Keynotes

Maker, Editor-in-Chief of Tested.com

Adam Savage has spent his life gathering skills that allow him to take what’s in his brain and make it real. He’s built everything from giant Buddhas and futuristic weapons to fine-art sculptures and dancing vegetables. Today he stars in and produces content for his website Tested.com, including behind-the-scenes deep dives into multiple blockbuster films. Adam lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and their awesome dog.

Author, science TV correspondent & radio host

Dr. Michio Kaku is an internationally recognized science figure, known for his authority in Einstein’s unified field theory and as co-founder of string theory. He has written five New York Times Best-Sellers and is the science correspondent for national CBS This Morning TV. He graduated summa cum laude in physics from Harvard and received his Ph.D. from the Univ. of Calif. At Berkeley. He has taught at City College of CUNY for 45 years and holds the Henry Semat Chair in Theoretical Physics at CCNY.

VP, Physical Retail and Technology, Amazon

Dilip Kumar joined Amazon in July 2003 and has held a variety of roles in Amazon’s Consumer business. Dilip has led teams responsible for forecasting and supply chain, contribution profit, and pricing, and he helped bring cutting-edge machine learning to Amazon’s core retail systems. He spent two years as Jeff Bezos’s Technical Advisor before joining the newly formed Physical Stores Organization in 2013. His teams are responsible for key physical retail technology services such as Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Dash Carts, and Amazon One that power many of Amazon’s stores as well as third-party stores.

SVP and Head Scientist, Alexa AI, Amazon

Rohit Prasad is Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Amazon Alexa, the voice service that powers Amazon’s family of Echo products, Amazon Fire TV, and third-party offerings. Prasad leads Alexa research and development in AI technologies aimed at making interaction with Alexa a magical experience. Prior to Amazon, Prasad was Deputy Manager and Senior Director of Speech, Language, and Multimedia at Raytheon BBN Technologies. In that role, he directed U.S. government-sponsored research and development initiatives in speech-to-speech translation, psychological health analytics, document image translation, and STEM learning. Prasad is an author on more than 100 scientific articles and holds several patents.

VP, Data and ML Services, AWS

Swami Sivasubramanian’s mission is to put the power of databases, analytics, and machine learning capabilities in the hands of every business, including developers, data scientists, and business users. Swami and his team innovate across multiple areas, from databases and analytics to machine learning and AI services. His team also works to deliver needle-moving capabilities in data and machine learning for specific verticals, use cases, and initiatives.

Director of Chief Technologists, AWS Public Sector
(Former CTO, NASA JPL)

Tom Soderstrom leads a team of business-focused technology builders/advisors for AWS public sector executive CTOs and leaders. The team identifies, evolves, and shares emerging technology trends, business models, and patterns that help solve deep technical problems at scale. From 2006–2020, Tom was the IT Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where he supported innovative space missions and emerging IT trends. He also mentored the next generation of IT and space explorers. Prior to JPL, he led teams working on large-scale IT technologies, best practices, tools development, and change efforts in startups, large commercial companies, international venues, and the U.S. government.

SVP, Amazon Alexa

Tom Taylor leads the Alexa and Echo teams at Amazon. He has responsibility for over 10,000 engineers, scientists, product, business, operations and sales people inventing on behalf of customers to bring Alexa, the cloud-based voice service to tens of millions of devices from Amazon and third-party device manufacturers. Tom Taylor joined Amazon in 2000 as Director of Operations, U.S. Fulfillment Centers, and went on to hold multiple other roles at the company, including launching and growing the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program. Before joining Amazon, Tom spent 15 years in Manufacturing and Plant Management at General Motors and K2 Sports.

VP, Engineering, AWS

Bill Vass oversees more than 42 cloud and edge technologies that allow AWS customers to store, analyze, manage, and retrieve information quickly and efficiently. His teams develop and operate the largest software-defined storage, streaming, IoT, automated management, and monitoring systems in the world. Before joining AWS, Bill held numerous leadership roles in technology and government, and most recently was the President and CEO of Liquid Robotics, Inc., a pioneering data-as-a-service, cloud-based solutions company that designs and builds autonomous robots that serve a wide range of customers in the energy, shipping, defense, communications, scientific, intelligence, and environmental markets.

Founder & Chief Test Pilot, Gravity Industries

Gravity Industries designs, builds, and flies Jet Suits, pioneering a new era of human flight. Experienced by over one billion people globally, the Jet Suit is now being used for military, paramedic, and entertainment applications.

CEO, Lunar Outpost

Justin is the founder and CEO of Lunar Outpost, leaders in the new Cislunar economy who are working to push the bounds of robotics in extreme environments, enabling a sustainable presence on the Moon and Mars.

Director, MIT Space Exploration Initiative

Ariel Ekblaw leads the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, a team of 50+ graduate students and faculty prototyping artifacts of our sci-fi space future. Her research builds on her MIT PhD in space architecture and the TESSERAE platform, which explores autonomously self-assembling space architecture for space tourist habitats and space stations orbiting around the Earth, Moon, and Mars. Ariel has undergraduate degrees in Physics, Mathematics, and Philosophy from Yale University and a masters in distributed systems from the MIT Media Lab.

Heliophysics Division Director, NASA

Nicola Fox is the Heliophysics Division Director at NASA Headquarters. Fox previously worked at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab as chief scientist for Heliophysics and project scientist for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. In 2021, the American Astronautical Society awarded Fox the Carl Sagan Memorial Award for her leadership in heliophysics. Fox received her BS in Physics and PhD in Space and Atmospheric Physics from the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London and an MS in Telematics and Satellite Communications from the University of Surrey.

Physicist & Author; Founding Director, Laurier Centre for Women in Science

Shohini Ghose became an explorer of quantum physics as a Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is an award-winning quantum physicist and author and the founding Director of the Laurier Centre for Women in Science. She holds the NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering in Canada and is a TED Senior Fellow. Shohini was elected to the College of the Royal Society of Canada in 2017 and serves on the Scientific Board of the UNESCO International Basic Science Program.

CTO, Zoox

Jesse Levinson co-founded Zoox in 2014 and is the company's Chief Technical Officer (CTO). He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University and completed his Computer Science PhD and postdoc under Sebastian Thrun at Stanford University, where he developed algorithms for the $1M-winning entry in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge and went on to lead the self-driving car team for five years. Levinson also co-created Pro HDR, the first HDR app for smartphones, which has been purchased by more than a million people since 2009.

CEO, Orbital Insight

Prior to his role at Orbital Insight, Kevin was the Regional Director for the Americas, Global Banking & Brokerage, for FactSet Research Systems. Kevin joined FactSet in conjunction with the acquisition of Revere Data, LLC, where he was President and CEO. Originally trained as a software engineer, Kevin earned a BBA in Management Information Systems from James Madison University. He earned an MBA in Innovation, Strategy & Information Technology from the EDHEC Business School in Nice, France.

CEO, Synchron, Inc.

Thomas Oxley is the CEO of Synchron and neurointerventionist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Trained as a vascular and interventional neurologist, he established the Vascular Bionics laboratory at the University of Melbourne and is currently co-head of this lab. Oxley is best known for founding Synchron, a company building next-generation brain computer interface solutions that has recently announced the first clinical data on a novel stent electrode (Stentrode) neural interface that is inserted through blood vessels. The company has received substantial funding from both DARPA and the Australian government to research this minimally invasive neural interface technology.

SVP, Advanced Development Programs, Blue Origin

Brent Sherwood is the SVP, Advanced Development Programs for Blue Origin, a private space company building the foundation for millions of people living and working in space. He is responsible for the development of in-space systems and services for human space flight, space cargo, and space infrastructure. Brent came to Blue Origin from JPL, where he was the founding manager of the JPL Innovation Foundry and later the Program Manager for Solar System Mission Formulation. Prior to JPL, Brent was at the Boeing Company, where he led multiple civil and commercial space initiatives. Brent has published over 60 papers on the exploration and development of space.

VP, Embedded and Edge Computing, NVIDIA

Deepu is Vice President of Embedded and Edge Computing at NVIDIA, where he is responsible for deploying AI technology in applications such as robotics, industrial automation, and intelligent 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. Deepu holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.