Keynote Speakers

Cary Coglianese 

Professor of Law and Political Science | University of Pennsylvania

Cary Coglianese is the Edward B. Shils Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science and the founding Director of the Penn Program on Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches courses in administrative law, environmental law, regulatory law and policy, and policy analysis. He specializes in the study of administrative law and regulatory policy, with an emphasis on the design and evaluation of alternative processes and strategies and the role of public participation, technology, and business-government relations in policymaking.  

In addition, Cary serves as the faculty director for and teaches in an executive education program on regulatory analysis and decision-making. He has chaired and served on National Academy of Sciences committees as well as committees of the American Bar Association’s Section on Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy. A Senior Fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), Coglianese has served as an appointed Public Member of ACUS and as the chair of ACUS’s Rulemaking Committee. He is a member of the American Law Institute and a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.  

Alex Dimakis

EECS Professor | University of California, Berkeley 

Alex Dimakis is a Professor in UC Berkeley in the EECS department. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and the Diploma degree from NTU in Athens, Greece. He has published more than 150 papers and received several awards including the James Massey Award, NSF Career, a Google research award, the UC Berkeley Eli Jury dissertation award, and several best paper awards. He served as an Associate Editor for several journals, as an Area Chair for major Machine Learning conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI) and as the chair of the Technical Committee for MLSys 2021. He is an IEEE Fellow for contributions to distributed coding and learning. His research interests include Generative AI, Information Theory and Machine Learning. 

Alex is a founding member and research thrust leader at the NSF AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (NSF IFML) and the co-founder and Chief Scientist at Bespoke Labs AI, focused on creating AI tools for data curation and post-training LLMs.

Robert Grey

Director of Sustainable Future | Plug and Play Tech Center

Robert Grey is the Director of Sustainable Future, overseeing five business units at the Plug and Play Tech Center: Agtech, Animal Health, Food & Beverage, New Materials & Packaging, and Sustainability. Over the course of his career, he has tackled large-scale challenges in human health, water efficiency, agricultural productivity, and ecosystem resilience, gaining a deep understanding of corporate innovation through cross-border business development.

Plug and Play is one of the most active investors and startup accelerators in the world, and the leading open innovation platform working with more than 600 corporate partners and 100 university partners. It is particularly distinguished by regular university engagement to help bridge the gap between research and translation.

Swathi Manikya Vallabhajosyula

PhD Candidate and Graduate Research Assistant | The Ohio State University

Swathi is a PhD candidate and Graduate Research Assistant at The Ohio State University, specializing in AI-driven resource provisioning for High-Performance Computing (HPC). Her research is central to developing modern AI-driven cyberinfrastructure (CI) middleware tools, including resource estimators and intelligent schedulers that interact with monitoring and metadata systems.

She works with the NSF AI Institute for Intelligent Cyberinfrastructure with Computational Learning in the Environment (NSF ICICLE), which is advancing the next generation of cyberinfrastructure to make AI more accessible and widely adopted. Within ICICLE’s middleware and tools group, she collaborates with cyberinfrastructure researchers to design software stacks that integrate directly with core infrastructure. Her contributions include the AI-Aware Adaptive Scheduler, which leverages backend estimators (e.g., memory and wall-time predictors, CI-centric queue wait-time estimators) and integrates with systems such as the Cyberinfrastructure Knowledge Network (CKN) for runtime monitoring and Patra Model Cards for efficient model metadata management. Together, these efforts form an integrated ecosystem designed to streamline AI deployment and optimize resource utilization for scientific applications.