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.

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.

Bryan is anAmerican technology executive expat living in Hong Kong and working cross-border for Shenzhen, China-based Huawei, China’s preeminent technology company. There, he leads vision and strategy across Huawei’s overall global business and portfolio, which spans mobile and consumer electronics, telecommunications, and cloud/enterprise IT around the world.

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.

Stephen Chin, currently VP of Developer Relations at Neo4, is a tech industry veteran with decades of experience in Artificial Intelligence. His prior corporate roles include VP of Developer Relations for JFrog, Senior Director of Developer Marketing for Oracle Groundbreakers at Oracle, and Chief Agile Methodologist for GXS. He has given keynotes and main stage talks at conferences around the world including AI Engineer Summit, AI DevSummit, Devoxx, DevNexus, JNation, JavaOne, Shift, Joker, swampUP, and GIDS. He is also the author of numerous books including the upcoming GraphRAG: The Definitive Guide for O’Reilly. Over the past year, Steve has taken an active role in organizing and vetting speaker submissions at conferences in which LF AI & Data is involved.

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.

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.

Stephen Chin, currently VP of Developer Relations at Neo4, is a tech industry veteran with decades of experience in Artificial Intelligence. His prior corporate roles include VP of Developer Relations for JFrog, Senior Director of Developer Marketing for Oracle Groundbreakers at Oracle, and Chief Agile Methodologist for GXS. He has given keynotes and main stage talks at conferences around the world including AI Engineer Summit, AI DevSummit, Devoxx, DevNexus, JNation, JavaOne, Shift, Joker, swampUP, and GIDS. He is also the author of numerous books including the upcoming GraphRAG: The Definitive Guide for O’Reilly. Over the past year, Steve has taken an active role in organizing and vetting speaker submissions at conferences in which LF AI & Data is involved.

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.

Nathan is a senior Project Coordinator with over 15 years’ experience in the multinational, nonprofit and startup sectors, orchestrating work across the full project life cycle. He has hands-on experience writing project plans; scheduling and overseeing the execution of tasks; assigning human and physical resources; coordinating/planning internal meetings and external events; translating/conveying information between departments; tracking budgets and aggregating costs; presenting to stakeholders; and building relationships. An organized multitasker and an adaptive communicator, he’s adept working in a shifting, fast-paced environment with tight deadlines, autonomously or on a team. He joined The Linux Foundation in March 2022. In addition to LF AI & Data Foundation, he supports DPDK, openIDL and LF Connectivity.

Jill is a Marketing Communication leader with almost two decades of experience leading integrated marketing and communications within open source and big tech. Currently head of marketing communications for Networking , Edge, and AI projects at the Linux Foundation, leading strategy (including social, PR & AR, content creation & distribution, events, community management, and more) and execution for 25+ open source projects and initiatives within the Foundation. Highly skilled at collaborative strategy, navigating complex global ecosystems, and translating deep technical language for high-level audiences.

Sunny is Marketing Communications Manager at The Linux Foundation, where she is passionate about promoting open source projects and communities. She has over five years of experience in marketing, program management, lead generation, and PR campaigns in the technology space.

In her current role, she executes B2B marketing for LF Edge, Nephio and SONiC projects, collaborating with project leaders, developer communities, and partners to create engaging and informative content, campaigns, and international events. She drives internal and external project/release launches, develop and manage organic social media, and lead projects event participation. She also measures and reports on the performance and impact of each marketing channel, using data and analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Hubspot and more.Her work supports the growth and adoption of open source technologies and fosters a diverse and inclusive community.