AI Career Notes: June 2020 Edition
In this monthly feature we bring you up to date on the latest career developments in the enterprise AI community -- promotions, new hires and accolades:
Luiz André Barrosso, vice president of Engineering at Google, is the recipient of the 2020 Eckert-Mauchly Award for the design of warehouse-scale computing. The basis of his architectural vision was to think of a system comprehensively, intertwining the compute, storage, and networking components into a design.
The Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society co-sponsor the Eckert-Mauchly Award, named for John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly. The award recognizes contributions to computer and digital systems architecture. Awardees receive a $5,000 prize.
NetApp appointed former president of Microsoft Latin America and corporate vice president of Microsoft Corp., Cesar Cernuda, as president and will report to CEO George Kurian. He will be responsible for the company's global market operations, including sales, marketing services, and support.
"I believe that NetApp will become a key partner in every organization's data strategy, and I am looking forward to being a part of it," Cernuda said. "During the past years, the key hyperscale public cloud vendors have bet on NetApp technology to support them with their customer offerings, and I believe this is one of the best examples of how NetApp has been transforming to become a cloud-first organization. I am thrilled with the opportunity to help and support customers and partners across the globe manage and protect one of their most important assets—their data."
Sumit Gupta
Sumit Gupta was promoted to vice president of AI Strategy and chief technical officer of IBM's Data & AI. He will be responsible for driving IBM's company-wide AI strategy. He was promoted from his role as VP Products, AI, machine learning and HPC, cognitive systems, where he built a startup business and led IBM's Cognitive Systems transformation into Enterprise AI and software, according to his LinkedIn profile.
"My expertise is centered around business and product management of software and systems products in the enterprise and data center markets," Gupta said in his LinkedIn biography. "Previously, I was the GM of the AI & GPU accelerator products at NVIDIA, where I was central to building the business in deep learning and technical computing / HPC and creating a new market category for accelerated computing. I have been front and center of the deep learning (AI) market since the start, since GPUs are used by every startup and major web, mobile, and enterprise company using deep learning."
The Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on the Mathematical Foundations of Computing awarded the 2020 Donald E. Knuth Prize to Cynthia Dwork, a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University and a distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, for her contributions to theoretical computer science over the past 40 years. Her research has contributed to distributed systems, cryptography, and data privacy, and fairness in algorithmic decision making.
The Donald E. Knuth Prize is named in honor of Donald Knuth of Stanford University. The award includes a $10,000 cash prize, in addition to a $1,000 travel stipend for Dwork to receive the award at the 61st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science.
Stuart Folo joins RStor as vice president of Asia Pacific to lead the new sales office in Tokyo, Japan. Folo has over a 20-year career in fixed and wireless networks, messaging security, and infrastructure. Before RStor, he was vice president of sales at ImageWare Systems, Proofpoint, and Cloudmark.
"RStor is helping to transform the way global organizations manage and store their data," Folo said. "At a time when IT teams are migrating between clouds, RStor provides the scale, security, and reliability they need. I look forward to working with current and future customers in this unique market."
Andrew Gehrlein and Michael Vedda
Park Place Technologies, a company focused on IT data center maintenance, monitoring and support, announced the addition of Andrew Gehrlein and Michael Vedda as chief financial officer and as chief revenue officer, respectively. Gehrlein will be responsible for the company's overall financial strategy, while Vedda will oversee the worldwide revenue growth for Park Place Technologies, including ParkView and Entuity.
Gehrlein comes from Valtris Specialty Chemicals serving under the role of CFO. He has 30 years of experience, including holding the role of CFO at ERICO International Corp. and Controller at Chart Industries, Inc. Vedda comes from Dell EMC, serving as vice president of sales for the Americas, Data Protections Solutions. Vedda also held sales leadership roles at Parametric Technology Corp.
Gregory Kurtzer
Gregory Kurtzer, creator of open source projects Centos Linux, Warewulf and Singularity, has formed and is the CEO of a new company called Control Command, Inc. Currently, in stealth mode, the startup is focused on “build[ing] the next generation of secure High Performance Computing infrastructure for compute centers, enterprise, hyper-scale, cloud, and edge,” according to Kurtzer’s LinkedIn profile.
Kurtzer was most recently the CEO of Sylabs, which was founded to provide support and other capabilities for running the Singularity container system on HPC and high security infrastructures. RStor, a major investor in Sylabs, recently acquired the company. Kurtzer created Singularity while at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where he held a position from 2000 to 2016. He was a corporate advisor for RStor from 2017 to April 2020.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li joins Twitter's board of directors as a new independent director. At Standford University, Li is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department. She is also the Denning Family co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute. From 2013 to 2018, Li was the director of Stanford's AI Lab. In addition, Li was vice president at Google and also held the role of chief scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud from January 2017 to September 2018.
"Twitter is an incredible example of how technology can connect the world in powerful ways, and I am honored to join the Board at such an important time in the Company's history," Li said. "AI and machine learning can have an enormous impact on technology, and the people who use it. I look forward to leveraging my experience for Twitter as it harnesses this technology to benefit everyone who uses the service."
Andrew Moloney joins SoftIron Ltd. as vice president of strategy. He will be responsible for the company's go-to-market planning and execution for SoftIron's product portfolio and global presence. Before SoftIron, Moloney was the founder of his own firm over the past nine years. He was responsible for guiding and creating strategies for various technology businesses.
"Many organizations are at an inflection point in their architecture, as they consider the implications of hybrid cloud and edge computing in their future strategy," Moloney said. "What SoftIron is doing is truly unique – taking leading open source software and building task-specific hardware platforms that redefine what's possible in both performance and efficiency in deploying them. In the process, SoftIron is simplifying the ability for organizations to adopt open source based 'software defined' architectures at scale. This will not only challenge traditional datacenter design, but will also change what's possible at the edge. I am looking forward to helping drive the mission here."
Pegasystems Inc. appointed Hayden Stafford as president of global client engagement. Stafford comes to Pegasystems with 25 years of experience, including leadership experience at IBM, Salesforce, and Microsoft. Before Pegasystems, he was corporate vice president of global Microsoft business applications. He is also credited with growing Microsoft Dynamics 365 cloud product revenue.
"As leading organizations strive for resiliency during uncertain times, there is a tremendous opportunity for Pega to support both immediate needs and pervasive digital transformation," Stafford said. "I look forward to bringing my experience to Pega and helping ensure continued client success and long term business growth."
CRN named Yvonne Walker, a senior manager of partner and customer experience at DDN, in the 2020 Women of the Channel list. At DDN, Walker manages the company's global channel program, where she develops business opportunities, communications, and marketing plans. Honorees are selected for their contributions to channel advocacy, growth, thought leadership, and dedication to the IT channel.
"CRN plays a key role in providing unique industry intelligence, forward-looking insight and acknowledging the many talented women leading trends and developments in the industry," said Walker. "The expansion of DDN's channel program is a result of our strong relationships with key partners and our commitment to providing partners with creative marketing tools, product training and best-in-class technology needed to resolve complex data challenges."
To read last month’s edition of Career Notes, click here.
Do you know someone that should be included in next month's list? If so, send us an email at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you.
