Fujitsu ActivateNow Technology Summit, Silicon Valley

Vivek Mahajan is a global business leader as well as an innovation and technology executive with extensive experience working in number of global leading corporations including Tandem Computers, General Electric, Siebel Systems, Oracle and IBM.

He joined Fujitsu in July 2021 as the Global Chief Technology Officer. His mission is to establish Fujitsu as a leading global technology company known for innovative technology leadership.

After graduating from Master’s program in electrical engineering and an MBA in Finance/Accounting, he started his career in Silicon Valley as an information technology specialist. Vivek has lived and worked　globally including in United States, Australia, Singapore, Japan and India and is fluent in English, Japanese and Hindi.

Guido Imbens is The Applied Econometrics Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Professor of Economics in the Economics Department at Stanford University. Currently he is also the Amman Mineral Faculty Fellow at the GSB. He has held tenured positions at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Harvard University before joining Stanford in 2012. Imbens specializes in econometrics, and in particular methods for drawing causal inferences from experimental and observational data. He has published extensively in the leading economics and statistics journals. Together with Donald Rubin he has published a book, "Causal Inference in Statistics, Social and Biomedical Sciences". 

Guido Imbens is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Statistical Association. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of St. Gallen and Brown University. In 2017 he received the Horace Mann medal at Brown University. In 2021 he shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel with David Card and Joshua Angrist for "methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationship." Currently Imbens is Editor of Econometrica.

David Patterson is a UC Berkeley Pardee professor emeritus, a Google distinguished engineer, and the RISC-V International Vice-Chair. His most influential Berkeley projects likely were RISC and RAID. His best-known book is Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach.

He and his co-author John Hennessy shared the 2017 ACM A.M Turing Award and the 2022 NAE Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering. The Turing Award is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing” and the Draper Prize is considered a “Nobel Prize of Engineering.”

Jack Dongarra specializes in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, the use of advanced computer architectures, programming methodology, and tools for parallel computers. He holds appointments at the University of Manchester, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the University of Tennessee, where he founded the Innovative Computing Laboratory.

In 2019 he received the ACM/SIAM Computational Science and Engineering Prize. In 2020 he received the IEEE-CS Computer Pioneer Award. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM; a foreign member of the British Royal Society and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.

Most recently, he received the 2021 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and software that have driven decades of extraordinary progress in computing performance and applications.

Lorenzo Speranzoni is a pragmatic and passionate IT-expert in software architectures and agile methodologies. After some significant experiences in the development of business critical projects, in 2004 he founded LARUS Business Automation, where he currently hold the position of CEO. Nevertheless, he maintains his passion in software development by supporting his R&D team and contributing in some open-source projects.

Since 2013 he's been focusing on NoSQL & BigData technologies. In 2016 he was nominated "Neo4j Ambassador" for his particular interest on Graph Databases.

He loves to teach, coach and collaborate with people in order to build enthusiast teams and in his spare time he likes to cultivate his passion for Art and cycling.

Hart Montgomery serves as the CTO of Hyperledger Foundation. He has extensive experience in blockchain and cryptography, and previously worked in blockchain and cryptography research at Fujitsu Research where he helped lead Fujitsu’s efforts to develop and deploy Hyperledger technologies.

Prior to Fujitsu, Hart received a Ph.D. in cryptography at Stanford under Dan Boneh, where he was a Stanford Graduate Fellow. Hart has numerous academic publications and patents in cryptography and blockchain and brings a wealth of experience in these areas to the Hyperledger Foundation.

Indradeep is currently the Chief Executive Officer at Fujitsu Research of America, Sunnyvale. He heads Fujitsu’s research efforts in North America and leads a team of researchers doing cutting edge research in AI, Quantum computing, and Convergence technologies. He has been working in industrial R&D for over 25 years in various areas of hardware and software analysis, quality assurance, and optimization.

Indradeep received the Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and the M.A. and Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University.

Asif Poonja is a Global Vice President with focus on the America’s as our Regional CTO and Head of Customer Markets with responsibility for driving the customer strategy and execution of the region’s digital consulting and professional services business. The portfolio of solutions includes application transformation, enterprise applications, customer experience center and hybrid hosted services interlocked with our core technologies of High-Performance Computing, Networks, AI, Data & Security and Converging Technologies.

Asif possesses more than 25 years of consulting and technology leadership experience. Asif holds a Bachelor of Math degree in Business and Information Systems from the University of Waterloo, and is a graduate of the highest Fujitsu executive management training program, the Executive Global Knowledge Institute Advanced Program and received highest-level Fujitsu accreditation for Incorporating Innovation, Design Thinking and Futurist Approaches to Business Success.

Guðbjörg Rist is the CEO of Atmonia, a technology company developing novel production methods for ammonia. Atmonia's focus is on developing catalysts for direct ammonia production at ambient conditions, in an electrolytic cell, that takes in only air and water to produce ammonia. Guðbjörg joined the Atmonia team as COO in 2018, and was appointed CEO in 2019.

Guðbjörg has a MSc in Production Engineering from Chalmers University in Sweden and has worked in a range of industries from banking to production, mainly focusing on business and product development.

Sarvagya Upadhyay is currently a Principal Researcher at Fujitsu Research of America (FRA), Inc. He is a part of Fujitsu Research’s global quantum laboratory. As a research member, Sarvagya focuses on applications of quantum computing in various disciplines of computer science and mathematics including machine learning, optimization, and finance. He is also interested in theoretical foundations of data privacy and privacy-preserving techniques compliant with various regulatory requirements. 

Prior to joining FRA, he worked as a quantitative analyst in a leading Australian bank in Singapore focusing on modeling and valuation of financial products, wherein he honed his skills on financial modeling and techniques used to price them. Sarvagya finished his doctoral studies from University of Waterloo in 2011 in quantum computing and worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in Singapore for three years. He’s optimistic about quantum technologies and believes that they will have an immense impact in our life in future.

Winnie Tsou is a Director at Fujitsu’s Technology Strategy Unit, where she leads the Megatrends team to develop foresight for Fujitsu’s long-term strategy. Ms. Tsou has over 25 years of international experience in IT industry with various positions in engineering, marketing, strategy, and management at Fujitsu, IXI Mobile, Na Software and Berksford. 

Ms. Tsou received a BS in Physics from National Taiwan University, and a MS in Manufacturing Engineering from Boston University.

As Assistant Division Chief of HPC Operations, William (Bill) Thigpen leads key supercomputing environment development efforts—including operation of an energy-efficient system named Aitken, in our new Modular Supercomputing Facility (MSF)—to significantly reduce the water and power required to cool today’s supercomputers and provide more computing capability to NAS users.

As Project Manager for NASA’s High-End Computing Capability Project, Thigpen also leads the team that provides day-to-day operations to ensure delivery of world-class supercomputing resources and services supporting NASA missions. The cornerstones of these resources are the Pleiades and Electra supercomputers, which rank among the world’s fastest and most capable systems.

Dr. Hiro Kobashi is Project Director at Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Fujitsu Research. He has been working for Fujitsu since 2003 including 5 year working experience in UK and joined Fujitsu Research of America in Oct 2022. Currently he is leading autonomous machine learning division to realize sustainable and efficient AI creation by managing members in both US and Japan.

His research interests address artificial intelligence, machine learning, and distributed systems.

Durga Kota is currently an Enterprise Architect with Fujitsu North America and leads solution architecture for Fujitsu on large customer engagements, while also supporting various technology initiatives in the Americas as part of the region’s CTO office. Durga joined Fujitsu America in 2017 as the Head of Pre-sales and Solution Architecture for the Digital Hybrid IT business. 

Prior to joining Fujitsu, Durga was the CEO of Locuz Inc., a niche services firm that specializes in providing IT Infra Transformation, Cloud & Hybrid IT solutions to large enterprises and institutions in US and India. Durga also worked at IBM for 7 years in various technical and leadership roles facilitating the growth of IBM servers and storage business in India. 

Durga completed his MBA program from Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT) Delhi, prior to which, he graduated in B.Tech (Computer Science) from the Jawaharlal Nehru Tech University (JNTU) Hyderabad. 

Mike Starkey is the VP for AI and Optimization Technology and a Regional Distinguished Engineer at Fujitsu, based in Vancouver, Canada. He has spent over 30 years in the technology industry and has recently been focusing on working with business leaders to take advantage of the capabilities of advanced technology such as AI and Quantum-inspired Optimization. He has worked with government ministers, CEOs and other business leaders around the world to transform how their organizations function through technology and has designed, created and led the development of global products and offerings to provide those capabilities. He previously held roles at IBM of Vice President for Technical Leadership, Distinguished Engineer, CTO and Software Development Executive and also had a stint as the Associate Dean of Computing at the British Columbia Institute of Technology.

Mike holds a BSc (Honours) in Computing from Queen’s University, Canada and a Masters of Science from the University of Utah. 

Heather is Co-founder and CEO of Indicio, the market leading developer of enterprise-class verifiable data solutions that optimize your existing systems ensuring digital privacy, efficiency, and trust.

Under her leadership, she has driven the company’s growth strategy and overseen its customer expansion and product development, including the launch of Proven™, the first complete market product for implementing and scaling open-source decentralized identity. Heather is a long-time champion for privacy-preserving cybersecurity technologies and advises governments and global NGOs on decentralized identity applications. 

Heather serves on the Governing board for the Hyperledger Foundation and holds graduate degrees from Columbia and Johns Hopkins and did her undergraduate studies at Willamette University.

Ted (Hideto) Okada is a SVP & Corporate Executive Officer at Fujitsu Limited. In this role, Ted is responsible for Fujitsu technology strategy, enhancing market awareness of Fujitsu technology excellence and building relationships with customers and partners interested in deploying Fujitsu technologies for competitive advantage. Ted has more than 30 years of experience in software engineering and executive management, primarily focused on public sector vertical with emphasis on business development with local governments. 

Ted has been in his current role since April 2021, leveraging his experience in New Business Planning, Co-creation, and Commercialization to further market and brand presence of Fujitsu technologies. In December 2021, Ted relocated to the bay area with objective to increase Fujitsu’s recognition as a global technology company and identify new partners and collaborators from the rich silicon valley ecosystem.