Gideon Mendels is the co-founder and CEO of Comet, the New York machine-learning platform that tracks, compares, and explains the experiments behind AI models. A computer scientist and NLP researcher by training, he built hate-speech detection at Google and ran speech-recognition research at Columbia before turning the messy, undocumented reality of model-building into a company. In 2024 Comet shipped Opik, an open-source LLM evaluation tool, putting Mendels at the center of the scramble to make AI agents reliable in production.

Andy Grove is the original creator of Apache DataFusion and a PMC member of Apache Arrow and Apache DataFusion. With over 30 years of software engineering experience, he specializes in query engines and distributed systems, currently serving as Principal Distributed Database Engineer at Apple. He's the author of 'How Query Engines Work' and creator of sqlparser-rs, one of the leading open-source SQL parsers for Rust. His open-source contributions have shaped the modern data processing ecosystem, with DataFusion powering hundreds of data-centric applications worldwide.