Pascal Borghino leads the infrastructure group at WeWork. This group, part of the Developer Platform mission, is tasked to delivering the software, services, and infrastructure needed to build WeWork products. They focus on providing cross organization dependency visibility, improving cost and efficiency. Prior to joining WeWork, Pascal spent over 10 years experiencing scale at companies like Twitter & Yahoo!. He has a background in databases, is an author for Eyrolles and was a technical reviewer for O'Reilly Media.

Kirk Bresniker is Chief Architect of Hewlett Packard Labs and a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Fellow and Vice President. He joined Labs in 2014 to drive The Machine Research and Advanced Development program, leading teams across Labs and across HPE business units with the goal of demonstrating and evangelizing the benefits of Memory-Driven Computing. His current focus is accelerating the transfer of technologies from The Machine research program in order to drive differentiating value into existing product categories as well as disruptive new offerings. Prior to joining Labs, Kirk was Vice President and Chief Technologist in the HP Servers Global Business Unit representing 25 years of innovation leadership.

Joining HP as a PA-RISC system hardware engineer in 1989, he has always been a part of the Business Critical Systems team. In 1993, he was the design lead for the first HP entry-level multi-processor system which broke new ground in terms of low-cost, high performance design. Following that, he was the design lead for the entire D-class PA-RISC product family, one of the highest volume BCS product families ever introduced. Starting in 1997, Kirk began a decade-long research and development effort to develop novel new modular system architectures which would eventually become a new category of integrated hardware and software offerings known as Blade Servers. This early work was eventually refined and blended with the contributions of the combined HP-Compaq merger lead to become HP BladeSystem c-Class, the undisputed leader in Blade Server platforms. In 1999, he was the key architect for all PA-RISC and Itanium entry and mid-range servers and oversaw a complete re-vamp of the product line and prepared for the PA-RISC to Itanium transition. From 2000 onwards, Kirk oversaw the transformation of the HP-UX UNIX and fault tolerant NonStop to blades to extend BladeSystem to the mission critical market, culminating in the Superdome X mission critical X86 blade platform, the highest performing HPE Mission Critical ProLiant system ever created. It was also during this period that he led the earliest investigations into what would become The Machine Research program.

Kirk current holds 28 US and 10 foreign patents in areas of modular platforms and blade systems, integrated circuits, and power and environmental control. He graduated in 1989 Cum Laude from Santa Clara University with a BSEE and was also a member of the Humanities Honors program.

Karan Gupta is the Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Pinterest where he is responsible for infrastructure and platforms that power the Pinterest experience. Over the last three years, Karan has led teams that have scaled infrastructure 3x to become one of the largest consumer web platforms on a public cloud. Prior to Pinterest, Karan has spent a number of years building highly reliable and resilient systems at companies such as Twitter and Yahoo. Karan holds a Masters of Science from University of Southern California.

Taylor Leese is a Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Twitter where he leads the Core Systems Libraries (CSL) team. CSL provides resilient and efficient libraries and frameworks that lay the foundation for building and operating services at Twitter. Prior to joining Twitter, Taylor was the backend team lead at StackMob where he focused on building backend services for mobile apps until it was acquired by PayPal. He also worked on physical security systems for the Department of Energy while at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and helped launch inflight internet on a number of commercial airlines while at Gogo. Taylor is also an occasional startup advisor and an avid tennis player.

For more than 30 years, IEEE Fellow Barry L. Shoop has been a member of and leader within the global IEEE community. In 2016 he served as the IEEE President and CEO. During his tenure as Vice President of MGA, Barry was the architect of MGA’s Regional Geographic Strategy, and created the Metropolitan Area Workshops. Additionally, as IEEE Secretary, he restructured IEEE’s Governance Committee to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of IEEE governance.

Barry received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and B.S. from the Pennsylvania State University, both in electrical engineering. During his tenure at West Point, he has served in a number of leadership positions including Director of the Electrical Engineering Program and Director of the Photonics Research Center. He is currently Professor of Electrical Engineering and Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, responsible for an undergraduate academic department with over 79 faculty and staff supporting ABET accredited programs in electrical engineering, computer science, and information technology.

Earlier in his career, he was a satellite communication engineer responsible for the design and installation of a high-capacity, global digital communication network, and also the CTO for a US$4.5B organization addressing the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) challenge worldwide.

In addition to being an IEEE Fellow, Barry is also a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE). In 2008, OSA recognized Barry with their Robert E. Hopkins Leadership Award and, in 2013, he earned both the SPIE Educator Award and the IEEE Haraden Pratt Award. He holds a patent on photonic analog-to-digital conversion and has authored over 150 archival publications as well as 8 books and book chapters. He is a licensed Professional Engineer in Virginia, USA.

Yao is a Sr Staff engineer at Twitter, and leads the Infrastructure Optimization and Performance team. Her team works on applying the latest research and technology to large-scale infrastructure problems, particularly to improve operational visibility and to take advantage of new hardware and system capabilities in new infrastructure software. Yao is an industry expert on distributed in-memory caching. She previously lead the Cache team at Twitter. She also authors and maintains open-source software such as Twemcache, Twemproxy, and Pelikan.