Eric P. Xing is the Founder, CEO, 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.

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.

Hitesh Dholakia is the Vice President of Product 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.