ABOUT THE FORUM |
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The Austin Forum on Technology & Society brings together technology leaders, practitioners, advocates, and enthusiasts to learn about and discuss transformative technology topics such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, cybersecurity, climate tech and clean energy, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), gaming, smart cities, health tech, space exploration, and much more. We explore technologies through the lens of their influence and impact on society.
Technology leaders and experts share information via our extensive programming. Everyone is invited to attend a variety of monthly presentation & discussion events, virtually or in-person, where they can ask questions and share their own experiences and ideas. We offer additional content that can be consumed via our podcasts and blog posts. And everyone—speakers, staff, and our huge community of tech leaders and professionals, learners, and enthusiasts—all converge and discuss in our Slack Workspace. The Austin Forum is one of Austin’s largest and oldest technology organizations, and we are increasing the quantity, diversity, and quality of our programming to help everyone keep up with technology capabilities and potential. We are focused on developing everyone’s understanding of diverse technologies, and accelerating the impact of these technologies in business, government, education, health, entertainment, and more. |
PARTICIPATE IN THE FORUM
EVENTS
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CONTENT
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MISSION
The Austin Forum engages and informs a diverse and worldwide community about the importance and impact of technology on society and stimulates discussions, collaborations, and partnerships on new technology opportunities. COLLABORATIONS The Austin Forum is designed to bring people together with diverse professions and points of view in order to increase the collaboration and the cross-fertilization of perspectives, experiences, and ideas. Community members are encouraged to ask questions and engage with speakers and one another through a variety of mediums including events, the Slack channel, and social media. LEADERSHIP The Austin Forum programming is led by Jay Boisseau, Executive Director, with guidance from an advisory board comprising leaders from technology companies and Austin companies that are partners of the Forum. COORDINATING ORGANIZATION The coordinating organization of The Austin Forum on Technology & Society is Vizias, an Austin-based technology strategies & solutions company. Contact Vizias. HISTORY The Austin Forum was conceived by Jay Boisseau, who launched in September 2006 under the management of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) where it was held on the J.J. Pickle Research Campus in North Austin and at the AT&T Conference Center at The University of Texas at Austin through October 2014. In February 2015, Vizias relaunched the Austin Forum in downtown Austin, and it has grown into the premier monthly technology event series in Austin. |
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ADVISORY BOARD
The Austin Forum on Technology & Society Advisory Board provides guidance and support in the areas of impact, development, community relations, and programming of future topics and speakers. Their participation helps increase the influence and impact of the Austin Forum for the whole community.
The Advisory Board is comprised of members of partner organizations and at-large community leaders in technology, business, government, and education that meet 8-10 per year to provide guidance and support in the areas of impact, development, community relations, and programming.
The Austin Forum on Technology & Society Advisory Board provides guidance and support in the areas of impact, development, community relations, and programming of future topics and speakers. Their participation helps increase the influence and impact of the Austin Forum for the whole community.
The Advisory Board is comprised of members of partner organizations and at-large community leaders in technology, business, government, and education that meet 8-10 per year to provide guidance and support in the areas of impact, development, community relations, and programming.
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Michael Ignatowski
Michael Ignatowski is a Senior Fellow at AMD Research in Austin, where he leads the research work in advanced memory architecture for high performance computers. Mike was involved in AMD’s role in winning the bid for the Frontier Exascale system to be installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory next year. Before joining AMD 10 years ago, Mike work at IBM in upstate New York for 27 years in advanced development and research. Mike has a master’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor’s degree in physics from Michigan State University. Outside of work, Mike serves on the board for Common Ground for Texans (CG4TX.org), a local group dedicated to promoting civil discourse among diverse communities and seeking common ground solutions toward a healthy democracy. He also servers on the board of 350-Austin, a local chapter of the international 350.org organization dedicated to reducing the threat of climate change. Mike is also the former president of the Central Texas Chapter of the World Future Society. |
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Chuck Gilbert
Chuck is the Technical Director of the Architecture and Strategy Solutions Team at AMD. The Solutions team is responsible for pathfinding, prototyping, and evangelism of new technologies in multiple industry verticals (HPC, AI/ML, Cloud, Networking) with a focus on software interactions with hardware technologies. Chuck has over 15 years of experience working on large scale system design, development, deployment, and operations. Prior to joining AMD, Chuck was an HPC Technologist in the office of the CTO at Dell, focusing on HPC technology futures, US Federal Government HPC as well as the convergence of HPC and Cloud computing. Previously, Chuck was the Technical Direct and Chef Architect at The Pennsylvania State University’s Institute for Cyber Science and was responsible for architecting and deploying HPC and Cyberinfrastructure in support of the University’s research mission. Chuck’s past experiences also includes working for Raytheon developing large scale data-warehousing and signal processing infrastructure in support of the US DOD/IC community, as well as at Oracle designing and deploying their Gen2 bare-metal cloud computing platform. Chuck has an academic background in Computer Information Science and Computer Science and resides in Austin, TX. |
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Fares Bagh
Fares Bagh is the VP of SOC and Solutions Enablement team at Arm, the world’s leading semiconductor IP company. In his role, Fares focuses on delivering complete solutions specific to market segments where various IPs are validated together and deliver optimum performance. His team’s work spans from IOT to supercomputers. Fares joined Arm in 2016. Before that, Fares held various executive position in NXP, Freescale, Avdent Solar, a solar startup acquired by Applied Materials, and Intel . Fares has personal interest in Python, machine learning, and squash(the sport not the gourd). |
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Eric Van Hensbergen
Eric is currently a Fellow in the Research division at Arm in Austin, TX leading the systems research group. The group's activities include exploring the place of Arm within data centers, network infrastructure, high performance computing, distributed systems, edge computing and investigating next generation concepts in security, operating systems, runtimes, and systems software. He was a research staff member in the Future Systems Department at IBM's Austin Research Lab. Over nearly twelve years at IBM, he has worked on low-power dense server and network processor appliance blades, DRAM power management, full system simulation, high performance computing, hypervisors, and the Linux operating system. Before coming to IBM, he worked for four years at Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories on the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems. |
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Harold Ingersoll
@atchleycpas Harold is a partner at Atchley & Associates, LLP. Harold has more than 30 years of leadership experience in consulting, public accounting and the U.S. Air Force. He earned his Bachelor of Business Administration in accounting from Texas State University. Prior to becoming a partner at Atchley & Associates, LLP in 2005, Harold managed his own accounting practice and later merging with Faske Lay & Co., LLP as a partner. Harold is retired from the Air Force and the Air Force Reserves. Harold centralizes his practice in mergers and acquisitions, business valuations, litigation support, expert witness consulting and forensic accounting. He has extensive expertise in these practice areas in addition to succession planning, taxation, attestation, and general business consulting. As the managing partner of the consulting services group, he has the ability to evaluate and explain complex business transactions as well as see them through to success. |
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Brad Englert
@EnglertBrad Brad is the CEO and founder of Brad Englert Advisory, a technology planning and consulting services firm, and is an author, advisor, and technologist. Previously, he served as Chief Operating Officer for ITS and Chief Information Officer (CIO) for The University of Texas at Austin, and was a partner with Accenture. Services offered through Brad Englert Advisory include strategy creation, IT governance, organization effectiveness, cloud solution evaluation and selection, career coaching, and career development training. |
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Carolyn Coke Reed Devany
Carolyn Coke Reed Devany is Executive Chair of Interactic Holdings, LLC dba Data Vortex Technologies, an intellectual property company holding the rights on the globally protected Data Vortex switch portfolio. As an active participant in the high performance computing community for nearly 25 years, Carolyn has witnessed first hand the dramatic shift from legacy supercomputing to efficient new solutions that meet today's massive data-driven infrastructure requirements. Her focus is on driving fair and transparent relationships with investors, industry partners, and thought leaders in both the public and private sectors. Representing the company’s majority interest, she is the primary visionary and decision maker, setting the course for the responsible dispensation of the Data Vortex intellectual property. Carolyn serves as Steering Committee Chair for the international organization Women in High Performance Computing and is Co-founder of Texas Women in High Performance Computing. She is excited by the imaginations of young innovators and is interested in better understanding how art and technology can drive social responsibility. As a passionate equestrian, Carolyn spends the majority of her free time trail riding through Central Texas with her favorite pal, Howdy. |
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Michael Shepherd
Michael is a Distinguished Engineer and recognized technical evangelist who speaks globally on the impact of emerging technologies. With 25 yrs Technology experience backed by 14 years growing up in Asia, he currently leads AI Research and Emerging Tech for Dell Technologies Services. Michaels responsibilities include engaging with external researchers and collaborating internally across the Chief Technology Offices to envision and drive transformation as we prepare for the Age of AI. As Augmented Intelligence improves the efficiency by which humans and machines work together, Michael focuses on “the possibilities” with Machine Intelligence and provides vision for how Data Scientists in Dell Technologies Services can help drive human progress and better outcomes for businesses and humanity. Michaels experience as a sole proprietor and subsequent 20+ yrs at Dell in multiple organizations gives him a unique perspective of Dell’s entire product lifecycle. He serves on the MSBA advisory council for the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and has been granted thirteen hardware and software patents in eight countries. When he isn’t consumed by Machine Intelligence, he can be found (or not) hiking with family and friends somewhere off the grid…getting recharged by nature where technology has yet to reach. |
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Erik Summa
Erik Summa works at Dell Technologies and is an award-winning Experience Designer, specializing in creating new and innovative experiences that leverage touch, voice, gaze, gestures, biometrics, and more. He has 16+ years of experience in the creative industry and spent over five years of teaching and mentoring future experience designers. |
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Dr. Steve Kramer
Dr. Steve Kramer, Chief Scientist of KUNGFU.AI, is a computational physicist and data science entrepreneur with 30 years of post-Ph.D. experience in AI, data science, research, software, and business management. He earned a Ph.D. in physics in the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics at The University of Texas at Austin. Steve has extensive research experience spanning data mining, machine learning, anomaly detection, bot/cyborg detection, clustering, network graph analysis, deep learning, spatiotemporal forecasting, predictive analytics, social media analytics, and pattern discovery/recognition. In 2014, he patented a robust method for dynamic anomaly detection based on chaos theory. Steve spoke at Data Day Texas in 2014 and 2018 and at Data Day Seattle in 2016. Since 2011, he has served as a program committee member and reviewer for the ACM KDD and IEEE Security and Intelligence Informatics conferences. He recently acted as the Principal Investigator on multiple subcontracts for DARPA's Information Innovation Office and on four different prototype contracts for the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). He is proud to serve on the Board of the Austin Forum on Technology and Society and as a member of Board of Technical Advisors for data.world. |
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Stephen Straus
Stephen Straus is co-founder and Managing Director of KUNGFU.AI, an artificial intelligence professional services firm based in Austin. Stephen is a serial entrepreneur and former venture capitalist who has started, ran, and successfully sold two companies. He was also a Kauffman Fellow and General Partner at Austin Ventures, at the time the largest venture capital between the two coasts, during the dot-com boom and bust era. He is a graduate of Colgate University and received his MBA from Harvard Business School. He is founding Chair of Impact Dyslexia, a non-profit focused on creating bold solutions to the dyslexia crisis, serves on the Engineering Advisory Board of the Cockrell College of Engineering at the University of Texas, and is a former member of the Board of Directors of Sustainable Food Center and Austin Film Society. He is also currently spearheading The Startup Diversity and Inclusion Pledge and is a partner and mentor at Capital Factory. Stephen lives in Austin with his terrific wife and they have four great kids. |
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Hugh Forrest
@Hugh_W_Forrest Hugh serves as Chief of Programming for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival. This event brings more than 25,000 digital creatives from across the United States and around the world to Austin for five days of panels, brainstorming, networking, deal-making and fun. Forrest graduated from Austin High School in 1980, and then majored in English at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Before joining the SXSW team, he founded a small alternative publication called The Austin Challenger. |
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Luke Wilson
Luke has spent the last 20 years advancing the state of the art in high performance computing and artificial intelligence through roles in academia, finance, and technology. In 2005 Luke joined the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and The University of Texas at Austin as a member of HPC research staff and lecturer in the Department of Statistics and Scientific Computation. While at TACC Luke helped in the design, deployment, operations, and programming of more than a dozen Top500 systems from vendors such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell, and Cray. In 2016 Luke became Director of Training and Professional Development at TACC and developed the successful and popular TACC Institute Series of week-long training courses in HPC, Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, HPC Administration, and HPC Leadership. In 2017 Luke made the move to Dell Technologies, where he served as Chief Data Scientist and Distinguished Engineer for HPC/AI in the Infrastructure Solutions Group. While at Dell Luke led the development and publication of dozens of patents in areas such as infrastructure configuration, cloud computing, and containerization. In 2022 Luke joined market maker and high-frequency trading firm Optiver as Head of Global Research Infrastructure, where he let a global team advancing their compute, storage, networking, and software strategies and deployments. Luke holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at San Antonio and has worked on many high-profile projects, including providing data processing support for the Nobel Prize-winning LIGO project and introducing performance and parallel scaling optimizations for early transformer neural networks, paving the way for technologies like GPT-3/ChatGPT. He is the author of more than two dozen peer-reviewed research papers. Outside of work Luke enjoys science fiction and superhero movies, classical history and Egyptology, golf, and spending time with his wife and 2 children. |
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Sherri Greenberg
Sherri Greenberg is a Professor Practice and Fellow of the Max Sherman Chair in State and Local Government at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. She is a Chairperson of the Board of Managers of Central Health, a Member of the City of Austin Regional Affordability Committee, and a Member of the UT Opportunity Forum Steering Committee. Also, she serves on the Texas.Gov Steering Committee, the Austin CityUP Board of Directors, the Austin Forum on Technology & Society Advisory Board, and the City of Austin General Obligation Housing Bond Review Committee. Additionally, she has served as a Senior Advisor to Austin Mayor Steve Adler. Greenberg was a Texas State Representative from 1991 to 2001, and she chaired the House Pensions and Investments Committee and the Select Committee on Teacher Health Insurance. She also served on the House Appropriations,Economic Development, Elections, and Science and Technology Committees. Previously, Greenberg was the City of Austin Capital Finance Manager, and a Public Finance Officer at Standard & Poor’s. Greenberg holds an MSc in Public Administration and Policy from the London School of Economics. Her teaching and research interests include: technology and innovation, urban and state issues, public engagement, housing, transportation, healthcare, public finance, and campaigns and elections. Her recent publications are: Congress and Social Media: Beyond Facebook & Twitter, Using Innovation and Technology to Improve City Services, Austin Anchors & The Innovation Zone: Building Collaborative Capacity, Congressional Committees and Social Media, and Congress + Social Media. |
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William "whurley" Hurley
whurley is founder and CEO of Strangeworks, an Eisenhower Fellow, a Senior Member of the IEEE, founder of the Quantum Computing Standards Workgroup at the IEEE, the first Ambassador to CERN and Society, and the co-author of "Quantum Computing For Babies” and the upcoming “Quantum Computing for Dummies” (available for pre-order now). Prior to starting Strangeworks he was a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs [NYSE: GS]. He came to Goldman Sachs via the acquisition of his second startup, Honest Dollar. Prior to Honest Dollar whurley founded Chaotic Moon Studios which was acquired by Accenture [NYSE: ACN]. |
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Stacy Vu
Stacy Vu is the Chief of Staff at whurley, Inc. She is a skilled professional in project management, executive support, and digital marketing. Stacy has played a vital role in optimizing operations at whurley, Inc. She also offers executive support to whurley, the CEO & Founder of Strangeworks. Apart from her responsibilities at whurley, Inc., Stacy is the author of an AI-focused blog called VUGRL. Her blog features the latest AI technologies and provides useful tips on utilizing AI tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT. She has also authored a Quantum Coloring Book, titled Quantum Adventures which can be found on Amazon. Stacy has a wealth of experience in various roles across multiple industries. She served as a graphic design consultant in internal communications at Expedia, Inc., led rebranding initiatives at Ronco, and spent 12 years at IBM. During her time at IBM, she worked as a Senior Multimedia Developer and created product demos for technical marketing, as well as digital assets for ibm.com. In this role, she received an Outstanding Innovation Award for Implementing New and Compelling Awareness Generation Programs on the Tivoli Web Site. As a Web Program Manager, she built a team that supported marketing and sales enablement, designed dynamic multimedia assets for go-to-market campaigns, and managed the day-to-day operations of the product website. In addition, she was a Web Developer for IBM Tivoli's Internet Business unit. Stacy also holds a US Patent - Method and system for distributing image-base content on the internet. |
At-Large Members
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Nancy Giordano
Play Big Inc Nancy built a formidable career at several of the most influential ad agencies in NY, Chicago, and LA and for more than a decade has been the Founder/CEO of Play Big Inc., a strategic inspiration company. Her current work dives deeply into the emerging intersection of tech, business and society. Her expertise and experiences range from A.I., to frozen foods, to reinventing the internet, and all of her projects have a key common denominator: transitioning away from the extractive operating systems and outdated business thinking that no longer holds up... to create the more sustainable, inclusive and dynamic solutions the future demands. Author of the Amazon bestselling book Leadering: The Ways Visionary Leaders Play Bigger, Nancy is a frequent panelist at South by Southwest, global keynote speaker, Singularity University guest lecturer, and the world’s first TEDx licensee. She is recognized as one of the world’s top female futurists, and is co-Founder of the Femme Futurists Society. |
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Jennifer (Houli) Houlihan
Flatiron School Houli serves as lead instructor, Product Management & Design, for Flatiron School, where she is currently assigned to the Army Software Factory (US Army Institute for Software Development). She also facilitates design sprints and workshops for select government agencies and nonprofit organizations. Previously, she served as lead instructor in the User Experience Design Immersive program at General Assembly. Houli has also served as Managing Director of the Austin Forum on Technology & Society, a nonprofit organization that explores the impact of technology on society, and Managing Director of Austin Smart City Alliance, a consortium of companies, organizations, and individuals collaborating to advance Austin through digital technologies, data collection, analytics, and modeling. Additionally, she has served as executive director and chief lobbyist for Austin Music People, the trade association for Austin’s $2 billion music industry. She is a certified facilitator and an award-winning public speaker and writer, with recent appearances at ProductCamp, Control the Room, Austin Design Week, Hire Women Week, and AIGA Changemakers. |
TEAM
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