Vladimir is the Chief Technology Officer of Ayar Labs. Prior to founding Ayar Labs, he led the team that designed the world’s first processor to communicate using light. Vladimir was recently a professor of EECS at UC Berkeley, and was one of the key developers of the Rambus high-speed link technology. He holds a PhD from Stanford University.
Taymur Ahmad is the Founder and CEO of actnano Inc. Prior to founding actnano, Mr. Ahmad had 18 years of manufacturing management experience with Fortune 50 companies such as Alcoa and Philips Electronics. Among other accolades, in 2010 he was awarded the "Visionary of the Year" award by Surface Mount Technology magazine. Mr. Ahmad's success stories have been featured in various magazines and newspapers including USA Today. Dell's Center for Entrepreneurs picked Mr. Ahmad to be one of the top 50 CEO's in the world. He is a member of the Dell founders 50 club and the Philips Alumni Club. Mr. Ahmad speaks 5 languages, and has lived in Europe and Asia. He earned his MBA from Business School Lausanne in Switzerland, and his Engineering degree from the University of Iowa.
Dave Driggers is the Chief Executive and Technical Officer and founder of Cirrascale Cloud Services. Mr. Driggers establishes and drives the vision and mission of the company while providing guidance for the development and implementation of the company’s specialized cloud-based, bare-metal server and accelerator partner for artificial intelligence development, training and inference solutions. As the previous founder of Racksaver, Verari Systems, and Cirrascale Corporation, he has an extensive background in hardware development serving various HPC and Artificial Intelligence vertical markets.
As Head of AI & Messaging Platforms org at PayPal, Nikhil leads Product Management & Conversational AI Design teams. Nikhil is responsible for defining the vision & strategy to bring advancements in AI, especially Generative AI & NLU/NLP to power intuitive & intelligent experiences for PayPal's Consumers & Small-Medium Business Merchants. He brings over two decades of experience in building and growing enterprise scale consumer products across technology start-ups, growth companies and S&P 500 large companies. In recent years, my focus has been on building enterprise-scale vertical Applied AI platforms that offer capabilities & services such as AI powered Chatbot, Voice / IVR applications, Semantic & Lexical Search, Agent Assist Solutions (Smart Replies, Summarization) etc within Consumer Wallet, Payments, SMB Merchants, Shopping / Rewards & Customer Success domains. Nikhil also is a Product Advisor to a handful of startups leaders and CEOs. Nikhil has a technical background with Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and has also earned an AI & ML certification from MIT.
Manu Fontaine serves on the Governing Board of the Confidential Computing Consortium, hosted within the Linux Foundation. He is also the Founder and CEO of Hushmesh Inc., a Public Benefit cybersecurity startup and NATO DIANA Innovator based in the Washington, D.C. area. Hushmesh is developing, deploying, and operating the Mesh—a global information infrastructure akin to the Web, but with automated, decentralized cryptographic security built in. Built entirely on Confidential Computing technology, the Mesh blueprint is mathematically and technically optimal for securing the Agentic Era. Prior to Hushmesh, Manu led identity, privacy, and security-centric product initiatives in the data center, mobile, and consumer spaces at Brightspot, EMC, AOL, and Alcatel. He holds two Masters in Electrical Engineering from the University of Louvain, Belgium.
At Salesforce, Hitesh is responsible for the end-to-end architecture of platforms delivered to financial services and insurance clients globally. His focus is on working with key strategic customers to align Salesforce implementations with their business goals, particularly around the conjunction of Data+AI and CRM. This involves collaborating with retail and commercial banking, payments, wealth management, investment banking, insurance, and capital markets to influence product roadmaps and shape the future of technology in these industries. A significant part of Hitesh's role includes facilitating discussions with CTOs, CIOs, CDOs, and Chief Architects to: • Analyze current architectures and design target states. • Optimize Salesforce technologies for customer needs. • Integrate and Interoperate with Salesforce platforms within broader ecosystems. Being the executive sponsors for the customers, I play a key role in influencing product development within Salesforce by advocating for customer-driven innovations.
Hitesh oversees end-to-end platform and solution architecture for global financial services and insurance clients. He specializes in aligning Salesforce solutions with strategic business objectives, particularly at the intersection of Data+AI and CRM. By collaborating with retail and commercial banking, payments, wealth management, investment banking, insurance, and capital markets, Hitesh helps influence product roadmaps and shape the future of technology in these industries.
A key part of his role involves engaging CTOs, CIOs, CDOs, and Chief Architects to analyze current architectures, design target states, and optimize Salesforce within broader ecosystems. As an executive sponsor, Hitesh champions customer-driven innovation, ensuring product development meets evolving industry needs.
Ashwin Gumaste is an AI Architect at Microsoft. He specializes in building AI systems, scaling networks, and model estimation. Before joining Microsoft, Ashwin held key roles at Infinera, Cisco, and Fujitsu, as well as academic positions at IIT Bombay and MIT. Earlier in his career at IIT Bombay, he designed, developed, and successfully commercialized carrier Ethernet switch routers, earning India's highest science and technology honor, the Bhatnagar Prize. A distinguished fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences in India, Ashwin has made significant contributions to AI and network engineering. He has authored three books, published 215 peer-reviewed papers, and holds 28 granted patents.
Dudy is a qualified manager and technology expert, with more than 30 years of experience in the networking industry. As a senior AI networking expert, he partners closely with the product and engineering teams to shape DriveNets’ vision for AI Networking, helping to deliver the high performance of a proprietary solution with a standards-based Ethernet implementation that provides unrivaled performance. Previously, Dudy served as the VP of Product Marketing at Ceragon. He also served as a Director of Solutions Engineering at Alvarion Ltd. Dudy holds an M.Sc.-E.E degree from the Tel Aviv University.
Ravi Mahatme is the Senior Director of Product at Celestial AI, where he leads product strategy and development across hardware, systems and software for next-generation AI infrastructure built on Celestial’s Photonic Fabric TM technology platform. His work focuses on solving data movement and scalability challenges in modern AI workloads.
Prior to joining Celestial AI, Ravi was part of the AWS SageMaker DeepEngines team, where he built foundational tools for distributed AI training and inference, including SageMaker Profiler.
Ravi spent over 17 years at Arm, transitioning from engineering to global product leadership roles. His experience spans semiconductor IP, high-performance CPU implementation, and NPUs—giving him deep insight into the full AI compute stack.
He has extensive experience working with customers across North America, Europe, and APAC.
Ravi holds an M.S. in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University and a B.E. in Electronics from Mumbai University.
Charlie Fu is an optoelectronics veteran with over 30 years of leadership experience spanning global industry leaders such as Lumentum, Harris, Nortel, and JDSU, as well as two innovative startup ventures. He currently serves as Technical Director of High-Speed Optical Interconnect Solutions at Amphenol ACS, where he leads the strategic development of next-generation optical technologies for AI and high-performance computing applications.
Throughout his career, Charlie has consistently demonstrated a unique ability to bridge deep technical knowledge with strong business insight—delivering impactful product roadmaps and driving widespread market adoption. He holds a Ph.D. in Optics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a B.S. in Optoelectronics from Tsinghua University. He is the named inventor on ten U.S. patents, has authored more than ten journal papers as well as a technical book.
Kurtis Bowman, AMD’s Director of Architecture and Strategy, has a career in computer architecture spanning over three decades. He played a key role in numerous transformative innovations, including introducing integrated audio in PCs, democratizing affordable PC pricing, crafting scalable object storage, and incorporating cutting-edge technologies into server products. His expertise has been honed through his work with prominent companies like Compaq, Dell, and Panasas.
His passion extends beyond individual companies. He co-founded pivotal organizations like CXL, Gen-Z, and UALink, actively shaping the future of high-performance computing. He currently co-chairs the CXL Marketing Workgroup and chairs the UALink Board of Directors, while actively representing these consortia at industry events.
Kurtis’s dedication to innovation and collaboration has cemented his position as a leading figure in the high-performance computing industry, driving transformative technologies and fostering industry-wide advancements.
Sherman Ikemoto is the Sales Development Group Director at Cadence Design Systems, where he leads global business development for the innovative Reality DC Digital Twin solution. With a passion for addressing challenges in data center design, performance, and sustainability, Sherman brings extensive expertise to the forefront of this critical industry. Previously, Sherman served as Managing Director and Board Member at Future Facilities, the pioneer of the original data center Digital Twin, and as North America Sales and Marketing Director at Flomerics, where he helped introduce computational fluid dynamics modeling to electronics cooling design. During his tenure at Future Facilities, Sherman was a sought-after speaker at prominent industry events like ITW, Data Center World, Uptime Symposium, and Data Center Dynamics. Sherman holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (BSME) from San Jose State University, where he was a member of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society, and a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering (MSME) from Santa Clara University. His career reflects a deep commitment to advancing sustainable and efficient technologies for the data center industry.
Eliana Stefani, PhD is a Staff Autonomy & AI Research Engineer at Lockheed Martin, with expertise in autonomous systems, AI, and robotics. She has experience architecting solutions to complex problems, leading teams across engineering disciplines, and deploying artificially intelligent systems to the edge.
As Principal Investigator, she architected the autonomy stack and developed novel autonomous driving software for the Lunar Terrain Vehicle, enabling a rover to navigate dynamic obstacles while traversing unmapped environments; garnering interest from additional customers.
As Program Manager and later Chief Engineer, she architected system design, led a multi-disciplinary engineering team from research concept to successful test events, guided the program to a contract win, and interfaced with customers and stakeholders.
Dr. Stefani's strong track record of delivering high-impact results and driving program success has been recognized with multiple awards from within Lockheed Martin. She has presented at conferences including NVIDIA's GTC-DC and Amazon's re:MARS.
PromptQL is an AI platform that delivers human-level reliability for natural language analysis and automation on enterprise data and systems. We capture and codify each business's unique know-how into a language that frontier models can understand and execute deterministically. Backed by top-tier investors and trusted by Fortune 100 companies, we're making AI that finally speaks the language of your business.
The combination of extreme-density, co-packaged interconnects and next-gen AI accelerators form the backbone of bleeding-edge AI hardware system topologies. Co-Packaged Copper (CPC) optimizes 224 Gbps signaling by eliminating BGA packaging losses. This implementation allows for extended reach preserving the viability of copper cable assemblies. Emerging Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) solutions enable high-bandwidth, low-latency optical links that can span multiple racks.
In this Main Conference presentation, Samtec technical experts will detail next-gen CPC/CPO solutions using the same SMT Co-Packaged CPX connector. This new CPX architecture breaks through existing performance barriers allowing seamless interconnection of multiple GPUs and enabling AI supercomputing fabrics. An overview of the latest 448 Gbps PAMx technologies will also be presented.
Matthew Burns develops go-to-market strategies for Samtec’s Silicon-to-Silicon solutions. Over the course of 25 years, he has been a leader in design, applications engineering, technical sales and marketing in the telecommunications, medical and electronic components industries. He currently serves as Secretary at PICMG. Mr. Burns holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University.
Chris Sharp has over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, with an extensive background in developing technology strategies in global markets. He has a deep knowledge of the data center sector and is well positioned to expand technical innovation at Digital Realty.
Most recently, he was responsible for cloud innovation at Equinix, where he led the development of innovative cloud services solutions and developed new capabilities enabling next-generation, high-performance exchange, and interconnection solutions, facilitating broad commercial adoption of cloud computing on a global basis.
Previously, Chris held leadership positions at top network and colocation providers, including Qwest Communications, MCI/Verizon Business and Reliance Globalcom.
