Alissa Sasso

Selcuk Kopru

Selcuk Kopru is Head of ML & NLP at eBay and is an experienced AI leader with proven expertise in creating and deploying cutting edge NLP and AI technologies and systems. He is experienced in developing scalable Machine Learning solutions to solve big data problems that involve text and multimodal data. He is also skilled in Python, Java, C++, Machine Translation and Pattern Recognition. Selcuk is also a strong research professional with a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in NLP in Computer Science from Middle East Technical University.

Saurabh Kulkarni

Saurabh Kulkarni is currently the Head of Engineering in North America at Graphcore. In his career spanning 20 years, he has held leadership positions at Intel, Microsoft and Oracle prior to his current role at Graphcore. His roles have spanned Computer Architecture, Server Platform Architecture, Cloud infrastructure design, Virtual Machine sizing for Microsoft Azure, HPC infrastructure in the cloud and more recently hardware accelerators and scale-out infrastructure for AI compute in the cloud.

After graduating from the University of Minnesota, Saurabh started his career at Intel Corporation, where he initially worked on several generations of X86 CPUs for client and server market segments. Towards the later part of his time at Intel, he was a platform architect in the data center group driving customer focused innovation in the enterprise platform and firmware security areas.

In 2014, Saurabh joined Microsoft in the Azure Compute team focusing on the IaaS platform and infrastructure, with particular emphasis on scale-out architecture. He drove the server platform architecture and Virtual Machine (VM) sizing strategy for various Azure VM families across general purpose and accelerated computing use cases including HPC/AI workloads. In this capacity, one of his primary areas of focus was efficient architectures for disaggregated resource management for general purpose and accelerated compute.

Saurabh briefly worked at Oracle in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure team working on cloud native services before joining Graphcore, where he currently is the Head of Engineering for North America. In his current role, he works closely with customers to understand their AI workload needs for training and inference with the objective to devise efficient, end-to-end solutions that can be either deployed on-prem, on public clouds or in a hybrid cloud setting. He is also involved in the architectural definition of the next generation of Graphcore IPUs and systems being designed to fulfil the demanding needs of future AI workloads at scale.

Nadia Fawaz

Mike Vildibill

Christopher Aberger

Christopher Aberger is a senior director of software engineering at SambaNova Systems where he directs the machine learning team. Christopher works on efficient training algorithms for new and emerging hardware architectures. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University where he studied the intersection of graph, database, and machine learning systems; this work received a Best Of award at VLDB in 2016 and an invited TODS article in 2017.