Speakers
Lukas Biewald
CEO and Cofounder at Weights & Biases
Lukas Biewald is the CEO and co-founder of Weights & Biases, the AI developer platform. He also co-founded Figure Eight (formerly CrowdFlower), a pioneer in the ML data-labeling space. Figure Eight was acquired by Appen (APX) in 2019. Lukas has dedicated his career optimizing ML workflows, teaching ML practitioners, making machine learning more accessible to all, and occasionally tinkering with robots.
Llion Jones
Co-Founder and CTO at Sakana AI
Llion Jones is an ex-Google engineer after working there for over a decade and is one of the authors of the well known paper “Attention Is All You Need,”. This paper introduced the deep learning model called “Transformer” for natural language processing and serves as backbone of most state of the art AI systems, such as ChatGPT. Recently, with co-founder David Ha, he started his own company and serves as the CTO of Sakana AI.
Jerry Chi
Head of Japan at Stability AI Japan
Jerry is a Taiwanese-American fluent in Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and English. In January 2023, he established the Japan branch of Stability AI, assembling both research and business teams, with a current focus on research and development in image and 3D generation. He graduated from Stanford University’s School of Engineering in 2006 and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. Jerry has held analytics and machine learning-related positions at companies such as Google, Supercell, SmartNews, and Indeed. Additionally, he has served as an advisor to various startups, leveraging his entrepreneurial experience. His passion lies in applying generative AI and machine learning to creative fields.
Suigen Koide
Tech Lead Manager, MLOps at Woven by Toyota
After graduating from Keio University (SFC), joined Toyota Motor Corporation. From the early stages of Woven by Toyota, consistently engaged in machine learning (ML) development for autonomous driving. Involved in joint research with AI research institutes in Silicon Valley and AI venture companies in Japan. Gained extensive experience in various areas of ML development, from model implementation to building training infrastructure and designing MLOps pipelines. Currently leading the MLOps team as a Tech Lead Manager.
Aozora Inagaki
Machine Learning Engineer at CyberAgent
Joined CyberAgent, Inc. as a new graduate in 2022. In the AI Business Headquarters, responsible for developing the machine learning model for the “Goku Prediction LP” and worked on the development of a large-scale Vision-Language Model (VLM) as part of the “Foundation Model Project.” Engaged in the social implementation of multimodal AI targeting images and text.
Natnael Hamda
AI-ML VT Lead at Astellas Pharma
Natnael is an AI and ML research scientist focused on advanced generative AI for early drug discovery. He’s expert in developing, reproducing, and customizing generative models, including large language and probabilistic deep learning models. Natnael is committed to enhancing explainability and trust in AI solutions for drug discovery through domain knowledge integration.
Kyosuke Nishida
Senior Distinguished Researcher at NTT
Joined Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation in 2009. From 2024, Senior Distinguished Researcher at NTT Human Informatics Laboratories. Oversees the research and development of the large language model Tsuzumi at NTT Laboratories. Specializes in LLM, machine reading comprehension (question answering), and Vision-and-Language. Awards include the Annual Conference of the Association for Natural Language Processing Excellence Award from 2018 to 2024 (Best Paper Award in 2018 and 2021), and runner-up in ICDAR 2021 Competition on Document Visual Question Answering, Task 3 Infographics VQA.
Jetha Chan
Technical Solutions Consultant at Google Cloud
Jetha Chan is a key member of the Gemma Developer Relations team, responsible for both the creation and delivery of developer-focused material around Google’s family of open models. He brings a wealth of software development and game development experience to Google, and contributed to Google’s efforts in the cloud gaming space as a Technical Account Manager for Google Stadia before his current assignment. He is a graduate of Edith Cowan University, Australia.
Stan Hwalsuk Lee
CTO at Upstage
Stan, Hwalsuk Lee is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Upstage AI in South Korea.As a former NAVER Clova Visual AI leader, he has more than 15 years of computer vision & AI experience and has led the establishment of NAVER Clova OCR team and advancement of its technology.He has published more than 10 Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology papers at major global international AI conferences, and dozens of companies in various industries are using OCR-based technologies researched and developed by him.In addition to technology skills, he has excellent business development and leading skills. Currently, he is focusing on leading the LLM Model & Applications team of Upstage, developing high-performance private LLM engines at minimal cost while ensuring maximum security.He has also led the ‘Document AI’ product in Upstage to help companies easily introduce AI technology to focus on their core businesses.
Teo Narboneta Zosa
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Mercari
Originally a founding member and technical lead of Mercari’s AI search ranking system, Teo is now working as part of Mercari’s dedicated AI/LLM team. Together, the AI/LLM team is leading the sweeping integration of AI into the foundation of the entire marketplace experience to uphold Mercari’s reputation as the number one C2C e-commerce marketplace in Japan.
Gon Chun
CEO at FriendliAI
- Previously at Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Intel
- CS Ph.D., UC Berkeley
- CS M.S., Stanford University
- Member of the National Academy of Engineering of Korea
- Award
- 2021 EuroSys Test of Time Award
- 2020 ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award
- Research Award : Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft
Hiroshi Matsuda
Chief Research Scientist at Recruit Megagon Labs
Chief research scientist at Megagon Labs Tokyo.Joint researcher at National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics.Visiting researcher at National Institute of Informatics.Development lead of the Japanese dependency parser “GiNZA”.Presented a tutorial “Practicing how to build a Japanese large-scale language model” at The Association for Natural Language Processing Annual Conference (NLP2024).
Masahiro Hara
Specialist at Olympus
In 2009, I joined Olympus Software Technology Corporation (later merged into Olympus Corporation). After joining, I was responsible for image processing and control software development, contributing to the development of core technologies for microscope and endoscope products. Later, I participated in the development of industrial microscope applications in the product development department of the business division. Alongside my primary duties, I actively engaged in internal working groups aiming to incorporate the latest AI and IoT technologies into products. Since 2018, in my current role, I have been involved in several medical AI development projects, focusing mainly on themes aimed at enhancing the explainability and reliability of AI.
Akira Shibata
Country Manager at Weights & Biases
Specializing in creating business value through the utilization of data and AI using artificial intelligence, he has enabled data and AI utilization for hundreds of domestic and international companies across a wide range of fields, including online services, existing industrial sectors, and creative domains. He has held positions such as Japan CEO of DataRobot, a machine learning automation platform, and COO of Qosmo, Inc., whose mission is to expand creativity through AI. Currently based in San Francisco, he serves as the Country Manager for Japan and Korea at Weights & Biases, which provides a development and operations platform for AI engineers. He also serves as an external director and advisor for several other companies.
Yuya Yamamoto
ML Engineer at Weights & Biases
Obtained a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo, specializing in organic-inorganic composite materials. After completing the degree, engaged in research and development of advanced chemical materials related to liquid crystals and touch panels at a major chemical company. Subsequently, worked at a leading food manufacturer, focusing on predictive modeling and optimization of food packaging using machine learning, gaining deep experience in both B2B and B2C sectors. At the previous position in DataRobot, led the manufacturing customer team, supporting AI adoption for dozens of domestic companies. One of the few Kaggle Grandmasters in Japan.
Keisuke Kamata
ML Engineer at Weights & Biases
A machine learning engineer specializing in causal inference, ML, and LLM. At APT, supported causal inference for business strategies, and at DataRobot, worked as the Lead Data Scientist for the healthcare team, supporting AI adoption across dozens of companies, particularly in the healthcare industry. During the COVID-19 pandemic, co-authored papers and letters to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in collaboration with the National Center for Global Health and Medicine. Currently at Weights & Biases, working on supporting ML workflow construction for companies as well as developing the Nejumi Leaderboard and llm-jp-eval. Also provides hands-on training on fine-tuning protein language models to eight pharmaceutical companies, contributing to the application of industry-specific LLMs.
Hyuwoo Oh
ML Engineer at Weights & Biases
Graduated from the College of Engineering Systems at the University of Tsukuba and obtained a Master’s degree in Reinforcement Learning from the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. After completing the degree, engaged in the research and development of dementia diagnosis modeling using machine learning at a medical AI startup in Korea. Subsequently, worked at a major IT company, focusing on research and development of real-time optimization modeling for search information optimization using reinforcement learning and building the necessary infrastructure. Currently, serving as a machine learning developer at Weights & Biases, responsible for the Korean market.
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