Aurick is Heard of Engineering at Petuum. He completed his Ph.D. work at the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he researched resource adaptability and elasticity for distributed machine learning systems. Before Petuum and CMU, Aurick studied computer science and combinatorics and optimization at the University of Waterloo, where he also researched multi-pivot quicksort. He has also been successful in competitive programming.

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.

Most recently Prof. Xing has been appointed the Founding President of the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in the UAE. MBZUAI is the world’s first graduate-level, research-based AI university. Prof. Xing also currently serves or has served in 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 one of the top computer science (CS) professors 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 2005-2020.

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.

Alex Liang is currently a Partner at Oriza Ventures. Prior to joining Oriza, Alex was a Venture Partner at SAIF Partners, heading US investment activities. He also founded & served as CEO of PICA, one of the earliest mobile Internet messaging companies in China. Additionally, he has served as VP of Asia Netcom, heading strategies for its pan-Asia data network services, as well as VP of 21vianet, China’s leading Internet Data Center company.

Mark serves as a Strategic Advisor to venture-backed, emerging tech companies with 20+ years of CRO/CEO experience. He is a commercial leader with a proven record of building category-defining emerging tech and B2B SaaS companies. He's designed & executed go-to-market strategies, built & managed multi-disciplinary operational teams, and helped raise multiple rounds of venture funding. He holds a B.S. in Applied Economics from University of Massachusetts and M.B.A. from Babson College.