Governing Board

Anwar Aftab leads a team of research engineers at AT&T Labs, Advanced Technology and Systems organization as Director Inventive Science. His major work areas include architecture, design and development of different CTO initiatives including AI/Machine Learning Automation Platforms, SDN (ORAN/ONAP/ECOMP), Data Science, Mobile Location Based Services, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Customer Analytics, Virtualized Network Services Simulation, Configuration and Management.

Earlier he has lead the design, architecture and delivery of innovative software systems for Wireless RAN 5G/LTE/VoLTE/UMTS Network Planning, Performance and Optimization Analytics. Anwar has worked extensively in delivering highly optimized software platforms for Enterprise Network Services Solutions Design, Configuration, Monitoring and Management including Cloud, VoIP, Network Integration, Ethernet and Fiber Access.

Anwar holds a BS degree in Computer Science from National University NUCES and MS degree in Computer Sciences from New Jersey Institute of Technology, and have also completed executive management and leadership programs from Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA.

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.

Francois Jezequel has served as Project Manager for Internet Services development and Orange Group Trouble Ticketing domain. By managing the Corporate Architecture team in Equant he has developed the transformation plan for the Information System of the company.

As the head of ITsation, Procurement and Operators, he currently leads the technology cooperation on the network with Deutsche Telekom since 2011 as well as the procurement coordination with BuyIN. Since 2016 he has developed relationships with other telcos on key transformation topics like 5G, SDN/NFV and AI. He has a zest for AI development and he is involved in the Strategy consolidation for that matter in Orange Group.

Dr. Haobo Fu is a senior researcher in Tencent AI Lab, Shenzhen, China. His research mainly focuses on reinforcement learning, deep learning, and game theory, which is widely applied in a range of Game-AI projects in Tencent.

Jim Spohrer directs IBM’s open source Artificial Intelligence developer ecosystem effort. He led IBM Global University Programs, co-founded IBM Almaden Service Research, and was CTO IBM Venture Capital Relations Group.

After his MIT BS in Physics, he developed speech recognition systems at Verbex (Exxon) before receiving his Yale PhD in Computer Science/AI. In the 1990’s, he attained Apple Computers’ Distinguished Engineer Scientist and Technologist role for next generation learning platforms. With over ninety publications and nine patents, he received the Gummesson Service Research award, Vargo and Lusch Service-Dominant Logic award, Daniel Berg Service Systems award, and a PICMET Fellow for advancing service 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.

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.

As Vice President, Offering Management for the IBM Data and AI business unit, Madhu Kochar leads the extensive portfolio of Watson AI applications and data platform. In this leadership role, Madhu is focused on how IBM can operationalize AI for its clients to help them advance their business strategy, such as accelerating growth, cutting costs, maintaining business continuity and resiliency, and more.

Throughout her 25-year career at IBM, Madhu has always held roles in product development and engineering, with a strong focus on data management. Over the last few years, Madhu has distinguished herself by successfully establishing a world-class engineering and service delivery that transformed IBM analytics business on the IBM public and private cloud. She has extensive experience in software development, DevOps, DataOps, hybrid cloud, machine learning and AI.

In 2012, Madhu was named one of the outstanding executive women from Silicon Valley, and was a recipient of the prestigious Tribute to Women (TWIN) award, in recognition of her role as a woman executive and an inspiration for other women in technology fields.

Madhu is a board member of UPWARD, an organization focused on accelerating career advancement for executive women. She has also represented IBM in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) summit panels and is on the IBM Corporate Asian Council. Additionally, she leads the local IBM Women Charter, whose goal is to grow the next generation of women leaders within IBM. Madhu is based in San Jose, CA.

As a Head of Enterprise Architecture – AI, Digital & Cloud at Tech Mahindra (Americas) Inc, Natarajan (Nat) Subramanian is focusing on AI open source development and strategy. He is leading the architecture, development and technology strategy team.

Nat holds a Master of Science in Information system from Stevens Institute of Technology, NJ, USA &; Bachelor of Computer Science &; Engineering from Madurai Kamaraj University, India.

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.