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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wenting Sun is a Senior Data Science Manager in Ericsson. She leads the activities around developing cutting edge AI/ML applications in telecommunication domain.

Xiaoman is the Director of MindSpore Community at Huawei. Xiaoman serves as the Expert of Chinese Institute of Electronics, project lead of TinyMS, and key leader of Huawei Official Women In Tech Project.

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.

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.

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 Executive Director 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.

Jacqueline Cardoso is a Senior Program Manager for LF AI & Data Foundation that supports and sustains open source innovation in artificial intelligence and data. She is an accomplished professional highly regarded for establishing strong alliances with clients, teammates, and industry leaders. Successful in implementing scalable programs to drive growth. Well organized, demonstrating self-motivation and perseverance, with the aptitude to achieve organizational and personal goals.

Jacqueline as previously worked in roles with a focus on program management, marketing, business development, and partner management. She started her career at AT&T within their Enterprise Business segment, followed by time in the start up space with TripIt, later acquired by Concur and SAP.

She graduated with a BSBA in Marketing and International Business from The University of Arizona. In her free time she is active in her local community with advocacy work, loves to travel, and enjoys spending as much as time as possible outdoors with her family and friends.

Erin Thacker is a Project Coordinator for LF AI & Data Foundation that supports and sustains open source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and data. She is a seasoned professional with a wide range of professional experience in the nonprofit sector.

Erin has successfully implemented programs within organizations across various industries, many of which were focused on identifying and meeting KPIs and deliverables. Central to her work is the passion she has for the mission at hand. She views discovery, innovation,  and technology as a means to alleviate some of our world’s biggest challenges.

Erin has previously worked in roles with a focus on program and project management, public relations, and research administration. She started her career in public relations in Washington, DC starting as a program coordinator and working her way up to a senior account executive. Erin then moved on to graduate school with a Masters in Public Administration from West Virginia University. From there she gained experience from building infrastructure projects in rural communities to negotiating large medical research contracts for one of the top research institutions in the country.

She graduated with a BA in Political Science and an MA in Public Administration from West Virginia University. In her free time she enjoys spending as much time as possible at her family’s farm in West Virginia. When not there, you can find Erin at her home in Durham, NC where she loves gardening, upcycling projects, and dedicating time for mental health, environmental, and animal welfare organizations.