Sebastian Thrun

Founder and President

Udacity

Sebastian Thrun is a scientist, educator, inventor, and entrepreneur. He is founder, chairman, and president of Udacity, whose mission is to democratize education by providing lifelong, on-demand learning to millions of students in more than 190 countries.

He is also the founder of Google X where he led the self-driving car, Google Glass and other projects. Earlier on, he led the Stanford Racing Team whose robot “Stanley” won the DARPA Grand Challenge. Sebastian continues as a research professor at Stanford University, and is the first recipient of the inaugural Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Education.

Gayle Laakmann McDowell

Founder and CEO

CareerCup

Gayle Laakmann McDowell is the founder/CEO of CareerCup.com and the author of Cracking the *interview books (Cracking the Coding Interview, Cracking the PM Interview, and Cracking the Tech Career).

Her background is in software development, with a BSE/MSE in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the Wharton School. She previously worked as a software engineer at Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

In addition to running CareerCup and writing books, she consults with tech companies on their engineering hiring process and with startups to help them through acquisition interviews. She can be found online at twitter.com/gayle, facebook.com/gayle, and gayle.com.

Astro Teller

Captain of Moonshots

X, Alphabet

Dr. Astro Teller currently oversees X, Alphabet's moonshot factory for building magical, audaciously impactful ideas that through science and technology can be brought to reality. Before joining Google / Alphabet, Astro was the co-founding CEO of Cerebellum Capital, Inc, an investment management firm whose investments are continuously designed, executed, and improved by a software system based on techniques from statistical machine learning.

Astro was also the co-founding CEO of BodyMedia, Inc, a leading wearable body monitoring company. Prior to starting BodyMedia, Dr. Teller was co-founding CEO of SANDbOX AD, an advanced development technology incubator. Before his tenure as a business executive, Dr. Teller taught at Stanford University and was an engineer and researcher for Phoenix Laser Technologies, Stanford's Center for Integrated Systems, and The Carnegie Group Incorporated.

Dr. Teller holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Stanford University, Masters of Science in symbolic and heuristic computation, also from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a recipient of the Hertz fellowship. Through his work as a scientist, an inventor, and as an entrepreneur, Teller holds many U.S. and international patents related to his work in hardware and software technology. Astro is also a successful novelist and screenwriter.

Dr. Ashwin Ram

Senior Manager, AI Science

Amazon Alexa

Dr. Ram is a distinguished artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and entrepreneur. He currently serves as the Senior Manager of AI Science for Alexa, the intelligent agent that powers Amazon Echo and other devices. He leads R&D initiatives to create advanced technologies for conversational agents, including the university-facing Alexa Prize competition.

He managed the Interactive Intelligence research area at PARC, and was a professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech and director of the Cognitive Computing Lab. He has co-founded multiple startups, including OpenStudy, an online social learning network, and Enkia, which developed AI software for social media applications.

He is a closet anthropologist and loves travel, people and culture.