Vision Tank Start-Up Competition

Dr. Gor Hakobyan is the CTO of Waveye (Palo Alto, California), a technology start-up developing high-resolution imaging radars for autonomous systems. Previously, he was a research scientist at Bosch working on future radar sensors for self-driving cars. Gor holds a PhD in Radar Signal Processing from the University of Stuttgart, where he is a lecturer on automotive radar systems for autonomous driving. He is the recipient of multiple award, has presented at multiple conferences and is an inventor in 100+ patent filings.

Kwabena Agyeman runs OpenMV and previously led Electrical Engineering at Embark Trucks, building fully autonomous semitrucks. Kwabena has an extensive background in ASICs, FPGAs and microcontrollers.

Brad Chisum is the Co-Founder and CEO of EyePop.ai. Prior to co-founding EyePop.ai, he helped create Launch Factory, a start-up studio created to build more intelligent start-up companies. He is the former CEO and Co-Founder of Lumedyne Technologies, acquired by Google in 2014. While at Google, Chisum served as the Product Manager for the technology acquired from Lumedyne. Prior to Lumedyne, Chisum held engineering and management positions at the US Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) and with semiconductor manufacturer STMicroelectronics. Chisum holds four patents and three degrees: an MBA from San Diego State University, a BS in Electrical Engineering and a BS in Mathematics from Southern Methodist University.

Nasim Sahraei, the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Edgehog, is driving the commercialization of antireflective glass nanotexturing, leading to omnidirectional broadband antireflection properties that enable accurate imaging. Before Edgehog, she was the CTO and Co-Founder of another start-up specializing in solar powering GPS trackers. Nasim is passionate about productizing technological innovation and creating value. Her technological expertise lies in scalable manufacturing processes and hardware innovation. She has past industry experience in glass fiber and solar panel manufacturing, and she contributes as a committee member in IEC standard development for the solar panel cleaning process. Nasim holds a PhD from the National University of Singapore focused on light scattering for solar panels.

Shweta Shrivastava is a seasoned product executive focusing on machine learning and computer vision. She is currently a Senior Product Leader at Waymo (Alphabet's autonomous driving unit), leading product management for self-driving behavior technologies. Before Waymo, Shweta was Chief Product Officer at Nauto, an AI start-up focusing on driver and automotive safety, where she led product management, design, strategy and marketing. Prior to Nauto, she was the Head of Product Management at Amazon Web Services for their database and analytics services. Shweta holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University and an MBA from INSEAD.

John Feland is the award-winning founder and CEO of Argus Insights, a new type of market intelligence company established by tech industry veterans seeking to connect the dots between technology innovation and consumer adoption. Argus Insights sits between traditional research firms and social analytics companies to provide focused and actionable analysis on where consumers are taking the market, who is winning and why. John holds an SB in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. An expert in consumer response to technology, John is a frequent speaker and is quoted in major publications such as Forbes, WSJ, the San Francisco Chronicle and industry trade publications.

Forrest Iandola completed a PhD in EECS at UC Berkeley, where his research focused on squeezing deep neural networks onto small devices. As part of his dissertation research, he developed the energy-efficient SqueezeNet neural network. His advances in deep learning led to the founding of DeepScale, which was acquired by Tesla in 2019. He is currently an AI Research Scientist at Meta.

Vin Ratford is CEO of Piera Systems. Piera’s sensor technology identifies dangerous particles in the air we breathe, creating healthy, energy-efficient spaces. He has been Executive Director for the Edge AI and Vision Alliance since 2012 and a Vision Tank judge. Vin has a BSEE from Northeastern University and has worked at Auviz Systems, Xilinx, AccelChip, Virage Logic, Mentor Graphics, Teradyne, Data General and Raytheon. He resides in Bristol, Rhode Island.