Steve Canepa, General Manager, IBM Global Industries & IBM Technology & Consulting: Mr. Canepa is responsible for achieving IBM’s revenue and cash-flow objectives for IBM clients organized in the four GTM geographies: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Japan. His teams are structured in four Industry Groupings:  Communications & Distribution, Banking, Financial Markets & Insurance, Manufacturing & Energy, Government and Health Care & Life sciences. He leads marketplace relevance for IBM’s Hybrid Cloud and AI technology GTM strategy, including IBM’s portfolio of Software, Red Hat, Infrastructure, Consulting, Eco-System ISVs, GSIs and Cloud partners. Steve serves as a C-Suite advisor regarding the emerging Hybrid Cloud, AI, 5G, Edge and Security capabilities that are transforming businesses and fueled by the growing synergy in ‘Compute + Connectivity.’ He is an expert in shaping Business Strategy & Technology Architecture for competitive advantage and has deep insights into applying Open Technologies, Digital Media, Communications, Data & AI, Security and Automation for business value. Steve is committed to, and recognized for, building high-performance global teams and lasting and trusted relationships with employees, clients and partners. His career has been centered on innovation and is highlighted by 25 years of increasingly complex global leadership roles in General Management, Sales, Strategy, Marketing, Consulting and Partner Eco-systems. Steve has received a number of important recognitions, including five EMMY awards for innovation, Frost and Sullivan recognized his leadership as Digital Media Company of the year and he has been recognized by Business Insider as one of IBM’s top leaders. 

Richard Kerris is the industry general manager for media and entertainment at NVIDIA. With a career spanning Apple, Lucasfilm and Amazon/AWS, Richard’s experience combine driving marketing and product development with a focus on bringing new ideas to life. At Apple, he directed developer relations and managed Final Cut Pro, and Aperture. At Lucasfilm, he served as CTO, managing research and development, IT and information services. Richard has given keynote addresses at GTC, Asia Broadcast and China Joy Expo and delivered multiple Apple Worldwide Developers Conference presentations. He currently serves on the Bay Area Board of the Visual Effects Society and as an active member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

Leslie Shannon, Head of Ecosystem and Trend Scouting, Nokia: Leslie entered the mobile communications world as a billing database analyst in the early 1990s. She joined Nokia Australia in 2000 and became the manager of the FutureLab, an early developer incubator in the days of WAP, GPRS and 3G. Building on her first-hand technical and business experience of the reality of bringing applications to market, she developed an analysis service for Nokia that examined success and failure factors for operators bringing mobile data to market for 4G that proved so successful that Nokia created a new department around her work. While in this role, she was based in Finland and worked with over 100 operators in more than 70 countries. Leslie relocated to Silicon Valley in 2015 and now focuses on identifying disruptions and opportunities for Nokia and its operator partners coming from outside the traditional telco world, particularly in the worlds of 5G, AR, VR, MR and the Spatial Internet. She is passionate not only about bringing strategic insight to Nokia and its customers, but also about introducing successful new paradigms from Silicon Valley to the telecommunications mindset, and continues to be a highly-regarded analyst and speaker. Born in Manhattan, Leslie has a BA in Psychology from the University of Virginia and a Master’s Degree in the History of Art from Yale University. She was an undefeated five-time champion in the American television game show “Jeopardy!” in 1992 and was invited to return to the show to compete in a tournament for one million dollars as one of the show’s “most memorable contestants” in 2002 and again in 2014. (She didn’t win, but still had a lot of fun.) She also got four questions away from willing a million dollars on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” in August 2017. Leslie lives in Santa Clara, California, with her husband and their two mobile-data enthusiast children.