Tom Yeh is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and the creator of AI by Hand, a wildly popular educational newsletter and community that teaches transformers, LLMs, and deep learning architectures through pen-and-paper calculations. With 62,000+ Substack subscribers, 200,000+ social media followers, and a Feynman-inspired philosophy that you only truly understand what you can build by hand, Yeh has become one of the most influential voices in practical AI education - bridging the gap between black-box hype and genuine first-principles understanding.
Lea Verou is a Greek-American web standards leader, MIT researcher, and creator tools advocate whose fingerprints are on the web itself. She has designed web technologies now baked into every major browser, built 30+ open-source projects with nearly 2 billion npm downloads (including PrismJS and Color.js), authored the bestselling CSS Secrets (O'Reilly, 2015), and served as an elected W3C Technical Architecture Group member. A PhD candidate at MIT CSAIL in Human-Computer Interaction and Programming Language Design, she consults for Google, Mozilla, and Stripe, leads the State of HTML survey, and has delivered 100+ conference talks worldwide - always live-coding.
Shreya Shankar is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's EPIC Lab building AI-powered data systems that are reliable and cost-efficient. A Stanford-trained engineer who worked at Google Brain and Meta, she bridges academic research and industry practice through DocETL (an open-source LLM data processing system with 3.5K+ GitHub stars used by 30+ S&P 500 companies), an O'Reilly book on AI evals co-authored with Hamel Husain, and a Maven course that has reached 4,500+ professionals. She is on the CS faculty job market and gave a faculty candidate talk at Carnegie Mellon in March 2026.