Hitesh Dholakia is the Interim-CEO at Petuum. Hitesh joined Petuum from Blackwood Seven, an AI marketing platform company. There he was their Chief Product Officer and led the team that built Hamilton AI, the world’s first in-silicon data scientist. Hitesh also worked on building successful Machine Learning and Data Science products for several companies including Sysomos, eBay, and Yahoo.

Hitesh earned his BS in Computer Science, followed by an MS in Artificial Intelligence from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

Eric P. Xing is the Founder, Executive Chairman, and Chief Scientist of Petuum Inc., and a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He completed his undergraduate study at Tsinghua University, and holds a PhD in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the State University of New Jersey, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His main research interests are the development of machine learning and statistical methodology, and large-scale computational system and architectures, for solving problems involving automated learning, reasoning, and decision-making in high-dimensional, multimodal, and dynamic possible worlds in artificial, biological, and social systems. Prof. Xing currently serves or has served the following roles: associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), Annals of Applied Statistics (AOAS), IEEE Journal of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) and the PLoS Journal of Computational Biology; action editor of the Machine Learning Journal (MLJ) and Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR); member of the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Science and Technology (ISAT) advisory group. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Computer Science, the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, the IBM Open Collaborative Research Faculty Award, as well as several best paper awards. Prof Xing is a board member of the International Machine Learning Society; he has served as the Program Chair (2014) and General Chair (2019) of the International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML); he is also the Associate Department Head of the Machine Learning Department, founding director of the Center for Machine Learning and Health at Carnegie Mellon University; he is a Fellow of the Association of Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and an IEEE Fellow.

According to csrankings.org, Professor Xing currently ranks as the #1 computer science (CS) professor worldwide, whose papers (in the most selective CS conferences of all disciplines) collectively have the highest (weighted) acceptance among all computer scientists in the US and global universities during 2008-2018.

Qirong Ho holds a Ph.D from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Ho is a Co-Founder and Co-Head of the original Petuum distributed machine learning operating system research team based at Carnegie Mellon University, and has provided key Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning infrastructure solutions to technology, banking and telecommunications companies. Dr. Ho was a Principal Investigator at the Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR, Singapore, and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Singapore Management University School of Information Systems.

A recipient of the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research PhD fellowship and the SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation award, Dr Ho's innovative research on distributed software systems delivers a new approach to running Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning applications at Terabyte scales and beyond, up to hundreds of times faster than existing Big Data systems. He has published over 40 papers with over 1200 citations in the areas of distributed AI and ML systems, large-scale social network and social media analysis, latent space models, and Bayesian Nonparametrics.

Liz Yi is Co-founder and Chief Corporate Development Officer at Petuum. Liz has been serving various roles at Petuum for fundraising, finance, communication, operations, etc. She also oversees business and operations in China and Japan after the initial setup. Prior to Petuum, Liz was Vice President of Tsinghua Education Foundation N.A. in the Bay Area, where she led fundraising and grant activities within the organization. Liz worked for Hina Group, a then investment banking startup focusing on cross border transactions as Director of Business Development. She was also a Venture Partner of Shanghai Pudong Science and Technology Investment Co. Liz earned her BS in Material Science and Engineering from Tsinghua University.

Saranyan Vigraham is Vice President of Engineering at Petuum. Previously, he was a VP of Engineering at Elementum, where he led their enterprise SaaS platform team that digitized the supply chain for Fortune 500 companies like Starbucks and Johnson & Johnson. Prior to Elementum, he was the Head of Software Engineering at Meta, delivering the industry’s first Augmented Reality platform with natural gesture controls.

Saranyan has also held engineering leadership roles at PayPal, Bigcommerce and Qualcomm, bringing with him a diverse engineering experience of shipping enterprise and consumer products across web, mobile and wearable platforms with millions of users.

Saranyan holds a Ph.D in Computer Science with a focus in Machine Learning.

Before Petuum, Paul had the opportunity over the past several years to serve a wide array of businesses in both full and part-time CFO roles. Generally, Paul is called upon to help the management team and the Board move the company from one place on the business life-cycle curve to the next. Most recently, Paul worked with a global private-equity firm's enterprise software division, where they integrated an acquisition that doubled the division's revenue to $400M and installed a couple of major debt facilities. Paul also has the good fortune to work with an automated driving venture, a socially responsible waste recycling company, and a business that provides television replay in major sporting events. Paul was also the part-time and full-time CFO of BodyMedia as well as the part-time CFO of Carnegie Learning – both CMU-related Pittsburgh companies where they managed successful exits in each case. Prior to Paul's fractional finance work, he had a long run with International Paper in their wholesale distribution business.

Dr. Bin Zhao is Vice President of Machine Learning, at Petuum, where he leads a team of machine learning engineers and software engineers. Dr. Zhao has 14 years of R&D experience in machine learning. Zhao’s expertise covers large scale machine learning, computer vision, optimization, statistics, and data mining, with more than 20 publications in top ranked computer science journals and conference proceedings. He has a Ph.D. in machine learning from school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, Master of Science from Carnegie Mellon University, Master of Science and Bachelor of Science from Tsinghua University, the top ranked university in China. Zhao has served as Program Committee member and reviewer for top ranked computer science conferences and journals, such as IEEE PAMI, TKDE, DMKD, ICML, NIPS, ICCV, ECCV, CVPR, BMVC, etc.

Valerie Quatrini is the Head of People Operations at Petuum, leading the Human Resources, Recruiting and Immigration functions for the organization. Valerie joined Petuum from Carnegie Mellon University where she was an Assistant Director in the university’s Career and Professional Development Center. While there, Valerie launched Carnegie Mellon’s first-ever comprehensive career readiness program for neurodiverse students and led other initiatives to engage the university’s diverse, world-class student population. Prior to CMU, Valerie worked in various corporate HR and business-focused roles at the Pittsburgh-based global retailer, American Eagle Outfitters. Valerie earned her BS in Marketing Management from Grove City College.