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Welcome LF AI and Data Newly Elected Leaders

By January 19, 2023No Comments

We are excited to start out the new year by welcoming our newly elected leaders to the LF AI and Data Foundation. We look forward to their leadership and contributions in the upcoming year and appreciate their help in supporting open source innovation and projects within the artificial intelligence (AI) and Data ecosystem. 

Congratulations to the newly elected Governing Board Chairperson, Governing Board General Member Representative, Technical Advisory Council Chairperson, and Outreach Committee Chairperson. These leaders serve on a volunteer basis and fulfill a vital role in the guidance and execution of LF AI and Data Foundation activities. For more details on the leadership roles, please take a look at the LF AI and Data Foundation Charter available here. Learn more about each leader below:

Junping Du, Chairperson, Governing Board

Junping Du was re-elected as Chairperson of the Governing Board. He is General Manager of Huawei Cloud and AI Open Source Department. He has 10+ years open source development experience, and now serves as ASF Member, PMC and Committer for Apache Hadoop, Submarine and Incubator and Mentor of Apache NuttX, YuniKorn, etc. 

Prior to Huawei, he worked as Chair of Tencent Open Source Alliance and 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 has gained vision and a wide influence on industry. He received a master’s degree in computer science from Peking University and bachelor’s degree from Tianjin University.

“I look forward to continuing to lead the LF AI & Data Governing Board as we build upon our collaborations and projects. LF AI and Data has witnessed significant momentum over the past year and it’s an exciting time to be deeply involved.” said Junping.

Charles Xie, General Member Representative, Governing Board

Charles was re-elected as the LF AI and Data Foundation Governing Board General Member Representative. Charles is the founder of Milvus, an open source vector database for production ready AI. Charles is also the founder and CEO of Zilliz, an open source software company with a mission to unleash data insights with AI. Prior to 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.

“It’s a privilege to continue serving the AI community. Open source and AI has experienced some exciting developments in the past several years. It’s my goal to help bring the power of AI to the masses and make real changes in society and the world.” said Charles.

Nancy Rausch, Chairperson, Technical Advisory Council (TAC)

Nancy Rausch, Senior Software Manager and Data Scientist in Research and Development at SAS Institute, was re-elected as the LF AI and Data Technical Advisory Council (TAC) Chairperson. Nancy 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.

“It’s thrilling to be able to collaborate and share ideas with some of the best and brightest minds across all sectors. Part of our mission is to promote the exchange of good ideas and participating in the TAC provides a great opportunity to watch these principles in action .” said Nancy.  

Jerry Tan, Chairperson, Outreach Committee

Jerry Tan (Tan Zhongyi) was elected as Outreach Committee Chairperson. Jerry is an architect at 4Paradigm.com Company. He leads a team of product, project, and community managers to help promote 4Paradigm’s open source technology by building an active community focused on MLOps. He is an expert in open source community building with more than 20 years of open source development, governance, and operation experience. Jerry worked at Sun Microsystem for more than 8 years in Mozilla/Gnome before moving on to Baidu for 10 years as the Open Source Program Manager where he drove open source adoption inside Baidu. He is also a member of the Apache Foundation.

Jerry is the primary author of the first Chinese book of PaddlePaddle released by Baidu and has participated in the build-up of LF Deep Learning Foundation, which was the predecessor of LF AI and Data. 

“As Outreach Chair, I would like to continue to promote more awareness of the projects of LF AI and Data while looking for more companies to become members and donate projects. I would like to help to build more connections with other organizations such as ASF, CD Foundation, etc.” said Jerry. 

Join the LF AI and Data Community!

The LF AI and Data Foundation is committed to building an open source AI and Data community in the fields of AI and data. The Foundation drives innovation in these fields by creating new opportunities for all community members to collaborate with each other. Interested in joining the LF AI and Data community as a member? Learn more here

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