Join us for a panel discussion on the future of AI.

In-person registration is limited to 110.

Panel Discussion:

• Brent Leback – NVIDIA
• Karthik Kashinath  – NVIDIA
• Janet Lee Johnson – AI Governance Group
• Hector Dominguez – City of Portland, Oregon 
• Octaviano Merecias – OHSU
• Maude David – Oregon State University
• Randy Staton – Amazon Web Services
   

Bios below for each:

Brent Leback - NVIDIA

Brent Leback graduated from Oregon State University in 1984.  Over the last 40+ years, he has worked in various positions in HPC customer support, math library development, applications engineering, consulting, and management at QTC, Axian, STMicroelectronics(PGI), and NVIDIA.  He is a co-creator of the CUDA Fortran programming language, and continues to actively participate in the design and implementation of new CUDA Fortran features.  He is a regular attendee at OpenACC GPU Hackathons and an expert in OpenACC and CUDA Fortran programming models.

Karthik Kashinath - NVIDIA

Principal Engineer and Scientist, AI-HPC and Engineering Lead, Earth-2, NVIDIA Karthik Kashinath is a senior machine learning scientist and technologist at NVIDIA. Before joining NVIDIA in August 2021, he was at NERSC, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, where he led various climate informatics and machine-learning projects at the Big Data Center. Karthik received his bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, his master's from Stanford University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. His background is in engineering and applied physics. Karthik uses the power of machine learning to accelerate scientific discovery in the complex chaotic systems of turbulence, weather, and climate science.

Janet Lee Johnson, AI Strategy & Governance Advisor - AI Governance

Janet guides organizations through digital transformations with experience spanning Fortune 10 companies to high growth startups in tech, edtech, and financial services. For the past five years, she has taught AI workshops and PR strategy at Portland State University’s Center for Executive and Professional Education. Her background bridging sales, marketing and technology led her to found the AI Governance Group, helping organizations adopt AI responsibly while protecting their people, brands, and IP. Johnson's journey includes stops at tech pioneers like AT&T, Apple and Enron, giving her a unique perspective on how truth, trust and transparency must evolve with technology.

Octaviano Merecias, Division of Learning & Development-Leadership Development - OHSU

Octaviano Merecias-Cuevas earned his Doctorate from the School of Advanced Studies in Education at Johns Hopkins University, where his research explores how structural and institutional stressors influence employees' physio psychological and psychosomatic responses. He is a scholar and practitioner in learning, training, education, and organizational development, with a focus on innovative, future-focused teaching practices and the broader impact of systemic pressures on well-being and performance. His academic credentials include a post-master’s certificate in Mind, Brain, and Teaching from Johns Hopkins University, a Higher Education Teaching Certificate from the Derek Bok Center at Harvard University, and a Master’s degree from Oregon State University.

Hector Dominguez, Open Data and Privacy Coordinator - City of Portland

Hector is the Open Data Coordinator for the City of Portland, Oregon and part of the Smart City PDX team. In addition to Open Data initiatives, Hector has led privacy and information initiatives in the City that includes use of ethical tools for technology solutions assessment, privacy and information protection principles, establishing the citywide privacy and surveillance technologies strategies and procedures, and policy development including the face recognition technologies and Surveillance policies. He is also a member of the State of Oregon's Governor's AI advisory Council.

Maude David – OSU Microbiology 
Dr. Maude M. David work focused on microbiota-gut-brain axis and applying new analytical methods to analyze multi-omics microbial datasets. After postdoctoral positions at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford School of Medicine, she joined Oregon State University as an Assistant Professor in January 2018, where she has a joined appointment in Microbiology and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and is now an Associate Professor.  Dr. David's laboratory studies the gut-brain axis, to understand how microbes can impact our behavior, specifically in Autism Spectrum Disorder. She uses a crowd-sourced approach to collect lifestyle type information, diet habits, and samples. Her team is also working on identifying bottlenecks in microbial ecology and bioinformatics, bringing novel solutions to unravel microbial molecular mechanisms by applying notably deep learning approaches to microbiome datasets.

Randy Staton – Amazon Web Services
Randy is an innovative and cloud-focused technology leader with over 20 years of enterprise experience across multiple industries. He has driven global cloud transformations for enterprise data platforms for fortune 100, and now helps R1 research institutions with cloud adoption and transformation. He is an expert in cloud solutions, focused on modern data architectures and integrating AI solutions into the enterprise.

Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made to Jared Haddock at jared.haddock@oregonstate.edu or 541-737-2367 at least five (5) business days prior to the event.