data-exchange
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Latif Khalil Spent Decades Making Data Behave. Then His Company Became Part of the System.
Before interoperability became a boardroom word, Khalil was building the unfashionable machinery underneath it. InteropX turned that long apprenticeship into a company - and a 2026 acquisition into its next chapter.
Tom Laband
Tom Laband is the co-founder and CEO of Adsquare, a Berlin-born location-intelligence company he started in 2012 with Sebastian Doerfel and Fritz Richter. Adsquare runs a neutral data exchange that turns consented location signals into audience data for programmatic advertising, and Laband has spent more than a decade arguing that location is a durable, privacy-compliant alternative to the crumbling world of online identifiers. A University of Mannheim graduate who cut his teeth in early European mobile advertising at YOC and Sevenval, he now splits his attention between the company's Berlin engineering base and its commercial push in New York.
Ben Lorica
Ben Lorica is a machine learning researcher, media entrepreneur, and conference architect who spent over a decade as Chief Data Scientist at O'Reilly Media before launching Gradient Flow, his independent newsletter and research platform that Coursera ranked among the top 10 sites for data scientists. Known for the @bigdata Twitter handle he registered before 'big data' was a thing, he chairs The AI Conference, the AI Agent Conference, Ray Summit, NLP Summit, and Data+AI Summit while hosting The Data Exchange - a 342-episode podcast in the top 0.5% globally. He coined the PARK Stack (PyTorch, AI Frontier Models, Ray, Kubernetes) as the production AI infrastructure standard for the current era.