Kai has been building companies and products since 1991. He has been involved either as founder, CEO, CTO or COO in 15 startups (thus far). He has raised angel funding as well as institutional rounds and experienced exits ranging from mergers, acquisitions to IPO. When not working on a new venture, Kai has been successfully turning around engineering organizations.

Kai’s passion is building successful companies, products and  sustainable industry-leading teams. He has an intuitive understanding of technology and has spent most of his career taming the ‘bleeding edge.’ His current passion on technology lies in combining 1st order logic with massive amounts of unstructured or semi-structured data.

Margareta Ackerman, PhD. is a Machine Learning researcher whose mission is to make cutting edge research both available and accessible to the software industry. Her research emphasis is on developing Machine Learning techniques that bridge the theory-practice gap, providing mathematically founded techniques that address users’ principle needs. Dr. Ackerman’s research spans Machine Learning, Algorithm Design, Bioinformatics, and Search Engine Optimization among others. In particular, her foundational work on clustering includes a new model for algorithm selection allowing users to attain solutions that meet their unique needs.

Dr. Ackerman’s work has been published at top Machine Learning venues and she has won numerous awards for her research. She received her PhD from the University of Waterloo, which has one of the top Computer Science programs in the world, and is currently doing her postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology.

Anthony Ley had a distinguished career in Schlumberger, managing the Research Centers in Paris and Palo Alto. Later he was the founding CEO of Harmonic, the world wide leader in video processing for cable, satellite and telco, raising venture rounds, managing the IPO and secondary offerings, leading the Company for 18 years. Subsequently he has assisted start up companies in Silicon Valley with fund raising and management, served on the Board of several private companies, including being CEO of a biotech company for its first year.

He holds an M.A. from Cambridge, an S.M. from M.I.T., is a Fellow of the I.E.T., an honorary Fellow of the S.C.T.E. (U.K.), a Senior Member of IEEE, served as a Trustee for the Center for Integrated Systems at Stanford, and as a member of the Advisory Board at the Materials Processing Center, M.IT., and is named as an inventor on 28 patents.

Alistair brings over 20 years of experience in the embedded, mobile, automotive and mapping spaces. He has held a variety of roles; engineer, team lead, product management, business development, making him equally at home talking to engineers, customers or executives. Successes include playing a key part in guiding the Openwave Browser to become the first software to ship over one billion units and while at Nokia making the Qt C++ UI framework the key UI toolset used in the automotive industry.

Alistair is adept at identifying industry trends, recognizing high value customer problems and defining differentiated product offerings that solve those needs. With a strong technical background in both hardware and software he particularly thrives on multi-disciplinary projects.

David Loker, M.Math, PhD ABD, is a researcher in Machine Learning with more than 9 years of industry experience with companies including Amazon.com, RIM, and Sybase. David’s unique blend of academic research and practical experience enables him to apply advanced Machine Learning techniques to real-world problems. He has the ability to see the big picture of what a company wishes to achieve, direct a team towards asking the right questions, and then apply the best techniques to accomplish its goals. David’s research spans many different topics, including Machine Learning, Advanced Algorithm Design, Game Theory, Bioinformatics, and Search Engine Optimization. His work has been published at top Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence venues and he has been awarded numerous awards for his research.