MEET YOUR AI & DATA HEROES IRL

Ryan Blue is the original creator of Apache Iceberg and currently serves as Vice President of the project. With over a decade in data engineering, he's an established expert in big data formats and infrastructure. Currently a Member of Technical Staff at Databricks since June 2024, Ryan previously co-founded and served as CEO of Tabular until its acquisition by Databricks. His career includes senior positions at Netflix and Cloudera, where he was a technical lead for data formats. An Apache Software Foundation member since 2017, he's a committer in the Apache Parquet, Avro, and Spark communities and previously served as VP of Apache Avro. Ryan holds dual Bachelor's degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Idaho and a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.

Ethan Rosenthal is a Member of Technical Staff at Runway, an applied AI research company focused on multimedia content creation, where he builds engineering systems to accelerate the work of research scientists. His career spans diverse roles across AI, machine learning, and data science - from training language models at Square to developing recommendation systems at seed-stage ecommerce startups. Before working in tech, Ethan was an actual scientist and got his PhD in experimental physics from Columbia University.

Mike has spent over two decades as a technologist, entrepreneur, and investor. He’s currently co-founder and CEO of Rill, a cloud service for operational intelligence. Previously he founded Metamarkets (acquired by Snap, Inc. in 2017), a real-time analytics platform for digital ad firms, and CustomInk.com a leader in custom apparel online. Mike was also a founding partner at the venture capital firm DCVC, which has invested over $2B+ in assets in deep tech. He began his career as a software engineer for the Human Genome Project and later received a Ph.D. in computational biology.

Julian Hyde is the original developer of Apache Calcite, which provides SQL parsers and query optimizers for dozens of products, and Morel, a new functional query language. Previously he led the query processing team at Looker (acquired by Google in 2020), and co-founded SQLstream, an engine for continuous queries. He left Google in early 2025 to create the next language for data.

Hiren Patel currently heads Product Management at Firebolt, where he's revolutionizing data-intensive analytics. With a passion for building high-efficiency, low-latency solutions, he empowers organizations to scale analytics faster and more cost-effectively while keeping data expenses under control. Before Firebolt, Hiren spent over 12 years at Microsoft optimizing Cosmos, an exabyte-scale distributed compute platform. His work on the SCOPE compiler, optimizer, and scheduler helped scale petabyte computations while driving down operational costs by 10% annually. Hiren is a University of Waterloo graduate and over his career has combined exceptional technical expertise in distributed systems with strategic product thinking.

Mitul Tiwari is CTO and Co-founder of a stealth AI startup. Until recently he was a Director of AI and Machine Learning Engineering at ServiceNow leading natural language technologies group. Earlier he was CTO and Co-founder of Passage AI (acquired by Servicenow). His expertise lies in building data-driven products using AI, Machine Learning and big data technologies. Previously he was head of People You May Know and Growth Relevance at LinkedIn, where he led technical innovations in large-scale social recommender systems. Prior to that, he worked at Kosmix (now Walmart Labs) on web-scale text categorization, and its applications. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He has also co-authored more than twenty publications in top conferences such as ACL, AAAI, KDD, WWW, RecSys, VLDB, SIGIR, CIKM, and SPAA.

Marcel Kornacker is currently CTO and Co-Founder at Pixeltable and is notably known as the founder of Apache Impala and co-founder of Apache Parquet. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where he studied databases under Joe Hellerstein. His career includes founding several startups, including Blink Computing, which provided data lake analytics as a service. He has also served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at both Sutter Hill Ventures and Coatue Management. Kornacker's expertise spans databases, data analytics, and open-source technologies.

Michael is a globally recognized leader in AI and data-driven business transformation, known for developing AIOS, an intelligent marketing system at Plus that optimizes customer journey analysis and marketing ROI. A former NYU Stern marketing professor, his research spans predictive computation, marketing strategies, and consumer behavior. He has launched successful AI products focused on user safety, privacy, and marketing optimization. His work on explainable prediction and data synthesis, particularly with incomplete data, has been featured in major publications like LA Times and AdAge, and he frequently speaks at prestigious events including The Nantucket Project and ANA Masters of Marketing.