Dr. William Chappell is the Vice President and CTO for the Strategic Missions and Technologies Division at Microsoft. As CTO for SMT, he works across the quantum, 5G, mission, space and federal teams to infuse technologies, such as our AI advances, into the product lines, while developing new concepts for the future of the cloud. On the Mission Engineering team in SMT, he developed the Azure Space and Spectrum team, as well as the strategic modeling and simulation team, which includes silicon cloud design.

Prior to Microsoft, he was the director of the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the Department of Defense. Serving in this position, he focused the office on three key priorities important to national security. These thrusts included ensuring unfettered use of the electromagnetic spectrum, building an alternative business model for acquiring advanced DoD electronics that feature built-in trust, and developing circuit architectures for next-generation machine learning. MTO creates the MEMS, photonic, and electronic components needed to gracefully bridge the divide between the physical world in which we live and the digital realm where our information resides. Under Dr. Chappell’s leadership, MTO developed the basic underpinnings of computation and sensing needed for an effective, information-driven society.

Prior to his work in government, Dr. Chappell was a professor at Purdue University specializing in electromagnetics. Dr. Chappell received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering, all from the University of Michigan.

Dr. Michaela Blott is a Senior Fellow at AMD Research. She heads a team of international scientists driving groundbreaking research into AI, from robotics to computer architectures, model optimizations and green AI.

Her journey includes a Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin and a Master's degree from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, and brings over 25+ years of experience in leading-edge AI, computer architecture and advanced FPGA design, in research institutions (ETH Zurich and Bell Labs) and development organizations. She is highly active in the research community as industrial advisor to numerous EU projects and research centres, serves on technical program committees and her contributions to the field were further recognized through multiple Women in Tech Awards.

JASON CONG is the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence Professor at the UCLA Computer Science Department (and a former department chair), with joint appointment from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He is the director of Center for Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC) and the director of VLSI Architecture, Synthesis, and Technology (VAST) Laboratory. Dr. Cong’s research interests include novel architectures and compilation for customizable computing, synthesis of VLSI circuits and systems, and quantum computing. He has over 500 publications in these areas, including 19 best paper awards, and 4 papers in the FPGA and Reconfigurable Computing Hall of Fame. He and his former students co-founded AutoESL, which developed the most widely used high-level synthesis tool for FPGAs (renamed to Vivado HLS and Vitis HLS after Xilinx’s acquisition). He is member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, and the National Academy of Inventors. He is recipient of the SIA University Research Award, the EDAA Achievement Award, the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal for “fundamental contributions to electronic design automation and FPGA design methods”, and the Phil Kaufman Award for “sustained fundamental contributions FPGA design automation technology, from circuit to system levels, with widespread industrial impact