ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Gilbert Thomas is the Technical Sales Lead for ASEAN Cognitive Systems covering the areas of HPC, Big Data and AI. He has over 10 years’ experience in the HPC field and was involved in numerous HPC projects across different industries such as financial services, education/research, oil and gas as well as genomics. He graduated with a Bachelor in Computing with Merit from National University of Singapore in 2002.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Michael Cornwell joined from Sun Microsystems where he served as Lead Technologist for Flash Memory. He was responsible for development of NAND flash memory technology for Server and Enterprise applications inclduing the first NAND designed for enterpirse applications in partnerhsip with Samsung Semiconductor. Michael led creation of world’s fastest storage system, Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array, utilizing all-flash design and core building block in TPC record-breaking transactional database machine developed by Sun/Oracle. Previously, he was the Manager of Storage Engineering for the iPod division of Apple, Inc. In this role, Michael was instrumental in the adoption of NAND flash in Apple products including iPod and iPhone.

Priot to joining Apple, Inc., Michael worked at Quantum Corporation as a Storage Architect focused on storage telemetry, virtual tape and disk-based backup technologies. Michael holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from the Univeristy of California at Santa Cruz. He has 36 U.S. patents awarded in flash and other storage technologies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Benny Riadi is the Head of Solutions and a Big Data Architect for OVO Lippo Digital. Prior to his current role, he served as Managing Consultant - Big Data Architect at PT IBM Indonesia and as a Data Warehouse Manager at PT Hutchison CP Telecommunications.

Benny has 20 years of experience in IT, currently he is responsible for design and implementation integrated analytic platform for multiple business within Lippo Group. In the past he had designed and delivered big data and analytic platform for some major cellular operator with billions of transaction records and terabytes data that required complex transformation. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Indonesian Institute of Technology. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dr. Hui Liang leads the data scientist team in Innovation Center, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Singapore.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dr Alexandre Thiery, co-founder of Abyss Processing, is an Assistant Professor in the department of Statistics and Applied Probability at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Dr Thiery was educated in theoretical mathematics at the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) of Paris and recently shifted to more applied areas of research such as Data-Assimilation and Monte-Carlo methods. Dr Thiery is recognized as a leader in the field of Bayesian statistics and machine learning.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Leo Tam serves as a Senior Solutions Architect and Deep Learning Community Manager, part of the NALA-based, World Wide Field Organization (WWFO). He focusses on curating open source tools, advising and architecting solutions for enterprise applications, and contributing to the Deep Learning Institute, which his team established. Leo Tam brings to NVIDIA 10 years of R&D experience, previously as a research scientist at Stanford’s School of Medicine. He is a top performer in algorithm's competitions including an algorithm placed in the top 3% of a world-wide competition sponsored by the California Healthcare Foundation and second place in a commodities trading competition. Leo holds multiple patents for MRI machine learning and encoding methods developed as a research scientist at the Yale University School of Medicine. Leo earned his BSc in Mathematics-Physics from Brown University and PhD from Yale University.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Christopher Muffat is the founder and CEO of Dathena Science a Singaporean company developing a data governance platform based on machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. Christopher has over ten years of experience in information security risk management, including leading the internal HSBC and SwissLeaks digital forensics investigation for one of the largest data thief that occurred in Europe, as well as conducting research on cyber security risk in safety-critical systems to prevent cyber terrorism for Emirates. Prior to founding Dathena, Christopher established and managed the Information Risk Management function for Barclays Europe and APAC. He designed information risk regulatory remediation program on identity and access management, information classification, application and infrastructure security, as well as data loss prevention strategy. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Steve is currently the Chief Information Officer and Group Senior Vice President, Technology at Changi Airport Group. His responsibilities includes: leading the SMART Airport Programme, Digital Transformation, IT project management, operations and support, architecture and strategy, innovation projects for airport operations, development commercial and corporate systems. Prior to joining CAG, Steve was the CIO at Kuok (Singapore) Ltd, a company with businesses in trading, shipping, logistics and other businesses across the region. He spent his earlier years in the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) where he held the post of Deputy Director, MINDEF CIO Office before leaving to join the private sector. Steve is also the past Chairman of Airport Council International (ACI) World Airport IT Standing Committee and past President of the IT Management Association (ITMA), Singapore. Steve also volunteers as an IT advisor at Volunteer Council of Singapore; Singapore Red Cross; and National Volunteer and Philanthropic Council. Steve led a team to win the biennial Singapore National Infocomm Awards (Private Sector category) in 2012; and was recently voted as #1 on the Future Travel Experience Airport Innovation Power List 2017. Steve completed the Stanford-NUS Executive Programme in International Management; as well as the Advanced Management Programme at the National Defence University, USA. As an undergraduate, he was trained as a mechanical engineer at NUS and his postgraduate education was in operational analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, California, USA.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Satoshi Matsuoka received his Ph.D. from The Univ. of Tokyo in 1993 and has been a Full Professor at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center (GSIC), a Japanese national supercomputing center hosted by the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech.), and since 2016, a Fellow at the AI Research Center (AIRC), hosted by Japan National Institute for Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), the largest national laboratory in Japan. He is the leader of the TSUBAME series of supercomputers, including TSUBAME2.0 which was the first supercomputer in Japan to exceed Petaflop performance and became the 4th fastest in the world on the Top500 in Nov. 2010, as well as the recent TSUBAME-KFC becoming #1 in the world for power efficiency for both the Green 500 and Green Graph 500 lists in Nov. 2013. He is also currently leading several major supercomputing research projects, such as the MEXT Green Supercomputing, JSPS Billion-Scale Supercomputer Resilience, as well as the JST-CREST Extreme Big Data, and now is the director of the Real-World Big Data Computing ? Open Innovation Laboratory (RWBC-OIL), a joint lab established between AIST and Tokyo Tech. He has written over 500 articles according to Google Scholar, and chaired numerous ACM/IEEE conferences, most recently the overall Technical Program Chair at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference (SC13) in 2013. He is a fellow of the ACM and European ISC, and has won many awards, including the JSPS Prize from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science in 2006, awarded by his Highness Prince Akishino, the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in 2011, the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2012, and recently the 2014 IEEE-CS Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award, the highest prestige in the field of HPC.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dr. Ethan Chu is the CTO and founder of the start-up company Xjera labs Pte Ltd. Prior to Xjera, he held research and development positions in Qualcomm and HP Labs in the US and also a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley. He was awarded A*STAR Overseas Graduate Scholarship in 2009. He earned his Masters and PhD degree both from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011 and 2014 respectively under supervision of Prof. Thomas S. Huang, a world pioneer in computer vision, image processing and machine learning. Dr. Chu has published 10+ research works in top venues in CVPR, AAAI, MICCAI, NIPS and AISTATS and is the author of two patents. Dr. Chu was a principal investigator of a few AI projects and also an adjunct research scientist at the Advanced Digital Sciences Center.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Shen Shengmei is acting as Assistant Director in PRDCSG (Panasonic R&D Center Singapore), leading AI technology development especially in deep learning for surveillance, automotive, robotics, and other applications with smart solutions. She has been working with Panasonic R&D Singapore since 1992 as senior R&D engineer, project leader, R&D manager, General Manager, actively involving in image recognition and sensing technology development, as well as audio-visual compression in the past years. Under her leadership and technology vision with strong business sense, the center has built up several Core Competent areas as a strong player in AI development and deployment, to provide their technology and service to Panasonic business and also external business. She was graduated from Xidian University in China and obtained her Master degree in 1986 before moved to Japan in 1988.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: The ROSE Lab focuses on research into visual object search and video analytics. As Deputy Director, Dennis is responsible for growing the Lab’s industry collaborations and its overall management. As Principal Scientist, he is responsible for the research strategy and overall systems architecture. Dennis has 30 years of professional experience in research, government and industry. He has a Ph.D. in Technology Management, a M.S. in Computer Science, and a B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Mr. Fisher has a solid track record of building rapid growth technology companies, including public companies, pre-IPO and PE backed ones. Over the past 23 years, 15 of which have been in Asia, Mr. Fisher has successfully scaled businesses, enabling them to realize substantial gains in revenues, profits, and ROI in competitive technology markets. Deep Instinct, the first company to apply deep learning to cybersecurity, is made up of an interdisciplinary team of global thought leaders and innovators in cybersecurity. More than 85% of the team are Ph.D. holders, headed by Dr. Eli David, one of the forerunners in the field of computational intelligence.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: David Kirk is an NVIDIA Fellow and served from 1997 to 2009 as NVIDIA's chief scientist, a role in which he led the development of graphics technology for today’s most popular consumer entertainment platforms. Kirk is the inventor of more than 60 patents and patent applications relating to graphics design and has published more than 50 articles on graphics technology. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from California Institute of Technology. Kirk’s research interests lie in Computer Architecture, Parallel Programming Systems, Interconnection Networks, High-Performance Circuit Design.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dr. Wanli Min received his PhD in Statistics from The University of Chicago. Afterwrds he held several research positions at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, IBM Singapore, and Google. In 2013 he joined Alibaba Group as director of data science. Currently he serves as Chief AI Scientist of Alibaba Cloud and General Manager of Big Data Business. His research interest includes stochastic process theory, time series analysis, signal processing and network flow dynamics. He has been leading the development of Alibaba AI solutions of ET City Brain, ET Industry Brain, ET Medical Brain and ET Environment Brain.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Drew is the founder of Adatos. Drew has extensive experience within the intelligence field across a range of organizations. With 27 years of experience as a U.S. Intelligence Officer, he has trained over 1000 analysts in Intelligence Tradecraft. He also co-founded the Lockheed Martin Centre for Security Analysis and has extensive experience in consulting with PwC, Thomson Reuters, and Accenture. He has been a guest speaker in multiple SEA events on Big Data and Predictive Analytics; Data Science for innovation.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Marc Hamilton leads the worldwide solutions architecture and engineering team at NVIDIA. He is responsible for working with customers and partners to deliver the world’s best end-to-end solutions for artificial intelligence and deep learning, professional visualization, and high performance computing. Prior to joining NVIDIA in 2013, Hamilton worked at HP in the hyperscale business unit, and at Sun Microsystems in the HPC and data center groups. He also worked at TRW, developing HPC applications for the U.S. aerospace and defense industry. Hamilton has published several technical articles and a book on software development. Hamilton holds a Bachelor of Science in math and computer science from UCLA, and a Master of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Pierre currently leads PwC’s Technology Consulting Service across South East Asia region. He co-leads PwC’s Global Cloud & Emerging Technology Practice. Pierre is an execution and thought leader for the firm across all industries with PwC’s major clients regionally and globally. He has over 23 years business and technology experience having held consulting leadership roles, senior technology industry roles and leads management consulting engagements across the insurance and financial services, resources and mining, telecommunications, food and manufacturing, media, retail, and airline industries. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dr. Guangda Li is the CTO and Co-Founder of artificial intelligence company, ViSenze. As CTO, Li Guangda is responsible for overseeing all scientific and technology updates. His areas of expertise include computer vision, machine learning, information retrieval, large-scale infrastructure, and product design. He is the principal investigator behind the patent-pending visual recognition technology that ViSenze uses, and has published over 19 international publications in video and image analysis, and search and browsing. In 2015, Li Guangda was named a finalist by MIT Technology Review on its annual list, TR35@Singapore, which recognizes the top innovators under the age of 35 from the Southeast Asia region. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dr Marcelo received his BSc and MSc degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the De La Salle University in the Philippines and University of Hawaii, USA in 1981 and 1985, respectively, and his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester, New York in 1988 where he was an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering. In 1989, he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the National University of Singapore where he is currently an Associate Professor and Acting Director of the Advanced Robotics Center. His research interests span the areas of robotics, mechatronics, autonomous systems, and applications of intelligent systems. He teaches robotics; creativity and innovation; applied electronics and instrumentation; computing; design and related topics. In addition to academic and research activities. He is also actively involved in the Singapore Robotic Games as its founding chairman, and the World Robot Olympiad as member of its Advisory Council.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Christopher Muffat is the founder and CEO of Dathena Science a Swiss/Singaporean company developing a data governance platform developed based on machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. Christopher has over ten years of experience in information security risk management, including leading the internal HSBC and SwissLeaks digital forensics investigation for one of the largest data thief that occurred in Europe, as well as conducting research on cyber security risk in safety-critical systems to prevent cyber terrorism for Emirates. Prior to founding Dathena, Christopher established and managed the Information Risk Management function for Barclays Europe and APAC in Geneva. He designed information risk regulatory remediation program on identity and access management, information classification, application and infrastructure security, as well as data loss prevention strategy. After years in the banking sector, Christopher decided to quit his job and founded Dathena in April 2016. After not being able to find a solution on the market that would fit their needs, Christopher developed the initial technology behind Dathena. As a result, Dathena is as close as possible to the user's needs as its developed by risk managers for risk managers. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Charles (Charlie) Killam, LP.D. is a Senior Certified Instructor and Curriculum Designer at NVIDIA's Deep Learning Institute. Though Charlie works across all verticals, his efforts focus primarily on the application of deep neural networks (DNNs) in the healthcare space. Prior to NVIDIA, Charlie's experience includes delivering a data analytics bootcamp for Northeastern University; a geospatial Tableau project for Stanford University; and, working with MADlib – an open-source, machine learning algorithm library while at Pivotal.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Ilija is a machine learning researcher building holistic models of unstructured data from multiple modalities. His diverse past project portfolio includes projects on combing urban and census data for complex city models, utilizing movie meta-data and watch statistics for recommender systems, and fusing image and text data representations for question answering. Currently, Ilija is working on developing a unified model of financial data coming from multiple sources applied to portfolio optimization. Ilija is pursuing a Ph.D. degree in "Complex Data Analysis with Deep Learning" from the National University of Singapore. Previously, he obtained an M.Tech. in Software Engineering for Machine Learning.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Clifton is at NCS Group, working on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced analytics under NCS Digital. He leads a team of more than 30 highly capable data scientists, and mentor them in their activities. In his free time, Clifton volunteers professional services to events, conferences, and journals (related to data mining/analytics, security and health informatics). Was also part of teams which won some analytics competitions.  His specialization was Big Data analytics in public security (attack and disaster preparation/recovery/response; cyber security; internal security; and predictive policing) and fraud (government, banking, and insurance). 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Deepu Talla is vice president and general manager of Intelligent Machines at NVIDIA, where he is responsible for deploying AI technology in devices such as factory robots, commercial drones and video analytics. Previously, he was responsible for NVIDIA’s mobile business unit.Prior to joining NVIDIA in 2013, he worked at Texas Instruments for more than 10 years in various executive management and technical leadership roles. Talla holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in electronics and communication engineering from Andhra University in India, a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from Villanova University, and a Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Niveditha is passionate about Machine Learning and is a strong advocate of Design Thinking and Business Model Innovation.  An SAP veteran with professional experience in business development, program management, leading strategic innovations using machine learning, Cloud, IoT, Mobile and SAP Leonardo. She has a Bachelor degree in Electronics & Communications from Anna University, Master of Science in Computer Science degree from University of Kentucky and Master of Business Administration in Strategy and Marketing from Nanyang Technological University. Born and educated in India, she has lived in the USA and Singapore (present). She enjoys music, teaching, traveling and fusion cooking.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Ravi Mishra is a seasoned Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco Systems from 2004. He currently works as Senior Technical Marketing Engineer for the Unified Computing Systems (UCS) within the Data Center Group at Cisco. In this role, Ravi has been responsible for sharing best practice with the customer for design and deployment of Cisco UCS infrastructure, providing subject matter expertise to the Cisco sales team and customer around UCS server and GPUs, product demos and technical "Deep Dives."  He is an author of numerous papers and the design guide on UCS, GPU use case with UCS, Virtualization, Video, Cisco Content networking and WAN optimization Technologies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Tonogi Naoki was born in Japan and was acknowledged as an excellent scientist in the Global Human Resource Development program during his enrollment at Nagoya University’s Faculty of Economics. Early on he joined a professional incubator dedicated to establishing new technology based businesses and launched several new, major companies as Project Manager before joining ABEJA. At ABEJA, he has been responsible for managing a broad range of initiatives in the fields of IoT, Big Data and AI (especially Deep Learning). He is currently the CEO of ABEJA Singapore.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Mr Chng was appointed Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister in September 2014, where he supports the Prime Minister in coordinating policy issues among various government ministries. Prior to this, Mr Chng served in various capacities in the Ministry of Communications and Information, Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Civil Service College, and the Communications Group, Prime Minister’s Office. He also worked at Shell as a Management Consultant. Mr Chng graduated from Stanford University’s Sloan Management Programme with an M.Sc in Management. Mr Chng also holds an M. Eng in Engineering and a BA in Engineering from the University of Cambridge. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Alberrt Alexander has extensive experience in developing banking solutions at one of Malaysia’s leading bank. Experienced in software development. Responsible for development and deployment of core retail banking solutions, front end delivery systems, CRMs, Data Warehousing and Enterprise Content Management. Headed a major multi-million-dollar integration project to migrate from disparate systems to an Integrated Banking System (IBS) and also integrated five banks’ systems to common IBS platform resulting from mergers. Currently, a co-founder and CEO of Glueck Technologies, Adviser to a leading Banking Solutions provider and mentor to start ups in the Malaysian start up eco-system.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Chee Seng Chan received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Portsmouth, U.K., in 2008. He is currently a Senior Lecturer, and the Head of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Department with the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In general, his major research interests include computer vision and fuzzy qualitative reasoning, particularly focus on image/video content analysis, that enables automatic analyzing of image/video to detect and determine spatial and temporal events. Dr. Chan is a recipient of the Young Scientist Network-Academy of Sciences Malaysia in 2015 and the Hitachi Research Fellowship in 2013. He is also a Chartered Engineer of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, UK.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dr Jason Rigby is a former computational chemist turned data scientist. He is passionate about best practise data management, health data and community outreach. He is working at both the Monash eResearch Centre as a DevOps engineer and as the Data Science Coordinator for the ASPREE clinical trial, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University. Together with clinicians and researchers, he aims to put the latest and greatest machine learning technologies to practise to gain insights and improve research outcomes.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Romain Bottier is the Subject Matter Expert for High Performance Computing and AI at Dell EMC (South Asia). He provides architecture design support to the technical teams across South Asia for complex HPC & AI requirements. Romain comes from an HPC storage background, where he spent close to 10 years working with various HPC customers from different horizon, across Europe, Middle East and for the past 4 years in Asia.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Chen-Khong Tham is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) of the National University of Singapore (NUS). His research focuses on sensing analytics, wireless mobile computing and machine learning algorithms and architectures, including Quality of Service (QoS) aspects. He has held positions at A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) Singapore in the computer networking, sentient computing and technology-enabled services domains, and was an IT consultant at Accenture. He obtained his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Electrical and Information Sciences Engineering from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Prof. Steven Hoi is an Associate Professor in the School of Information Systems (SIS), Singapore Management University (SMU), Singapore. Prior to joining SMU, he was a tenured Associate Professor at the School of Computer Engineering of the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He received his Bachelor degree from Tsinghua University, and his Master and Ph.D degrees from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include large-scale machine learning (online learning and deep learning) with application to tackling big data analytics challenges across a wide range of real-world applications, including multimedia retrieval, social media, web search and information retrieval, computer vision and pattern recognition, computational finance, cyber security, mobile and software data mining, etc. He has published over 200 papers in premier conferences and journals, and served as an organizer, area chair, senior PC, TPC member, editors, and referee for many top conferences and premier journals. He is the recipient of the Lee Kong Chian Fellowship Award due to his research excellence. Currently he is the Editor in Chief of Neurocomputing, a premier journal for neural networks & deep learning.