Committee

Karen Bartleson has over 35 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, specifically in electronic design automation. She served as the President of IEEE in 2017, and currently is a member of the Champions Board of the National Girls Collaborative Project. She is also a member of the Toy Association’s STEM/STEAM Strategic Committee. Karen chaired the editing committee for IEEE’s recently published book, Ethically Aligned Design, First Edition.

Karen retired as Senior Director of Corporate Programs and Initiatives at Synopsys, an electronic design automation company, where her responsibilities included creating programs for technical standards development, software tool interoperability, and creating and maintaining strong relationships with universities and research institutions worldwide. Prior to Synopsys, Karen brought her exceptional professional and leadership skills to bear at United Technologies Microelectronics Center and Texas Instruments.

As a member of and leader within the IEEE Board of Directors in 2013 and 2014, she chaired and led the development of the strategic plan for the IEEE Internet Initiative Committee, whose charter is to raise IEEE’s influence and profile in the areas of Internet governance, cyber-security, and cyber-privacy policy development. She was also a member of the IEEE Strategy Committee, overseeing the development of the role of IEEE in global public policy.

Karen has published numerous articles about standards and universities and has authored the book “The Ten Commandments for Effective Standards: Practical Insights for Creating Technical Standards” (Synopsys Press, 2010). In 2003, she received the Marie R. Pistilli Women in Electronic Design Automation Achievement Award. She earned a B.S. in Engineering Science with a concentration in Electronic Engineering from California Polytechnic State University in 1980.

HPE Fellow/VP Kirk Bresniker is Hewlett Packard Labs Chief Architect leading advanced development in system hardware and software. 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. Kirk current holds 28 US and 10 foreign patents in areas of modular platforms and blade systems, integrated circuits, and power and environmental control. Bresniker received his BSEE from Santa Clara University, where he was also a member of the Humanities Honors program.

Sabrina Farmer is a VP in the Site Reliability Engineering org. She is responsible for the reliability teams for Google's Consumer and Enterprise products, as well as the various product infrastructure systems. Sabrina joined Google in 2005 and has more than 20 years of experience in production engineering. She earned a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of New Orleans, and is the founder of the “Scholarship for Women in Computer Science” at her alma mater.

Danny Lange is Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Unity Technologies where he leads efforts to advance the capabilities of AI through scalable game simulations. Prior to his role at Unity, Danny was the head of Machine Learning at Uber where he lead the development of the company’s Machine Learning platform. Previously, he was General Manager for Machine Learning at Amazon where he managed Amazon’s internal Machine Learning platform as well as launched the first AI product for Amazon Web Services (AWS) known as Amazon Machine Learning. Danny has also lead Machine Learning efforts at Microsoft and started his career building autonomous agents as a Computer Scientist at IBM Research.

Barry L. Shoop became Dean of the Albert Nerken School of Engineering in January 2019 after retiring as a Brigadier General from a nearly 39-year career in the U.S. Army. For the last 25 years, he served in a number of key leadership roles at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point including Director of the Photonics Research Center, Director of the Electrical Engineering Program and most recently as Professor and Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In this capacity, he was responsible for an undergraduate academic department with over 79 faculty and staff supporting Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (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 Chief Technology Officer for a US$4.5B organization addressing the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) challenge worldwide.

Dr. Shoop received the B.S. degree from the Pennsylvania State University and Ph.D. from Stanford University, both in electrical engineering. His research interests include optical information processing, neural networks, image processing, disruptive innovations and educational pedagogy. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE) and a member of Phi Kappa Phi, Eta Kappa Nu, and Sigma Xi. He has served on the Board of Directors of OSA, ABET and IEEE. In 2016 Dr. Shoop served as the IEEE President and CEO. In 2008, OSA recognized him with their Robert E. Hopkins Leadership Award and, in 2013, he received both the SPIE Educator Award and the IEEE Haraden Pratt Award. Dr. Shoop 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 the Commonwealth of Virginia, USA. In 2019, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Martina Trucco is a marketing, communications and strategy professional with over 15 years of R&D, technology, and higher education experience. At Micron, she leads a global team focused on corporate marketing and brand experience, corporate communications, and employee and executive communications for a Fortune 105 company with 37,000 employees in 18 countries.

Prior to joining Micron, Ms. Trucco served as the global innovation marketing director at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where she created multiple award-winning technology brands and campaigns, led AI and emerging computing marketing, and was the host and executive producer of The Element podcast. During her 10 year career at HP, she held leadership roles in HP Labs’ strategic planning, Open Innovation, and University Relations offices. Ms. Trucco was a founding member of a privately-held start-up in Munich, Germany – Symplon AG – specializing in early Tablet PC hardware and mobile computing solutions and consulting.

Ms. Trucco earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in digital business management from HEC Paris and Télécom ParisTech. She is author of over 20 peer-reviewed articles and papers and has been a frequent speaker on emerging technology trends such as AI, blockchain, cloud, Computing Beyond Moore’s law, open innovation and economic development. She served as Patronage Chair for the IEEE International Conference on Rebooting Computing (ICRC 2019), and has previously served as Chair of the Advisory Board of the NSF-funded Caribbean Computing Center for Excellence.

Mazdak Hashemi's career has been focused on building and scaling platforms & infrastructures for both consumer and enterprise companies. He was formally the Vice President of Engineering at Twitter where during his tenure [2012-2018] he championed a number of efforts which improved Twitter’s reliability, scalability, and efficiency. Prior to that, he was leading Infrastructure and Security for Support.com, the remote technology company, and he was part of their core team to architect and launch their Cloud platform. Mazdak was the CTO/Founder for a software start up company and has held different engineering roles for small to medium size global software companies both in early stage to mature public companies. He has served as faculty at the University of Colorado, his alma mater. His areas of technical expertise include software engineering, data mining, databases, and distributed systems. Mazdak is an advocate of promoting equality in technology and was a male ally executive sponsor for @TwitterWomen.

Dejan is a distinguished technologist at Hewlett Packard Labs, Palo Alto, CA [1998-]. His areas of technical expertise include operating systems, distributed systems, and systems management. He worked in the OSF Research Institute, Cambridge, MA [1994-1998] and Institute “Mihajlo Pupin”, Belgrade, Serbia [1983-1991]. He received his PhD from University of Kaiserslautern, Germany (1993); and MSc/BSc from Belgrade University, Serbia (1983/86). From his early career, Dejan has been involved in infrastructure development: from OS support for transactional systems deployed across Eastern Europe; to microkernel support for distributed systems; to global memory management in shared memory clusters; to appliance aggregation architecture; virtual desktop systems; Open Cirrus Cloud Computing stack; software architecture for accelerators for AI, and many more.

Raymond Blaine is the Director of the Cyber Research Center at the U.S. Military Academy (USMA) at West Point. In this capacity he is responsible for leading specialized research programs in support of USMA, Army, and DoD requirements as well as teaching cyber security subjects in the West Point curriculum. Immediately prior to this, he spent three years leading one of the twenty Army defensive cyber protection teams. He took his cyber protection team from inception through the traditional cybersecurity training and certification by U. S. Cyber Command. He then led his team through specialized training in industrial control system (ICS) security. His team became highly specialized in this area and was tasked with the defense of all Army ICS systems globally. These ICS systems reside on almost all Army installations and fall in to several of the Department of Homeland Security’s critical infrastructure sectors, to include dams, energy, and the defense industrial base. Ray was among the first cohort of Army officers to be selected for the Army’s newest branch, Cyber Warfare. His military assignments include a variety of duty positions in the Cyber Protection Brigade at Fort Gordon as well as the 82nd Airborne Division and 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, NC. Ray was the Company Commander for HHC, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment. He has served two tours in Operation Iraqi Freedom and one tour in Operation Enduring Freedom. Ray received the BS from the U.S. Military Academy and the MS and Ph.D. degrees from Vanderbilt University, all in electrical engineering. His Ph.D. focused on radiation hardened by design analog and mixed-signal microelectronic circuits. His research interests are in industrial control system security, data visualization for cyber security, and cyber security applications of machine learning. Ray is a member of the IEEE and ACM and is a licensed Professional Engineer in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Pascal Borghino leads the Automox's engineering organization as VP of Engineering and Architecture. Automox is coming off its fourth quarter of record growth that has seen its platform become the most recommended solution in endpoint security and the preferred endpoint management solution for over 1,500 customers across 30 countries. Previously Pascal spent over 10 years experiencing scale at companies like WeWork, Twitter, Yahoo! & IBM. He has a background in databases, he is an author for Eyrolles and was a technical reviewer for O'Reilly Media.

Jenifer is a Mechatronic Engineer and International Enterprises MBA candidate. Currently is the Territory Manager of the Caribbean for Parker Hannifin, where she is in charge of business development and distribution channel management in the region, focused on different Parker technologies, such us Automation, Electromechanical and Hydraulics among many others. Previously to it, she worked for Ingersoll Rand as applications engineer in Colombia, and subsequently as sales coordinator in the Caribbean.

Senior member of IEEE, has been an active volunteer for 15 years, currently is the IEEE Puerto Rico and Caribbean Section Chair, as well as part of the Women in Engineering Committee. Industry Engagement Committee member and Industry Engagement Adhoc Committee Chair in Region 9.

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates is a digital storage analyst as well as a business and technology consultant. He has over 37 years in the data storage industry with engineering and management positions at several companies.

Dr. Coughlin has many publications and six patents to his credit. Tom is also the author of Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics: The Essential Guide, which is now in its second edition with Springer. Coughlin Associates provides market and technology analysis as well as Data Storage Technical and Business Consulting services. Tom publishes the Digital Storage Technology Newsletter, the Media and Entertainment Storage Report, the Emerging Non-Volatile Memory Report and other industry reports. Tom is also a regular contributor on digital storage for Forbes.com and other blogs.

Tom is active with SMPTE (Journal article writer and Conference Program Committee), SNIA (including a founder of the SNIA SSSI), the IEEE, (he is past Chair of the IEEE Public Visibility Committee, Past Director for IEEE Region 6, President of IEEE USA and active in the Consumer Electronics Society) and other professional organizations. Tom is the founder and organizer of the Storage Visions Conference (www.storagevisions.com as well as the Creative Storage Conference (www.creativestorage.org). He was the general chairman of the annual Flash Memory Summit for 10 years. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the Consultants Network of Silicon Valley (CNSV). For more information on Tom Coughlin and his publications and activities go to www.tomcoughlin.com.

Edhem ‘Eddie’ Custovic by day is an engineering academic at La Trobe University, Australia and the founder/director of the La Trobe Innovation & Entrepreneurship Foundry (LIEF). He is a business owner, entrepreneur, thought leader, mentor, philanthropist and a global citizen. Eddie was born in Bosnia & Herzegovina and lived for extended periods in Switzerland and Germany before migrating to Australia. His multicultural background, multilingualism and 'borderless' approach to work enable me to take a politically and culturally sensitive perspective on life, volunteer roles, and professional career. In 2015, with the culmination of first-hand experiences and passion to help those in need, he founded the Bosnia & Herzegovina Futures Foundation. The foundation’s vision is to break down ethnic division in his homeland through a simple approach of empowering youth through education, technology access and leadership development. Custovic is widely credited for changing how the 1.5 million strong Bosnia & Herzegovina diaspora are viewed by the residents of the same country, from ad-hoc financial injections to knowledge bearers and empowers of the next generation of thinkers through the diaspora industry mentoring program. The result of his work is evident in the dozens of projects and initiatives that he has led on 4 continents. He has worked on cutting edge R&D projects securing significant funding and support globally in a variety of sectors including; defence, communications, power, food & agriculture, automotive, health, sports technology and civil/construction. In 2014, Custovic along with his team, was recognised for the innovative work in developing the first fully digital HF OTH radar system ‘TIGER’ radar and the project was awarded the Engineers Australia (State & National) Engineering Excellence Award 2014 - Research/Development and Innovation. Custovic is highly regarded for drive and leadership that have led him to become one of the youngest senior leadership and board members within the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organisation. Custovic currently serves as the Chair of the Industry Engagement Committee where he engages with C-level executives and Fortune 500 organisations on a regular basis. In 2015, Custovic was recognised for his outstanding leadership and received the IEEE Young Professionals Achievement Award. He is considered by youth as the go to person for mentoring, career development, industry experience and life coaching. As a result, he was recognised by the University leadership and awarded the Vice Chancellor's Award for "Supporting Student Employability" in 2015 and was named employability champion by the University in 2018. He is a tireless ambassador for STEM education and this is evident through his continued work to bridge the gap between primary/secondary/university education and industry. Custovic was the Engineering Project Coordinator for the Learn, Access, Experience Professions (LEAP) program which was funded by the Australian Federal Government to accelerate the participation of regional, low SES and minority participation in STEM higher education. Under his leadership the program excelled, reaching more than 10,000 students in over 200 state schools. He wholeheartedly has a deep commitment to making positive change for the world. For Custovic, the intersection between scientific innovation and human empowerment is where we can really “disrupt the future”. His life motivation is to use the powers of engineering, education, networking, entrepreneurial mindset and the spirit of positive change to empower individuals and grow local economies while delivering the scientific advancements of our finest minds for the benefit of future generations. Custovic is an active contributor to Online & Print Media globally, TV & Radio.

Zoran Dimitrijevic is a principal software engineer at Airbnb Labs. Before Airbnb, Zoran Dimitrijevic was a principal software engineer at Altiscale since 2014 and a principal engineer at SAP after the acquisition in 2016 working on Big-Data-as-a-Service systems based on Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark. Before Altiscale, Zoran was a software engineer at Google, from 2004 to 2013, working on Google distributed systems including Google File System and Google News Archives, News, Search, and Video/YouTube. Zoran received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2004, and a Dipl.Ing in Computer Engineering from the School of Electrical Engineering, Belgrade University, Serbia in 1999.

Dr. Robert S. Fish is President of the IEEE Standards Association and Chief Marketing Officer of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc). Dr. Fish is a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science of Princeton University and is also President of NETovations, LLC, a consulting company focused on the creation and standardization of communications and networking technology. From 2007 to 2010, he was Chief Product Officer and Senior VP at Mformation, Inc. a company specializing in carrier software for mobile device management. From 1997 to 2007, Rob was Vice President and Managing Director of Panasonic US R&D laboratories working on embedding networking into consumer devices. Prior to this, he was Executive Director, Multimedia Communications Research at Bellcore/Telcordia after starting his career at Bell Laboratories. Besides his many publications, Dr. Fish has been awarded 17 patents. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Ethan is a software engineering professional who lives in Mountain View, CA. Across his close to 20 years of experience in Silicon Valley, he has worked at numerous industry leading companies and startups: Hewlett Packard -including their world renown research organization HP Labs-, TIBCO Software, Delphix and Cape Analytics. At TIBCO Software he was one of the key contributors to the re-design and implementation of ActiveSpaces, TIBCO’s distributed in-memory data grid. ActiveSpaces is a consistent, partition tolerant scalable database that supports mixed read/write workloads; ActiveSpaces can be used both as a cache as well as a system of record. At Cape Analytics, he worked on their scalable machine learning inference infrastructure. Through the latter experience, he came to appreciate the promise of deep learning to solve many formerly intractable problems. Ethan serves as the Chair of the IEEE Information Theory Society Santa Clara Valley Chapter and holds Masters (2007) and PhD (2012) degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University as well as an undergraduate engineering degree from ESIEE-Paris (1997).

Dinesh is a Committer on the Apache Cassandra project and a IEEE Member. He has been a professional Software Engineer for over a decade building highly scalable realtime Web Services and Distributed Streaming Data Processing Architectures serving over 1 billion devices. He has a Masters degree in Computer Science (Distributed Systems & Databases) from Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA.

Dr. Kimberly Keeton is a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Labs, where her research is in the areas of memory-driven computing and NVM-aware data stores and programming models. She has also worked in the areas of storage and information management, storage dependability, NoSQL databases, intelligent storage, and workload characterization. She was a co-architect of the Express Query database, which provides metadata services for HPE's StoreAll archiving product. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.S. in Computer Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University. She is a Fellow of the ACM and a Senior Member of the IEEE, and has served as Technical Program Committee Chair for multiple USENIX, ACM, IEEE and IFIP sponsored conferences.

Sriram Krishnan is a Senior Director of Engineering on the Einstein Platform team at Salesforce. He leads a team of engineers and managers building the foundational infrastructure & services for Machine Learning at Salesforce. Prior to Salesforce, Sriram led the Data Platform team at Twitter, and was an Architect on the Big Data Platform at Netflix. Sriram has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University, and has also spent several years doing R&D at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

Sangjin is currently a Senior Director at PayPal, leading the Container & Routing Platform team. Sangjin is an industry veteran of 20+ years at Silicon Valley, having previously worked at companies such as Netscape, Siebel Systems, eBay, and Twitter. As leader and individual contributor, Sangjin is steeped in wide-ranging areas of the infrastructure/platform engineering, from big data, storage platform, systems development, Java platform libraries, software development lifecycle ecosystem, and more. Sangjin has also been active in the open source software development and is a PMC member of the Apache Hadoop project. Sangjin holds a Ph.D degree in Physics from the University of Chicago.

Francisco Martinez’ areas of expertise include the development and implementation of automation and control systems and solutions. His passion for technology and electronics and his knowledge on those fields is reflected in the company he founded in Guadalajara, México in 1994 where he is currently CEO, Sistemas Azteca S.A. The company provides fully integrated AIDC (Automatic Identification and Data Capture) applications that combine state-of-the-art hardware with tailor-made software solutions. Additionally, they are consultants in a wide variety of data capture related topics, like the everyday more popular RFID technology, and also manufacture self-adhesive labels. His career includes experience as practicing engineer and designer in the electro-medical and molded plastic industry and Professor for 20 years (retired) in the Universidad de Guadalajara and ITESO universities.

IEEE ACTIVITIES:
COMMITTEES/BOARDS:

• IEEE Governance member 2014-2015-2016- 2018-2019
• IEEE Industry Engagement Committee member 2019
• IEEE Conference Committee member 2017-2018-2019
• IEEE National Societies Agreements 2019
• Future Directions Committee member 2016-2017-2018
• Signature Program Evaluation Committee (SPEC) 2016-2017-2018
• MGA Vice Chair-Information Management 2015-2016
• IEEE AB Joint Awards with National Societies Committee Chair 2017-2018
• IEEE Awards member 2017-2018
• IEEE AB OpCom member 2017-2018
• IEEE Service Awards Committee member 2017-2018
• MGA Vice Chair Information Management 2015-2016
• MGA ITCO Committee Chair 2015-2016
• FDC Industry Advisory Board (IAB) member 2015-2016
• Ad Hoc on Holistic IT Development Member 2015
• MGA ITCO Committee member 2014
• MGA Liaison to TAB 2014
• IEEE AB Joint Awards with National Societies Committee Member 2013-2014
• IEEE Admission and Advancement (A&A) Committee Chair 2012-2013
• IEEE N&A member 2011-2012
• IEEE Awards Board Member 2010-2011
• IEEE Career Services Committee Member 2010-2011
• IEEE Admission and Advancement Committee Member 2010-2011
• IEEE Globalization of Professional Activities Co-Chair 2009
• IEEE N&A member 2006-2008
• IEEE BoD member 2004-2005
• IEEE Compensation Committee Member 2005
• IEEE Governance Working Group Member 2003
• MGA Liaison to TAB 2009
• MGA N&A Chair 2008
• RAB N&A Chair 2006-2007
• Member Activities Committee member 2006
• RAB Board Member 2004-2005
• RAB liaison to EAB 2002-2003
• RAB Finance Committee member 2003

REGIONS:

• R9 History committee Chair 2014-2015-2016
• R9 Strategic Planning Chair 2008
• R9 Past Director and N&A R9 Chair 2006-2007
• Region 9 Director 2004-2005
• R9 Membership Development Chair 2002-2003
• R9 Secretary 2000-2001
• R9 Awards & Recognition Member 2000-2001
• R9 Newsletter Editor 1998-1999

SECTIONS/CHAPTERS

• Computer society Chapter Chair 2014-2015
• Guadalajara Section Chair 1996-1997
• Mexico’s Council Secretary 1996-1997
• Guadalajara Section Vice Chair 1995
• Guadalajara Industrial Electronics Chapter Chair 1991-92
• Guadalajara Sub-Section Secretary 1988-1989
• Guadalajara Subsection Treasurer 1987

SOCIETY:

• Computer Society,
• Systems, Man, and Cybernetics,
• Society on Social Implications of Technology,

CONFERENCES:

• 2017-2004 Mexico’ Section Summer Power Conference. Program committee
• 2014 Guadalajara First Smart Cities Conference steering committee
• 2014 Section Congress Speaker (“Member Grade Elevation and Recognition” )
• 2013 Guadalajara Smart City Kick Off steering committee
• 2011 Section Congress Speaker for Admission and Advancement Committee (“Member Grade Elevation and Recognition” ) and for Career
Services Committee (""Doing Professional Activities in Your Sections “)
• 2005 Section Congress Speaker
• 2002 Section Congress Speaker
• 1999 Section Congress Speaker
• 1998 Region 9 Annual Meeting Chairman.
• MEXICON, 1992 Co-Chair & Speaker."

Ed Palacio has 40 years of experience in directing development and production of complex electronic systems. He has held P&L responsibility at the Business Unit and Sector levels, as well as functional lead positions in Program Management, Engineering and Operations. Currently he is President of P&L Technical Management Solutions, a Small Business focused on technology, program, and business development for the DoD and civilian market. Prior to this, he was VP of Program Management and Business Operations for ITT/Exelis Electronic Systems. Before joining ITT, Ed was VP of EDO Corporation’s Electronic Warfare Sector. He has been a member of multiple advisory boards in academia and professional organizations and currently teaches at Stony Brook University’s Department of Technology and Society. He is currently Vice-Chair of the IEEE Industry Engagement Committee as well as IEEE Region 1 Director-Elect. Ed holds a BEE from the Cooper Union School of Engineering and Science and two MS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Technology Management from the Polytechnic Institute of New York.

Dr. Peter Sbarski is VP of Content at A Cloud Guru, AWS Community Hero, and the organizer of Serverlessconf, the world’s first conference dedicated entirely to serverless architectures and technologies. His work at A Cloud Guru allows him to work with, talk and write about cloud computing and serverless architectures. He is the author of Serverless Architectures on AWS (Manning Publications, 2017) and a co-author of another upcoming another book on Serverless Design Patterns (together with Tim Wagner and Yochay Kiriaty). Peter is always happy to talk about cloud computing and can be found at conferences throughout the year. Peter’s passions include serverless technologies, event-driven programming, back end architecture, microservices, and orchestration of systems. Dr. Peter Sbarski holds a PhD in Computer Science from Monash University, Australia.
Twitter: http://twitter.com/sbarski
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petersbarski

Sheikh is an award-winning ICT and Smart Buildings Consultant specializing in the digital transformation of buildings into smart properties. He is based out of London, United Kingdom and has expertise in strategy, design, implementation, and commissioning of large-scale complex information & communications systems on high profile, major international capital investment programmes, particularly in the commercial property and sport sectors across United Kingdom, Middle East, and Russia.

Within IEEE, he is a Senior Member and is currently the Vice Chair of Technical Activities for IEEE Region 8 (EMEA), a member of IEEE Industry Engagement Committee and a member of IEEE Educational Activities Board where he also Chairs the Section Education Outreach Committee. He was also a member of the Administrative Committee of IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society in 2015-16.

Shmuel Shottan is an experienced technology executive who served as CTO, SVP Engineering and as general partner at a corporate VC firm over the years. Shmuel also has a strong board and advisory board experience. Shmuel has over 40 years' experience in the research and development of hardware and Software, and in engineering management for firms ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 Companies. Shmuel is currently serving as SVP, Converged and Storage Engineering at Hitachi Vantara, where he leads multiple development tracks. Shmuel Joined Hitachi Vantara through the acquisition of BlueArc, the leading provider of the most scalable and the highest performing network storage solutions. Prior to BlueArc, Shmuel was the senior vice president of Engineering and Chief Strategy Officer for SNAP Appliances, Inc. Previously, Shottan served as vice president and general partner of Quantum Technology Ventures. Previously, Shottan was the senior vice president of engineering and chief technical officer for Quantum's Snap Division. Under his direction, the award-winning Snap Server garnered 80 percent of the rapidly developing market for entry-level network-attached storage systems. Prior to Snap, Mr. Shottan held engineering development and management positions with Parallan Computer, AST Research, where he led the development of the Manhattan Multiprocessor server, and ICL. Shmuel also enjoys mentoring, coaching and advising early stage startups (With emphasis on enterprise software, IoT and software defined infrastructure).

Natalia Vassilieva is a Technical Product Manager at Cerebras Systems, a stealth mode startup. Her focus is machine learning and artificial intelligence, analytics, and application-driven software-hardware optimization and co-design. Most recently before joining Cerebras Natalia has been a Sr. Research Manager at Hewlett Packard Labs, where she led the Software and AI group. Prior to HPE, she was an Associate Professor at St. Petersburg State University and worked as a software engineer for different IT companies. Natalia holds a PhD in computer science from St. Petersburg State University.