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Hannes Mühleisen is a creator of the DuckDB database management system and Co-founder and CEO of DuckDB Labs. He is a senior researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam. He is also Professor of Data Engineering at Radboud University Nijmegen.

Naveen Rao is VP of AI at Databricks, with a unique background bridging neuroscience and computing. He earned his PhD in Neuroscience from Brown University and previously co-founded Nervana, where he pioneered hardware for AI. His career focuses on building synthetic intelligence and making it widely accessible. Following Databricks' acquisition of Mosaic ML, Naveen continues driving AI capabilities for enterprise applications. Beyond his primary role, he serves on several advisory boards including the Allen Institute and is a board member for innovative companies like Beacon Biosignals and NeuReality. Naveen describes himself as a "neuroscientist, AI perpetrator, processor architect, entrepreneur, and investor" with a passion for transforming how we interact with large datasets.

Denis Yarats is the Co-Founder & CTO of Perplexity, building AI-native search tools since 2022. With a PhD in AI from NYU and experience at Facebook AI Research, Quora, and Microsoft, Denis brings deep technical expertise to his work. He's also an angel investor in AI startups like Cognition Labs (Devin) and Cursor. Currently, he's developing Comet, a new "browser for agentic search" that reflects his ongoing commitment to advancing how we discover information online. His work sits at the intersection of reinforcement learning, natural language processing, and search technology.

Aaron Katz is the Co-Founder and CEO of ClickHouse, Inc., a company focused on high-performance database solutions. With over two decades of experience scaling technology companies, Katz has established himself as a go-to-market expert in enterprise software. Prior to founding ClickHouse in 2021, Katz served as Chief Revenue Officer at Elastic for nearly six years, growing the company from $5M to over $500M in revenue and guiding it through IPO. His earlier career includes twelve years at Salesforce.com, where he rose to Senior Vice President of Enterprise Sales, helping transform the company from a 200-employee startup to a $200B+ market leader. A UC Davis graduate with a BS in Managerial Economics, he recently led ClickHouse's acquisition of HyperDX to enhance the company's observability offerings.

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.