Vivek has over 18 years of experience in silicon photonics. He was a Sr. Principal Engineer, Product Architect and Program Leader for Integrated Silicon Photonics at Broadcom driving key core technology development required to co-package optics with switches and demonstrated industry’s first 25.6T Ethernet switch co-packaged with silicon photonics chiplets. Prior to joining Broadcom, he was a Principal Engineer at Rockley Photonics where he led silicon photonics product integration for their data-com product line. He started his career at Intel where he led next generation GPU to HBM interconnect technology development and the commercialization of their first Silicon-photonics-based transceivers. He received his PhD from MIT in Material Science and Engineering.

Alex is a world leader in quantum and nonlinear photonics. He performed many of the key demonstrations of nonlinear optical devices in silicon photonics, including parametric amplifiers and optical frequency comb generators. He also holds appointments in the departments of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. He was awarded the Townes Medal in 2019 and is a Fellow of Optica, the American Physical Society, and IEEE.

Yoshi has over 20 years of research experience in nonlinear silicon photonics and optical frequency combs. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal papers and is a co-inventor on 8 patents.

He is a Fellow of Optica, the 2017 Optica Ambassador, and is the recipient of the 2017 Tingye Li Innovation Price. He holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Physics, as well as an M.Eng. and B.S. in Engineering Physics, all from Cornell University.

Nicolas has over 25 years of experience in the photonics space. He joins Xscape from Lumentum where he was the General Manager of its Datacom business unit after serving as the Vice President of Strategy. In prior roles, he spent 16 years at NeoPhotonics as Director of Product engineering and General Manager of the Transceiver business unit serving the Hyperscale Cloud Datacenters. He started his career as Principal Engineer at Dicon Fiberoptics then Lightconnect with focus on integrating Optical and MEMS technologies.

Nicolas received a Master of Science in Physics/Optics from Paris-Sud University and an Executive MBA from Northwestern - Kellogg School of Management.

Vikram brings over two decades of deep technical and product leadership in photonics. A key member of the core team that successfully commercialized silicon photonics at Intel, he played a pivotal role in bringing breakthrough optical technologies from lab to market. Prior to that, he was an early member of the technical team at Luxtera, where he drove pioneering efforts in silicon photonics.

‍

He has a Ph.D. from USC and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Madras.

Sowmitra has nearly 15 years of experience in strategy, corporate finance, and M&A.

Sowmitra specialises in business plan and forecast preparation, cost modelling (Opex and Capex), returns assessment, cash flow projections, scenario analysis, fundraising and M&A. Sowmitra has held senior roles at organisations such as EY-Parthenon and Deloitte, leading and delivering strategic projects for businesses - including aspects covering value creation, cost engineering and margin enhancement.

Sowmitra holds an MBA in strategy and finance from HEC Paris, a Master's in Eng. from the University of Texas, Austin, and a Bachelor's in Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

Leo has over 30 years of leadership experience in Supply Chain Operations and Materials Management across the Optical Communications, Semiconductor, and Electronics Manufacturing sectors. He has held senior roles at Intel, Cisco Systems, Avanex, and Sanmina Corporation, where he led complex supply chain strategies across global operations.

During his time at Cisco Systems—following its acquisition of Lightwire—Leo managed Supply Operations for the launch of Cisco’s first Silicon Photonics optical transceiver. He later served as Senior Director of Supply Chain and Manufacturing at Intel’s Silicon Photonics Product Division, helping scale production and streamline sourcing for cutting-edge photonics technologies.

Leo received his Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from California Polytechnics State University at San Luis Obispo.

Karthik Vaithianathan has over 24 years of experience defining and implementing SoCs, Accelerators, Systems, andSoftware for various applications including General-Purpose (x86) Computing, Video Signal Processing, ComputerVision, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and Large Language Models (LLMs). In his recent role as anentrepreneur, he defined and launched a distributed edge computing framework called Garuda REAP for LLMinference and training. Before that as a Lead SoC architect at Intel Corporation, Karthik was responsible for thearchitecture definition/performance of four SoCs/Accelerators including Skylake Accelerated Compute Extension(ACE). Karthik has 10 approved patents, 10 patent publications, and over 12 published papers. Karthik received hisMS in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University at Tempe, and a B.S. in Electronics and CommunicationEngineering from Guindy College of Engineering at Chennai, India.

Joseph has been in the optical communications industry for over 25 years and been involved in product development of optical transceivers, optical components and subsystems.  He spent 16 years at Neophotonics, leading the Coherent Receiver program and continuing in that role at Lumentum after its acquisition of Neophotonics.  Earlier in his career, he was a co-founder of Beam Express, an optical transceiver company which was acquired by Neophotonics.  In addition, he was in product development roles at Pine Photonics and Opnext.  He is a co-inventor on 7 patents in optical communications.  He received a Masters and PhD degrees from the University of Toronto, with specialization in optoelectronics and a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Keren is a world leader on photonic interconnect architectures. Her work is foundational to reducing energy consumption in computing with optical data movement. Keren holds a faculty appointment in the Electrical Engineering Department at Columbia University. She is the recipient of the IEEE Photonics Engineering Award and is a Fellow of Optica and IEEE.

Michal is a pioneer of silicon photonics. Several of her innovations are currently standard offerings in photonic foundries around the world, including microring modulators and nanotaper couplers. She is a co-founder of Voyant Photonics and sits on the Board of Poet Technologies. She holds appointments in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics at Columbia University. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of Optica and IEEE.

Tim Jenks is the former Chairman and CEO of NeoPhotonics Corporation, a leading global supplier of lasers and optoelectronic products to transmit high-speed digital optical signals in Cloud and hyperscale data center and telecom networks.  NeoPhotonics was the largest provider of semiconductor tunable lasers in the industry.  Tim led NeoPhotonics for more than 20 years, from venture-funded start-up to public company.  The company merged with Lumentum Holdings in 2022.

Tim previously served in positions of increasing responsibility at Raychem Corporation, a materials engineering company which was acquired by Tyco International Ltd. (now TE Connectivity Ltd.) in 1998.

He is a former nuclear-power trained naval officer, having served on multiple nuclear surface ships, and holds a Master of Business Administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a Master of Science in Nuclear Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and Marine Engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy.

Paul Negus brings with him over 30 years of management and business development specializing in technology startups in new and emerging markets. His expertise in forecasting, budgeting, restructuring, outsourcing, global contract negotiations, and profit and loss served him in revitalizing operations and delivering growth for a number of global organizations.​

A versatile, resourceful leader, Negus has held a variety of leadership roles throughout his career, including Vice President in the Data Center Group and the general manager of Connectivity Group Engineering and Operations at Intel Corporation, vice president of operations at LightWire Inc., prior to and after its acquisition by Cisco Systems; Vice President of global operations at Gemfire Corporation; vice president of operations and customer service at ONStor, Inc.; Vice President of worldwide operations at Avanex Corporation, Inc.; and Vice President and general manager of operations at IOA Corporation (now Clerios, Inc.).

Dylan Patel is the founder and Chief Analyst of SemiAnalysis, a boutique semiconductor, datacenter, and AI consulting and research firm. He has experience in both deep learning as well as the semiconductor industry and is focused on the unique requirements of AI hardware, software, infrastructure, and costs associated with running various types of models.

Tanj started his computing career in the UK with a degree in math, working on automatic test, digital simulation, wafer scale CMOS memory, distributed operating systems, networking, device drivers, and various office applications.

He worked at Borland in California on run time libraries for Pascal, C and C++, various utilities supporting Borland compilers, and the Quattro and Quattro Pro spreadsheet applications.  He was the architect and engineering lead for Paradox for Windows.

At Microsoft he worked on object databases, just-in time code generation for mobile computers, large scale mathematical optimization, an experimental secure OS, and early foundations for HoloLens.  He was the architect for Bing search engine until 2015, and hardware architect for Azure server systems until 2020.  

Tanj has consulted on data center architecture, memory, error correction, and energy-efficient interconnects.  His current projects include low energy chip design and electron beam lithography.Tanj has more than 50 publications and patents in hardware, software, and biology.

Richard has 35 years of design, management, and executive experience in high-speed electronics and electro-optics in companies including Plessey Research (UK), Texas Instruments, Inphi, Intel, and Astera Labs. He holds multiple patents on SerDes circuits and technology and was the Editor for the OIF High Bandwidth Coherent Driver Modulator and the 3.2T Co-Packaged Optics module Implementation Agreements. Post retirement, Richard is excited to be a Technical Advisor with Xscape Photonics to assist with the standardization and productization of our advanced electro-optics technologies.

James R. Scapa brings deep expertise and experience in business growth, innovation, and cultural stewardship to his role as founder, chairman, and CEO of Altair (Nasdaq: ALTR), a global leader in
computational intelligence software and technology.

Founded in 1985, Altair employs more than 3,000 scientists, engineers, and creative thinkers across 28 countries and serves more than 16,000 customers across a broad range of industries including
automotive, aerospace, government and defense, finance, energy, technology, life sciences, architecture, and construction.

James holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Michigan.

‍

Vivek has over 18 years of experience in silicon photonics. He was a Sr. Principal Engineer, Product Architect and Program Leader for Integrated Silicon Photonics at Broadcom driving key core technology development required to co-package optics with switches and demonstrated industry’s first 25.6T Ethernet switch co-packaged with silicon photonics chiplets. Prior to joining Broadcom, he was a Principal Engineer at Rockley Photonics where he led silicon photonics product integration for their data-com product line. He started his career at Intel where he led next generation GPU to HBM interconnect technology development and the commercialization of their first Silicon-photonics-based transceivers. He received his PhD from MIT in Material Science and Engineering.

Alex is a world leader in quantum and nonlinear photonics. He performed many of the key demonstrations of nonlinear optical devices in silicon photonics, including parametric amplifiers and optical frequency comb generators. He also holds appointments in the departments of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering at Columbia University. He was awarded the Townes Medal in 2019 and is a Fellow of Optica, the American Physical Society, and IEEE.

Eric was previously a Director in Temasek’s Emerging Technologies Fund where he led or co-led growth investments in frontier technologies such as PsiQuantum, Kepler Computing, d-Matrix, and Eavor Technologies. Before Temasek, Eric was an Investment Director with GE Ventures, leading investments in frontier technologies and enterprise marketplaces Eric is also the co-founder of SoCore Energy, a venture-backed commercial solar financing and installation provider acquired by Engie. He has previously served on the advisory boards of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a BA from Dartmouth College.

Keren is a world leader on photonic interconnect architectures. Her work is foundational to reducing energy consumption in computing with optical data movement. Keren holds a faculty appointment in the Electrical Engineering Department at Columbia University. She is the recipient of the IEEE Photonics Engineering Award and is a Fellow of Optica and IEEE.

Bill Gartner is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Optical Systems and Optics business. In this role, he leads business strategy and development efforts for Cisco’s multibillion-dollar portfolio that includes Optical Systems, Optics, and next-generation architectures (e.g., Routed Optical Networking) that employ pluggable optics.

Bill is known for his passion for technology and vision for groundbreaking solutions that help Service Providers and Webscale customers build world-class networks that maximize capacity, flexibility, scalability, and operational efficiencies – all integral to the Internet for the Future. Bill is also a champion of mentoring and career development of female leaders in technology.

Throughout his career, Bill has earned a reputation for building trusted customer and business partnerships, with a focus on growth and innovation. Prior to joining Cisco, Bill was Chief Operating Officer of Meriton Networks (acquired by Xtera Networks). Before that, he served as President and COO of Mahi Networks and COO of Photuris. Previously, he was Vice President and General Manager of Lucent's Optical Networking Systems business, responsible for Metro, Access, and Long Haul DWDM products. His earlier tenure in the industry included roles at AT&T Bell Labs and Paradyne.

Bill has served on the boards of OptronX (acquired by JDSU) and CyOptics.

Bill holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and an executive master’s degree in Technology Management from University of Pennsylvania/Wharton. He is a University of Pennsylvania Moore Fellow and holds three patents.