Recently joining WB, Arvel’s career has spanned Space, AI, Cinema and Virtual Reality. He began his career working in the Space industry building technology for government customers, eventually serving as chief engineer over the Wideband Global Satcom Constellation. Currently, Arvel serves on the IEEE ethics in Artificial Intelligence committee where they are creating industry guidelines to facilitate AI’s use. In addition to engineering, Arvel has enjoyed a love of cinema and holds an MFA in cinema production from USC, was a Sundance screening writing lab semi-finalist, has directed numerous short films and most recently a VR experience for Daily Show’s Trevor Noah. At Warner Bros Arvel is part of the Emerging Technology group where he is leading VR & Artificial Intelligence R&D projects which are inventing the future of immersive content.

Austin Clements is a venture capitalist with TenOneTen Ventures, a seed stage fund base in LA. Prior to TenOneTen, Austin worked at Sony Pictures, licensing film and TV content to emerging video platforms. He began his career in investment management working with AllianceBernstein and has since held roles evaluating early stage tech investments at Creative Artists Agency, Digital Entertainment Ventures, and NY Angels. Austin is also committed to encouraging underrepresented minorities to pursue careers in tech and entrepreneurship. He is an active volunteer in various local youth entrepreneurship programs. Austin received his MBA from NYU Stern with a specialization in Media, Entertainment, and Technology and his BA from Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA.

Jason Flittner leads the Content and Studio Data Engineering teams at Netflix. He was previously an analytics manager and engineer, focusing on data transformation, analysis, and visualization of Netflix content data. Prior to Netflix, Jason led the EC2 business intelligence team at Amazon Web Services and was a business intelligence engineer with Cisco Systems.

Jeff Rosenberg is the Director of Software Development for Reporting, Analytics and Data Science at Hulu, where his team is responsible for the overall technology direction of business intelligence and governance, big data platform and infrastructure, data products, data quality management and data science.  Jeff’s background is in biological sciences, technical program management and software development, with a strong focus on media.  Before leading the data organization at Hulu, he successfully led the cross-functional effort to ship Hulu’s landmark ‘No Commercials’ plan.  Previously, he worked on platform and product development with companies including Warner Bros, Fox/Myspace, DirecTV, and Sony/Playstation, driving execution of countless products backed by billions of data points. Jeff holds a BS in Biology from Brown University.

Levon Karayan has over 25 years of experience from being employee number one to one numbered in the hundreds of thousands.  Some of his leadership roles have been in the game industry, internet finance, sponsored search advertising, startup incubation, social advertising, mobile advertising and media and entertainment.  He’s currently one the leaders focusing on data technology at The Walt Disney Studios where he was one of the first to use the public cloud and machine learning in production applications.   His passions lie where technology can innovate in business.

Paul Orlando accelerates company growth. He is Incubator Director and Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. Paul has founded and operated successful startup accelerator programs in Hong Kong (focused on mobile development), Los Angeles (focused on growth of wide-ranging companies with founders affiliated with USC), and the Laudato Si accelerator affiliated with the Vatican in Rome (focused on environmental technology). Companies Paul has worked with have raised tens of millions in capital, served millions of customers, and have been acquired. He has authored several related academic case studies available on Harvard Business Publishing. Paul also consults to larger institutions as they innovate, develop, and grow, especially in transitioning past legacy business models by using rapid experimentation techniques. In the past Paul also co-founded a B2B startup and consulted to Fortune 100 firms. Paul has been featured in media including Forbes, TechCrunch, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal and was a winner at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. He has a BA from Cornell, an MBA from Columbia, and speaks Mandarin.

Subash D'Souza is a Data Evangelist. He is the founder and organizer of Data Con LA fka Big Data Day LA, a data conference based in Sunny Southern California. He also organizes the Los Angeles Big Data Users Group and the Los Angeles Apache Spark Users Group. Subash's passions lies in building scalable and performant systems. 

Trinh Nguyen leads the cloud infrastructure and application development for the E! Entertainment network. E! is part of the NBCUniversal’s cable portfolio and Trinh has been leading the charge with cloud native and progressive application development. With over 10 years at Comcast & NBCUniversal combined he is now focused on helping various divisions within his media company transition to adopting big data and cloud technologies more effectively. Companywide he is also the committee lead for NBCU’s Asian Pacific American employee resource group primarily focusing on professional development for employees who are interested in their career growth. He has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of California Irvine. When not promoting leadership principals in the workplace, you can find him at home raising his newborn son, Maverick, who as they say is very “dangerous”.

Subash D'Souza is an Data Evangelist. He is the founder and organizer of Data Con LA formerly known as Big Data Day LA, a data conference based in Sunny Southern California. He is also the founder for Data 4 Good, a public entity using data to solve social causes. Subash's passions lies in building scalable and performant systems. 

Abbass is a professor of data science at USC Marshall School of Business, and he is the director of the MS in Business Analytics program. Professor Sharif specializes is in the field of statistical computing and data visualization and he has developed and published new multivariate visualization techniques for functional data, and currently he is developing visualization techniques to study brain activity data collected via the near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) technology. Professor Sharif teaches statistics courses that range from introductory statistics to data analysis for decision-making through to advanced modern statistical learning techniques, statistical computing and data visualization. (Host)

Gwen is a principal data architect at Confluent helping customers achieve success with their Apache Kafka implementation. She has 15 years of experience working with code and customers to build scalable data architectures, integrating microservices, relational and big data technologies. She currently specializes in building real-time reliable data processing pipelines using Apache Kafka. Gwen is an author of “Kafka - the Definitive Guide”, "Hadoop Application Architectures", and a frequent presenter at industry conferences. Gwen is also a committer on the Apache Kafka and Apache Sqoop projects. When Gwen isn't coding or building data pipelines, you can find her pedaling on her bike exploring the roads and trails of California, and beyond.

Megan Risdal is a Product Lead and Data Scientist at Kaggle, the world's largest global data science and machine learning community, where she focuses on helping the world learn from data using collaborative tools and open datasets. Prior to her current role, she worked in marketing and market research and has authored dozens of blog posts including interviews with top data scientists from Airbnb and Deepmind. She has master's degrees in linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles and North Carolina State University.

Ken Weiner leads the engineering and product teams behind the industry’s top computer vision platform for marketers and rights holders. As an active member of the ad tech community, Weiner is a guest columnist for VentureBeat and Forbes, a frequent speaker at conferences and a member of industry groups such as IAB’s OpenRTB Working Group and various LA Ad Tech Meetups. Weiner was LA Business Journal’s 2015 CTO of the Year, andin 2003, he was included in the InfoWorld 100 for his work on uPortal, an open-source web portal framework for the higher education community. Before coming to GumGum, Weiner was the Director of Engineering at the lead-generation platform LowerMyBills.com, acquired by Experian in 2005. He has also worked as an open-source software consultant, a project manager and an instructor at Interactive Business Solutions, acquired by Unicon Inc. in 2003. Weiner received a B.S. from UCLA and currently lives in Los Angeles. Away from the office, he enjoys mountain biking, hiking, California native plants, jazz music and playing the saxophone.

Justin Herz was named Executive Vice President, Digital Product, Platform, and Strategy in January 2017. As head of Warner Bros. Digital Herz oversees emerging technology, new platforms, and direct-to-consumer technology working across all divisions of the studio identifying and spearheading technology-related innovations intersecting with new digital products, production, distribution, and marketing. Digital’s portfolio includes digital innovation, technology development, standard setting for the studio, direct to consumer platforms, and Warner’s consumer intelligence/data activities designed to generate value by creating and enhancing consumer engagement through direct interaction with Warner Bros. products, programs and partners.

Sari Ladin-Sienne executes Mayor Garcetti’s vision for a more responsive, and data-driven Los Angeles. As Chief Data Officer, Sari improves access to meaningful information for residents and city employees. She leverages her policy knowledge and technical skillset to form new partnerships that tap into the value of data as a critical asset in smarter decision-making. Sari believes knowledge sharing is at the core of the smart cities movement. She previously worked as a Harvard Ash Fellow for the Mayor’s Data Team where she led the team’s digital strategy and elevated the city’s best practices to the national conversation through her articles for Harvard’s Data Smart Cities and Government Technology. She has provided data analysis, budgeting, and policy recommendations to a range of public and nonprofit clients including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Nonprofit Finance Fund. Sari holds a Master's Degree in Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley.

Tim leads the development and execution of market strategy, positioning/messaging, demand and content marketing, and sales enablement. Tim’s career spans over 25 years of B2B high tech marketing in the supply chain and enterprise mobile computing industries. Tim’s prior experience includes senior marketing and sales leadership positions with Honeywell Scanning and Mobility, Intermec Corporation, Vocollect Inc., and Zebra Technologies, Inc. Tim holds an MBA from the University of Oregon Lundquist School of Business and a B.S. in Political Science from Oregon State University. He is co-inventor and patent holder for the number one selling ‘bi-optic’ scanner scale used at point-of-sale check-outs around the world. (Sponsored)  

With responsibility for Accenture Digital and AI delivery for the Western United States, Diego Saenz's focus is on Applied Intelligence, Digital Transformation, and Customer Experience Design for Accenture clients in the communications, media and technology industries, including Facebook and Twitter.  A technology entrepreneur with prior experience in consumer products, retail, travel, and automotive; Diego previously served as CIO for Pepsi Latin America. (Sponsored)

Mike is a senior technology adviser for the team - he is passionate about advanced analytics, including streaming analytics, ML & AI and brings over 25 years of large-scale systems design, development, and operations.  Mike, previously was the Technology Leader for the AWS Solutions Architecture team here in Los Angeles, and also worked as a management consultant at various firms including Ernst & Young, & Deloitte Consulting. Mike's experience include providing large-scale systems design and advanced analytics expertise for the Defense Intelligence community. Mike has been a featured speaker at Amazon, Gartner and UCLA Anderson School of Management events. (Sponsored)