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.
Corey Bronstein
Matt Withington
Matt Withington is the Marketing Director of Samuel Adams, responsible for brand strategy, communications, and portfolio development. Matt began his career at the Boston Beer Company in 2017, leading the Angry Orchard Hard Cider brand, and has spent more than 15 years in food and beverage as both a marketer and an operator. He and his wife Kayleigh live in Newburyport, MA and are avid travelers.
Milan Martin
Milan is a creative business executive with a history of driving growth and success in both large enterprise and entrepreneurial environments. For the past decade, Milan has held executive-level positions across three continents, leading both Fortune 50 and growth brands.
In 2020, Milan founded The Free Spirits Company and is currently the CEO of the organization. Working with a talented team of multi-disciplinary professionals, Milan is dedicated to changing drinking culture by offering people better “no and low alcohol” options when ‘drinking’. Free Spirits is one of the leading brands in a quickly growing category and is poised to continue to innovate and expand rapidly across markets.
Prior to Free Spirits, Milan led Grey Advertising through a significant turn-around and to the most successful time in its history. Under Milan’s leadership, Grey San Francisco was recognized as one of the fastest growing, most creatively awarded agencies on the West Coast. Taking home top honors at festivals including Effies, Cannes, OneShows and D&AD, in addition to the business results achieved for Grey’s clients were all factors in the Agency being named as Global Agency of the Year three years running.
Earlier in his career, Milan spent over a decade at Ogilvy & Mather in both London and New York City, later joining a digital agency as Chief Strategist where he also orchestrated the sale of the company to a publicly traded organization.
A native of the East Coast, Milan now lives with his family in Mill Valley, California where he plays drums (serviceably) in a neighborhood dad band called “The Sofa Kings”.