Sharad Devarajan, Founder & CEO, FaiBLE, Founder & CEO, Graphic India, Media & Technology Professor, Columbia Business School: Devarajan has served for over 15 years as a professor at Columbia Business School, where he teaches the highly reviewed class, Artificial Intelligence and Disruptive Technologies as well as other classes on media and entrepreneurship. A serial media entrepreneur, creator and showrunner, Devarajan has created numerous award-winning shows, films and graphic novels. His most recent company, FaiBLE, a Palo Alto startup, has a mission to decode the fundamental science of storytelling, while pioneering entirely new forms of media experiences. Devarajan Co-Founded the startup with two-time Academy Award winning technologist and virtual beings pioneer, Mark Sagar. FaiBLE brings together AI scientists, Award-winning storytellers, and technologists with a singular focus - to understand the deep structures that make stories resonate with human beings and to create breakthrough tools and experiences based on that understanding. The company is building what it calls "The AlphaFold of Storytelling" - a long-term research initiative to explore the scientific patterns of aesthetic and emotional resonance, in a similar manner to how AlphaFold solved the protein-folding problem by revealing hidden structures that govern life itself. In addition, Devarajan is Founder & CEO of Graphic India, the leading animation and character entertainment company for the Indian market. Graphic India’s mission is to create superheroes and stories that unlock the unique creativity of India but appeal to audiences worldwide and transform the perception of India from being an ‘outsourcer” to being ‘the source.’   Devarajan is the Co-Creator, Showrunner & Executive Producer on the acclaimed Disney+Hotstar series, “The Legend of Hanuman” which became one of the Top Binged and Top Watched shows across all streaming platforms in India in 2021 (source: Ormax Media) and became #1 on Disney+Hotstar in January 2024 when it released its third season. The series is the most successful animated project in Indian history and broke records on Disney+Hotstar with over 8.5 million views in the first 10 days of release. He is also the creator of “Spider-Man: India” a reimagination of the classic western superhero as an Indian boy growing up in Mumbai, transforming Peter Parker into Pavitr Prabhakar. In 2023, Pavtir Prabhakar,featured prominently in “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” Sony’s highest grossing animated release worldwide. 



Jie Yang is Co-Founder and CTO of Utopai Studios, where he leads the company’s research, engineering, and technical artist teams in building the infrastructure layer for AI-native filmmaking. His work brings together large-scale generative models, cinematic media generation, multimodal foundation models, and agentic production systems to support professional, end-to-end film and television creation. At Utopai, Jie is helping define a new technical foundation for storytelling, one that gives filmmakers greater control, continuity, speed, and creative precision across the production process. Before founding Utopai, Jie worked at Google Research and Google X, where he was part of the early team that incubated Mineral, an Alphabet moonshot that later became an independent company. As a founding team member and Head of Research, he led projects from ideation through deployment, building AI-native systems across generative AI, multimodal large language models, multi-agent systems, robotic perception, time-series forecasting, and large-scale machine learning training and inference. Several initiatives he created and developed from the ground up became core Mineral product lines and key revenue drivers, establishing him as a technical leader in translating advanced AI research into real-world systems. It was also at Mineral that Jie met Cecilia Shen, who would later co-found Utopai Studios, formerly Cybever, with him. Jie’s mission is to redefine filmmaking as a more expressive, precise, and scalable creative process. He believes AI should expand human imagination, not replace it, by giving filmmakers, artists, and storytellers new ways to develop, visualize, iterate, and produce cinematic work with greater quality, efficiency, and creative control.

Connie Wailan Siu is Head of Production at Promise Advanced Imagination. A seasoned production executive, she has helped bridge technology and storytelling at studios including Eyeline Studios at Netflix and DreamWorks Animation, guiding ambitious creative projects from concept to screen.

Darren Frankel brings 35+ years of experience in visual effects and post production in television and media, to both domestic and international clients. Prior to joining Adobe as Head of Film & Television, Darren was Head of Post Production and Visual Effects for Marvel Television working in both studio oversight and creative capacities. Prior to joining Marvel, he was President of Stargate Studios and was responsible for the day-to-day management of the company overseeing all operations at the ten facilities in seven countries including business development, corporate strategy, technology and financial activities. He was a freelance producer and post producer before joining Stargate. Darren consults for various visual effects companies including Untold Studios, and helped to build the episodic division of Framestore, along with two stints on the Executive Committee at the Television Academy in visual effects. Darren attended Northwestern University and UCLA and majored in Theatre Arts. When Darren isn’t working, he’s either working out, running or spending time with his wife and their two rescue dogs.

Charlie Fink writes a weekly technology column for Forbes covering AI and XR, and co-hosts The AI/XR Podcast. He is the author of the critically acclaimed AR-enabled books Charlie Fink’s Metaverse (2017) and Convergence: How the World Will Be Painted With Data (2019). Fink teaches emerging media at Chapman University in Orange, CA, and at Arizona State University’s graduate program in Narrative and Emerging Media in Los Angeles. In 2024, he co-founded Cinemation AI with film director Rob Minkoff. Fink's forty-year career at the intersection of storytelling and technology began at Walt Disney Feature Animation, where he famously conceived the idea for The Lion King and subsequently became the studio’s youngest creative vice president. Fink's work in immersive media began in 1992 as COO of Virtual World Entertainment, a groundbreaking location-based VR company founded by Tim Disney. In 1995, he was recruited by AOL to serve as Senior Vice President and Chief Creative Officer of AOL Studios. After selling his subsequent venture-backed startup, eAgents, to American Greetings Interactive for whom Fink served as President and Chief Creative Officer (2000–2004), acquiring its two biggest competitors, Blue Mountain and eGreetings. Fink spent a decade as Producer and Chairman of the New York Musical Festival, which nurtured Broadway hits "Title of Show," "Next to Normal," and "Guttenberg!"