bachelor’s degree from Tianjin University.

Senior Director, Machine Learning Department at OPPO
Liam Zheng
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.

Researcher at Baidu Inc.
Ma Yanjun
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.

LF AI & Data TAC Chairperson - Senior Software Manager & Data Scientist in Research & Development at SAS Institute
Nancy Rausch
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.

Global Chief AI Officer at IBM
Seth Dobrin
Dr. Seth Dobrin is IBM’s Global Chief AI Officer and leads the corporate AI strategy. In his role, Seth is responsible for connecting AI development with a systemic creation of business value and providing his perspective and experiences to IBM clients.
Seth created a human-centered methodology that enables organizational change through a bespoke design-driven framework for data and AI that drives the implementation of trusted solutions that solve business problems thru the identification of real human needs.
Trust, fairness, and inclusiveness are the differentiators of Seth’s approach to AI for business. Seth’s outcome-based strategy fundamentally changes every company’s area, from business operations to product development, by ensuring continuous and responsible delivery of tangible business results.
Before being appointed as Global Chief AI Officer, Seth led the digital transformation of IBM’s Cloud and Cognitive Software business as Chief Data Officer. In that role, Seth’s mission was to fundamentally change how the IBM C&CS unit is operated by surfacing the data needed by the business to run more efficiently.
The process and strategy employed by Seth are laid out into a collection of articles describing how an enterprise can begin growing data science and AI: Six Steps Up: From Zero to Data Science for the Enterprise.
His experience in transforming companies through data and AI, and his far-sight vision make Seth a transformational leader that innovates companies’ culture by advocating for diversity and inclusiveness.
One of Seth’s most significant accomplishments in the realm of business transformation is the creation of the IBM Data Science Elite: the team, which is highly diverse and composed of multidisciplinary experts, was designed to help clients successfully executing, operationalizing, and scaling AI in the Enterprise. The success of the Data Science and AI Elite team dwells in Seth’s data-driven approach to hiring diverse talents featured by Forbes.
The principles of diversity and inclusiveness are also at the core of the IBM Data Science Procession Board, of which Seth is the chairperson, and the women’s diversity network GROW, of which he is the co-founder.
Seth is a prominent voice and prolific writer in trustworthy AI, AI governance, and enterprise digital transformation. By sharing his expertise in innovating companies through data and AI, Seth has helped several Fortune 500 companies design an AI strategy and execution plan to accelerate their business transformation.

Director of Standard and Open Source at ZTE
Wei Meng
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.