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Anna-Katrina Shedletsky is the CEO and founder of Instrumental Inc., a manufacturing data company creating the first end-to-end optimization platform for product teams building electronic devices. Instrumental combines AI-powered defect and anomaly detection, failure analysis tools, complete issue monitoring and reporting, and production-quality in-line tests into a single end-to-end optimization platform.

Anna-Katrina holds two degrees in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. Before founding Instrumental, she led system product design for the first-generation Apple Watch program, and contributed to several generations of iPod mechanical design.

Simon is the Industry Director for Discrete Manufacturing Industries at Google Cloud. He is responsible for defining industry needs, new solutions and facilitating opportunities for Enterprises to innovate across their value chain.

Simon has 30 years of experience in product design, manufacturing, and industrial software. Prior to joining Google Cloud, he led Industry Services Delivery for Manufacturing, Retail, and Automotive at Microsoft.  He has held senior roles at Cadence Design Systems and Actify defining solutions for engineering and manufacturing.  Simon commenced his career designing industrial products throughout the Asia Pacific and North America.

Simon holds a Bachelor’s degree in Technology from Monash University Australia and has patents in solar power generation and product lifecycle management software.

Chris Luecke is a Podcaster, Marketer, and self-proclaimed “Media Maverick” in the manufacturing industry. As the host of the podcast Manufacturing Happy Hour, Chris interviews leaders in the industrial sector to simplify and explore the latest trends and technologies impacting modern manufacturers. After an 11 year sales career at Rockwell Automation, Chris now helps manufacturers tell their story to their ideal customer audience through videos, podcasts, and social media.

Stephen Nellis covers semiconductors and hardware for The Information, a tech-focused premium subscription publication, from its San Francisco bureau. Before that, he spent five years at Reuters covering Apple and semiconductors, where he broke news on Apple’s car project and dove into the company’s growing dependence on China’s supply chains. He also covered the growing conflict over advanced technology between the United States and China with stories about U.S. government efforts to prevent Chinese access to advanced chipmaking tools such as extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. Before joining Reuters, Stephen spent two years at The Information in its early days. Before that, he was the technology editor at the Pacific Coast Business Times in Santa Barbara, California. A graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Stephen hails from small-town Missouri.

Michael Sternowski is Director, Advanced Manufacturing for Communication Systems of L3Harris Technologies. Communication Systems covers a broad portfolio, including tactical and airborne radios, night vision technology, and defense and public safety networks.

Michael assumed the position of Director, Advanced Manufacturing in 2019. They are responsible for driving manufacturing excellence for 6 manufacturing sites in the United States with a focus on the incubation and deployment of technologies to attack costs of poor quality and drive productivity.  

Previously, they served as Senior Manager, New Product Introduction leading a team of process engineers responsible for launching next-generation tactical radios. 

In February 2016, he was selected to serve as Deputy to the Chief Global Business Development Officer focused on managing day-to-day operations and reporting.

In November 2013, Michael was product line manager for a family of international handheld and airborne products.

Michael joined L3 Harris Technologies in 2004 and entered the mechanical engineering department. From there he held roles of increasing responsibility in product line management and international account management.  He is a graduate of the L3 Harris rotational development program.

Michael has a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Villanova University.  He also received a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Rochester, Simon School.

Milo Werner is a General Partner at The Engine. Before The Engine, she was at Ajax Strategies where she was a Partner, leading mid-stage investments across energy, transportation, agriculture and industrial applications. Milo joined Tesla in 2007, at a critical stage in the company’s trajectory, where she led New Production Introduction, launching Model S powertrain (battery, drive unit, and all the stuff in between), dual motor, drivers assist and, most importantly, Model X. The company grew from 200 to 12,000 during her tenure. In addition to Tesla, Milo ran New Product Introduction at Fitbit, launching four factories in China and transitioning the company to fully automated production, and led engineering and product for micro-grid company Zola, a startup providing distributed energy to over a million families in Sub Saharan Africa. Milo earned a B.S. in geology and civil & environmental engineering from the University of Vermont, as well as a M.S. in civil engineering and an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She sits on the boards of the UVM College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, AxelHire, Infinitum Electric and is a Board Observer for Lime.

Dave Nazzaro is the Sr Director of Hardware Engineering and Advanced Technologies at Insulet Corporation. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. For the last 17 years, he has progressively risen through the ranks, having worked for various organizations, including Fluident, Apple, and now Insulet.

Dave was on the product design engineering team responsible for the development and launch of the first generation Apple watch. At Insulet, he currently leads Electrical, Mechanical, and Materials Engineering Groups. The team supports advancements within current platforms, with a core focus on new product innovation.

Kane is a Partner at Root Ventures, a seed stage venture capital fund that invests in technical teams at the earliest stages. He primarily invests in better tools and software for engineering teams. Kane also runs @machinepix, a popular engineering content account and newsletter.

Samuel is the CTO and founder of Instrumental, a manufacturing data company that uses machine learning to find anomalies on consumer electronics assembly lines. He has degrees in mechanical engineering and mathematics from MIT and Stanford University, and went on to work as a Product Design Engineer at Apple. During his three years there, he led the development of the Taptic Engine, a new kind of micro-mechanical vibration motor. Samuel spent significant time on some of the most advanced and most rudimentary factory lines in Asia. He has experienced the pain of solving complex mechanical system problems under tight deadlines, and is passionate about using machine learning technology to modernize manufacturing.

For the past 7 years, Matt has lead Intuitive Surgical’s Automation, Equipment, and Test group, which is responsible for the manufacturing equipment supporting the da Vinci robotic surgical system’s instruments, accessories, and endoscopes projects.  For many of Intuitive’s products, production volumes reach into the millions per year and quality requirements are extreme – resulting in many exciting challenges.  Prior to joining Intuitive, Matt taught Mechatronics in Stanford’s Mechanical Engineering Dept., and co-founded two medical device start-ups:  Neoguide Systems and Treus Medical.

Alok leads a global business development team driving growth through strategic alliances and partnerships across SAP’s entire product portfolio, and for core strategies such as Industry Cloud. Alok and his team have an amplified focus on newer innovation areas like AI, ML, Blockchain, Quantum Computing, etc. and the implications for SAP, and the enterprise software market.

Alok has over two decades of experience in the enterprise software arena at startups and Fortune 500 organizations. Alok’s focus during his time in the technology industry has been on building businesses from the ground up, identifying product and partnership opportunities, opening new global markets for organizations, and growing existing and new revenue streams with an entrepreneurial drive. Prior to joining SAP, Alok held a variety of senior roles at Microsoft, Motricity and Experian.

Alok holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Pune, India, and an MBA in Business Strategy, Marketing, and Information Technology Management from the University of California, Irvine.

Piyush Modi is responsible for Global Business Development/Strategy for Industrial Sector at NVIDIA. He is actively engaged with major industrial companies and related research labs to conceive and realize Industrial AI enabled solutions. He is focused on developing business and ecosystem around real time deep learning training/inferencing platforms, architecture and related algorithms for the Industrial use cases spanning inspection, predictive maintenance, video analytics, logistics, automation and Conversational AI.

Prior to NVIDIA, at Sentient.ai as a VP of engineering, he led a team to build the industry’s first distributed AI (Deep Learning and Evolutionary Algorithms) platform to serve the model building pipeline needs for E-Commerce, Financial and Industrial verticals to harness dark compute cycles from 1000s of GPUs available globally.

Previously, over 20+ years of his career he has held CTO, Sr. VP, and Head of Research Lab positions at companies including GE Global Research, BT, Ribbit, IP Unity, and AT&T Bell Labs, to deliver major industry forming outcomes leveraging Speech Recognition, VOIP, IoT, and Deep Learning technologies.

Piyush holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Speech Recognition) from Rutgers, New Jersey, an MS in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee, and a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi, India.

Bill is co-founder and CTO of Ronin Product Development Labs. His superpower is connecting the dots between disparate data points to define strategic paths to efficient execution.  Listening and adapting are core elements of Bill’s development approach that lead to highly successful outcomes. Prior to starting Ronin, Bill worked at a number of small design firms, startups, and not-so-startups (Fitbit and Amazon) throughout the SF bay area.

Bill’s management focus includes investments in the passion of his team – allowing for a growth mindset at all levels.  Ronin’s overarching goal is to be a leader in product development focused on improving the lives of people and the health of the planet. To this end Ronin invests in education, process framework and network development, and manufacturing execution, all with a strong willingness to share to deliver a larger impact.

Bill is focused on building teams where highly talented leaders and engineers are able to plug into their superpowers and identify a direction, create a path, and have the support and coaching necessary to achieve their definition of success. Clients as collaborators are the end benefactors of the continual improvement and iterative learning environment being actively built at Ronin.

Dan Kennedy is a Studio Principal and Partner at Ronin Product Development Labs, an international engineering consulting firm with a strong presence in the San Francisco Bay Area. With over 20 years of product development experience and driven by a strong passion for creative collaboration, Dan leads Ronin’s sustainable design team whose focus is on developing circular economy solutions for a diverse range of clients in areas including consumer electronics, waste stream recovery, and renewable energy.

Nichole is the Founder and Creative Director at level. She has deep experience taking complex new technologies and shaping them into forms that foster emotional connections between consumers and brands. 

Nichole’s expertise in manufacturing means production feasibility is considered from day one, and her minimalistic approach leads to timeless designs that delight users and live seamlessly in their environments.  Her work has helped create new industry categories and propelled products into the global spotlight. 

As a mother and female leader, Nichole strives to bring balance to her own business and to the practice of industrial design at large. The products designers create touch millions of lives – women must have a bigger impact on shaping them. Her passion for creating a diverse and inclusive industry led her to serve as Chair of IDSA’s Women in Design SF for a number of years.

level was listed as #03 in FastCompany’s Most Innovative Design Companies of 2021 and Nichole and level’s work has garnered wide recognition, including design awards such as IDEA Gold, Red Dot, iF and Spark Platinum. Before founding level, Nichole was Creative Director at HTC, and led teams at One & Co. and NewDealDesign. www.leveldesignsf.com

Kyle Wiens is the CEO of iFixit, the free repair manual. He’s dedicated his life to defeating the second law of thermodynamics, a battle fought in the courtroom as often as in the workshop. The Right to Repair campaign has, so far, successfully legalized cell phone unlocking and tractor repair. Kyle regularly speaks on design for repair, service documentation, and the environmental impact of manufacturing. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Popular Mechanics, and Wall Street Journal.

Philip Spagnoli Stoten started his career in electronics as a PCB designer in the 1980s and held numerous roles in manufacturing including Production Director of a UK plc making industrial computer equipment. Midway through his career Philip switched to journalism and content marketing. He founded EMSNOW and SCOOP and he currently write for numerous industry and business publications including Forbes, Entrepreneur and Fast Company.

VP Sales & Marketing at SEACOMP where we design and manufacture hardware for industrial, medical and consumer product innovators. I have over 20 years of product development and technical sales and marketing experience. Co-Host of the best Hardware room on Twitter Spaces (formerly on Clubhouse) on Thursdays at 7pm PT.

Dave Trail (He/Him) is VP of Sales at Arch. He is an accomplished industry professional with over 25 years of experience in electronics manufacturing equipment, machine connectivity, and manufacturing execution systems software (MES). Throughout his career, he has been a pioneer and proponent of the evolution of manufacturing from Industry 3.0 to 4.0, big data analytics, AI/ML, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT).

While working with most of the largest global manufacturing corporations, Dave possesses a vast knowledge of the challenges manufacturing companies face and the opportunities inherent in evolving their organizations to capitalize on tomorrow’s technologies today.

Jake Hall is a Business Development Manager for Feyen Zylstra, but is better known as the Manufacturing Millennial.  His passion is to advocate manufacturing, automation, digital transformation, and skilled trades by helping revolutionize the way people and companies present through social media.

With 32,000 followers and 10,000,000+ views on his content, he ignites conversations about the latest in manufacturing and automation to excite the current and future workforce on the impact this industry has.

Rajeev Bhalla is CEO and co-founder of Clip Automation, who are redefining the way automation is developed and deployed in the manufacturing world, with a focus of covering data to insight that drives value. Rajeev has more than 25 years of automation experience, including Vice President of Automation at JUUL and six years in operations at Apple.

Carl Hung is the President and CEO of Season Group, a global EMS delivering value to OEMs through full stack design and manufacturing services in Asia, Europe and the Americas. Carl’s career started in the Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) industry, where he worked intimately with aerospace, automotive, medical devices, computer hardware, music, security, safety, industrial, satellite, telecommunications and niche consumer companies.

Rustem Feyzkhanov is a Sr. Machine Learning Engineer at Instrumental, where he creates analytical models for the manufacturing industry, and AWS Machine Learning Hero. Previously he worked at Astro Digital where he created analytical models on top of satellite imagery.

Rustem is passionate about the use of cloud infrastructure for AI/ML applications and is the author of the courses and book “Serverless Deep Learning with TensorFlow and AWS Lambda” and “Practical Deep Learning on the Cloud”. Rustem also presented at O’Reilly Software Architecture, AI DevWorld, MLOps: Production & Engineering and numerous conferences and meetups on the topic of using cloud native infrastructure for Deep Learning training and inference pipelines.

Also, he is a creator of a few popular open source repositories on GitHub about AWS infrastructure and usage of it for deep learning applications. His current interests include using serverless for AI/ML applications, solving challenges when building production ML workflows using AWS infrastructure.

A mechanical engineer by trade, Will worked at Apple as a Product Design Engineer on a wide range of products from the Apple Watch to Mac desktops. He learned how difficult it is to get a new product to market and now uses that experience to make it easier for everyone else. After more than 2 years at Instrumental, he is excited by Instrumental’s growing abilities to connect different types of data and eliminate the need for Excel in day-to-day life.

Tobias Harrison-Noonan grew up as a mechanical engineer at Apple, and experienced the waste and inefficiencies of hardware development as they brought multiple generations of Apple Watch and iPhones to market. At Instrumental, he sets out to solve those inefficiencies through a combination of assembly data, cloud infrastructure, and machine learning that help hardware engineers find and fix issues faster. And now, in the era of remote work, we’ve become essential to our customers’ development process.