Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council

Lloyd Danzig

Chairman & Founder, International Consortium for the Ethical Development of Artificial Intelligence

Lloyd is the Chairman & Founder of the International Consortium for the Ethical Development of Artificial Intelligence, a 501(c)(3) non-profit NGO dedicated to ensuring that rapid developments in AI are made with a keen eye toward the long-term interests of humanity. He is also Founder & CEO of Sharp Alpha Advisors, a sports gaming business and investment consultancy with a focus on companies deploying cutting edge tech.

He previously managed institutional portfolios for BlackRock, data science initiatives for Samsung, Machine Learning engines for sportsbook operators, and a lifelong passion for entrepreneurship and innovation. Lloyd is widely regarded as the world’s foremost expert on the evolving role of Machine Learning in the sports gaming and tech space.

His non-profit boasts members from leading tech companies across the globe and is internationally acclaimed for its contributions to the ethical development of Artificial Intelligence. Lloyd is also a distinguished member of CompTIA’s AI Advisory Council.

He has been privileged to be featured as a guest speaker and panelist at numerous prestigious universities including Stanford University, Columbia University, and The Wharton School of Business, in addition to private sector conferences such as QConAI, Data Council, The AI Summit, MathSport International, BOSCON, Sport & Society, and IAGR 2019.

Rama Akkiraju

Distinguished Engineer of IBM Fellow, IBM Watson

Rama Akkiraju is an IBM Fellow, Master Inventor and IBM Academy Member, and a Director, at IBM’s Watson Division where she leads the AI operations team with a mission to scale AI for Enterprises. Prior to this, Rama led the AI mission of enabling natural, personalized and compassionate conversations between computers and humans. Rama has been named by Forbes as one of the ‘Top 20 Women in AI Research’ in May 2017, has been featured in ‘A-Team in AI’ by Fortune magazine in July 2018 and named ‘Top 10 pioneering women in AI and Machine Learning’ by Enterprise Management 360. In her career, Rama has worked on agent-based decision support systems, electronic market places, and semantic Web services, for which she led a World-Wide-Web (W3C) standard. Rama has co-authored 4 book chapters, and over 100 technical papers. Rama has 18 issued patents and 25+ pending. She is the recipient of 3 best paper awards in AI and Operations Research. Rama holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and has received a gold medal from New York University for her MBA for highest academic excellence. Rama served as the President for ISSIP, a Service Science professional society for 2018 and continues to actively drive AI projects through this professional society.

Uday Tatiraju

Tech Lead of Principal Software Engineer, Oracle

Uday is a tech lead and a principal software engineer at Oracle with over a decade of experience in ecommerce platforms, search engines, backend systems, machine learning, NLP, and web and mobile programming. Uday is an InfoQ editor where he frequently publish technical deep dives and technology news pieces. Uday also publish articles on Medium and DZone.

Manoj Suvarna

Business Leader of HPC & AI (N.America), Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Manoj Suvarna is a product leader for the High Performance Computing (HPC) & Artificial Intelligence (AI) portfolio within Hybrid IT in N. America. In this role, his responsibilities span across product P&L, competitive positioning, marketing, sales & channels enablement and go-to-market activities. Most recently, Manoj was responsible for SAP HANA Converged Solutions which experienced significant growth in revenues and market share under his leadership.

Previously, Manoj was Director Product Management for the Big Data portfolio and part of the Global Business Unit. Under Manoj’ s leadership, HPE established an early footprint with data management solutions including SAP HANA, Microsoft APS and Vertica Analytics platform emerging as the leading vendor for in-memory platforms in the industry.

With over 20 years of experience in the tech industry, Manoj has held positions in portfolio management, product marketing, market research and business strategy across software, servers, storage and commercial notebooks.

Manoj has an MBA in International Marketing from University of Memphis, TN and a BE in Production Engineering from University of Bombay, India. He recently completed an Executive Certificate Course on “Business Implications of Artificial Intelligence” at MIT. Manoj is based in Houston, TX.

Rashed Haq

Global Lead for Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Data, Publicis Sapient

Over the last 20 years, Haq has helped companies transform and create sustained competitive advantage through innovative applications of artificial intelligence, dynamic optimization, advanced analytics and data engineering. Prior to joining Sapient, Haq did research in theoretical physics at the Los Alamos National Lab and the Institute for Theoretical Science. His seminal research in electromagnetically induced transparency led to the emerging technology of quantum cloaking.

Mady Mantha

AI Platform Leader, Sirius Computer Solutions

Mady Mantha is an AI platform leader and machine learning architect with nearly 10 years of experience in the technology industry. She owns the vision and strategy for AI at Sirius, and helps companies drive business transformation using artificial intelligence. A machine learning architect by training, Mady primarily focuses on deep learning, recommender systems, multi-task and reinforcement learning, NLP and conversational AI. She graduated from Georgetown University and is a space enthusiast.

Vibha Sinha

Technical Program Manger, Facebook

For the past 10+ years, Vibha Sinha has been working on applying machine learning in different domains to drive business outcomes. Currently, she is a technical program manager at Facebook driving initiatives to improve quality and developer efficiency in recommendation systems. Prior to that she worked at IBM Watson in the area of natural language understanding, bringing to market technology to understand tone, sentiment and user personality to text. She also spent significant time at IBM Research working in the area of productivity tools, where she developed technology to mine insights from problem tickets, enterprise documents and version management systems. Vibha is a prolific inventor with 25 issued patents and 44 publications in various peer reviewed conferences and journals. She has served on program committee for multiple software engineering conferences such as Mining Software Repositories, International Conference on Software Maintenance. She is an ACM Senior Member. She did her Master's from Stanford University and Bachelor's from Delhi University.

Kaladhar Voruganti

VP of Technology Innovation, Equinix

Kaladhar is recognized as a forward thinking leader in the industry for consistently 1) coming up with new innovative ideas, building PoCs and subsequently making them into products (more than 70 patents) 2) for setting company wide Horizon 2-3 innovation strategy and programs at both NetApp and Equinix and 3) for being a leading researcher in systems area (recognized as top 10 researcher in storage systems area) 4) for building a positive culture of innovation (ran company wide employee innovation program) 5) has contacts at key Cloud companies, top universities and VC companies and 6) for mentoring more than 50 engineers at IBM, NetApp and Equinix to help increase their patent profiles, paper publications and product impact.

Jackie Medecki

Director and Managing Attorney, Intel Corporation

Jackie Medecki is the Director and Managing Attorney of U.S. AI and Healthcare Policy for Intel Corporation based out of Washington DC. She has been with Intel over 13 years and recently completed her tenure as Chief of Staff to the Corporate Secretary. Jackie has experience in policy through her work as a marketing law expert, and a history of engagement in public policy. She graduated from UC Berkeley Law School in 2002 and is barred in California and Oregon.

Michael Huckabee

Executive Director of Strategic Initiatives, SAS

Michael Huckabee an Executive Director of Strategic Initiatives at SAS who works with clients to formulate an integrated solution to solve business challenges.

In his current role, Michael continues to leverage experiences with many Fortune 500 clients to apply both business and technical lenses to everchanging business needs.

Michael believes that SAS is uniquely positioned to apply technological capabilities in a wide variety of industries empowering organizations to leverage investments to gain business advantages.

Michael started his career with SAS at a subsidiary company, Dataflux, where he ran all customer facing lines of business including Consulting Services, Technical Support, and Education. Subsequently Michael was responsible for Management Consulting in within SAS’ Global Data Management division. The charter of this organization was to work across industry to instill rigor to data related programs to solve business challenges. Data Drives decisions and represents a critical foundation for the analytics lifecycle.

Tom Derhake

Partner, Liberty Advisory Group

Tom is a Partner at Liberty Advisor Group, a firm helping senior leaders use technology to realize their aspirations. He is also the founder of Box Score Games a platform that helps brands connect with customers during live sporting events. He has a software background and over 20 years of consulting experience where he worked in retail, manufacturing, and supply chain & logistics. Tom’s consulting and entrepreneurial experience give him the advantage of multiple perspectives for building B2B and B2C solutions.

Tom joined Liberty because he believes in a different, more pragmatic model to solve complex problems for clients. Liberty partners with clients to deliver outcomes, and they pride themselves in providing objective advice. They are unhindered by vendor partnerships and alliances that often cloud a large consulting firm’s judgment. It’s this unbiased approach that allows Tom to be a trusted advisor. He works at multiple levels, from senior executives to front line employees, and it is this flexible, non-hierarchical and objective approach that enables Tom to deliver more creative and impactful outcomes for organizations.

Tom lives in Chicago with his wife and 3 children, and he enjoys playing sports and coaching his children’s teams.

Chithrai Mani

Vice President of Digital Transformation & Innovation, InfoVision Inc.

Chithrai Mani is the VP of Digital Transformation & Innovation for InfoVision, a global IT services company headquartered in Dallas, TX. Chithrai is an expert on how businesses can transform their operations through leading-edge technologies to drive a competitive advantage. He is a sought-after digital transformation leader, Cloud Evangelist, consultant and speaker. He has extensive cross-industry experience in application development, project execution, operational planning, delivery, business alignment, systems design and integration, and architecting cloud, mobile and network applications.
He connects companies to transformative technologies to take their business to the next level of connectivity and efficiency, including: artificial intelligence, the internet of things, machine learning, mobility, DevOPS and serverless data management. He has worked with companies around the world to choose, adopt, roll-out, and measure the impact of innovative technologies to increase productivity, accelerate collaboration and improve people’s lives.

Chithrai has successfully implemented digital transformation strategies and other solutions for leading Fortune 500 companies including 7-Eleven, TransCore, Halliburton and Gulf Oil. Chithrai has more than 12 years of experience in the information and communication technology industry. He has deep experience across the retail, oil & gas and transportation sectors.

Chithrai delivers timely solutions with attention to finer technical details. Chithrai is a natural leader, calm under pressure, and is results driven. Discovering, understanding and explaining future trends of technology and systems architecture, and what they mean for business, are what drives Chithrai’s passion for his work.
Chithrai sets aside his own personal time to work with select clients as a keynote speaker, workshop facilitator, and coach for executives on digital transformation, change management, leadership, and technology as a factor for business success and transformation. His most recent speaking engagements include the DFW Cloud Conference and DevOps, Microservices & Containers Summit.

Originally from India, Chithrai is bilingual and speaks English and Tamil. He received his bachelor’s degree from Sudharsan Engineering College in India. He currently resides in Flower Mound, Texas.