Chris Rowen is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and technologist, now VP of AI Engineering for Webex Collaboration at Cisco, working on audio, video, natural language and collaboration AI. Most recently he was Co-Founder and CEO of BabbleLabs, a speech ML company acquired by Cisco in 2020. Prior to BabbleLabs, Chris served as CTO for Cadence’s IP Group, which he joined after Cadence’s acquisition of Tensilica, the company he founded in 1997 to develop extensible processors. He led Tensilica as CEO, and later CTO, to develop one of the most prolific embedded processor architectures, especially for compute-intensive embedded processing. Chris was a pioneer in developing RISC architecture and helped found MIPS Computer Systems in 1984. He has an MS and a PhD in EE from Stanford and a BA in Physics from Harvard. He was named an IEEE Fellow in 2015 for his work in development of microprocessor technology.