I was born and raised in Salvador, Bahia Brazil. I was the first person among my relatives to pursue a career in Computer Science. In 2007 I was finding ways to make my engineering students on CS 100-level at UDel learn to appreciate recursion by making them implement MergeSort iteratively. I moved to the US in 2008, accompanying my husband for his PhD studies at UDel. A couple of years later, I graduated from my doctorate, advised by professors Kathleen McCoy and Sandra Carberry. Since then, I have had a chance to work on very cool projects. These projects have varied from writing NLP algorithms for ISS’s robot Robonaut while at IBM Watson, acting as the Global Learning Portfolio Manager for Google in the areas of ML/AI, Data Analytics and Databases and joining Microsoft to manage a team of applied scientists for their Cloud for Healthcare.

Jonathan Bentz is a Senior Solutions Architect at NVIDIA, leading a team of scientists and engineers focused on bringing the NVIDIA platform for HPC & AI to universities.  Prior to NVIDIA, Jonathan was a software engineer at Cray in the scientific libraries group.  Jonathan obtained a PhD in physical chemistry and a MS in computer science from Iowa State University.

At AMD, Ferreira is charged with building out the AI Software Ecosystem for the AMD Instinct Business. Ferreira joined AMD in 2022 via an acquisition from Core Scientific, whereas Chief Product Officer, Ferreira was charged with building a boutique AI focused cloud, equipping, and enabling Data Scientists to take on the world’s most advanced challenges. Before joining Core Scientific, Ferreira was EVP of Programmatic WideOrbit, charged with building the world’s first and largest programmatic media exchange using machine learning infused toolsets. Prior to joining WideOrbit, Ferreira was Director of Engineering at a Seattle based predictive analytics startup focusing on using distributed machine learning techniques for the financial industry. Spending a decade at Microsoft, Ferreira owned the Tools and Publishing platform for the new MSN.com and Windows and Windows Phone apps. Before this role, Ferreira served as the Chief Architect for the Microsoft Ad Exchange and  led various engineering teams in and around Bing.

Patrick is the Director of Advanced Analytics at LabWare. In 2022, LabWare acquired CompassRed, a Data Science and AI company he founded in 2012 in San Francisco California. Prior to CompassRed, Patrick was the co-founder of The Archer Group, a digital agency in Wilmington Delaware acquired by Bounteous. In February of this year, CompassRed was acquired by LabWare in order to bring data analytics and data science to their global customers and industry. Patrick has held positions at Andersen Consulting, Hesta Data Systems, and ProximiTree.