Ashwin Ram is Technical Director of AI in the Office of the CTO for Google Cloud. He focuses on bringing Google AI to the world through deep personalized engagement with the leadership of top companies to reimagine their businesses by leveraging the power of AI. He also works with Google’s AI teams to drive new technologies and capabilities that address customer needs.
Ashwin is a distinguished AI researcher, technologist, and entrepreneur. Prior to Google, Ashwin was Senior Manager of AI Science for Amazon Alexa. He led cross-functional R&D initiatives to create advanced Conversational AI technologies for intelligent agents, including the university-facing Alexa Prize competition. Earlier, Ashwin was a professor at Georgia Tech, co-founded 4 startups, and managed the Interactive Intelligence area at Xerox PARC. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1989, his MS from University of Illinois in 1984, and his BTech from IIT Delhi in 1982. He has published 2 books and over 100 scientific articles in international forums.

David Gunning is DARPA program manager in the Information Innovation Office (I2O). Dave has an over 30 years of experience in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. At DARPA, Dave manages the Explainable AI (XAI) and the Communicating with Computers (CwC) programs. This is Dave’s 3rd tour as a DARPA PM. Previously, Dave managed the Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) project that produced Siri and the Command Post of the Future (CPoF) project that was adopted by the US Army as their Command and Control system for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. In between DARPA tours, Dave was a Program Director for Data Analytics at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a Senior Research Manager at Vulcan Inc., SVP of SET Corp., VP of Cycorp, and a Senior Scientist in the Air Force Research Labs. Dave holds a M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, a M.S. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Dayton, and a B.S. in Psychology from Otterbein College.

Michelle Zhou is a co-founder and CEO of Juji, Inc. Prior to starting Juji, Michelle was a senior manager of the User Systems and Experience Research (USER) group, part of IBM Research, Almaden and then part of the newly formed IBM Watson Group. She also worked at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center and was on an international assignment at IBM Research, China.
Michelle received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University. Her expertise is in the interdisciplinary areas of intelligent user interaction, smart visual analytics (2D/3D), and people-centric information systems. Her work has been incorporated into or created over a dozen IBM products and solutions. She has also published over 80 peer-reviewed, refereed scientific articles, and filed over 35 patents in above areas.