AI Career Notes: November 2019 Edition 

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In this monthly feature, we'll keep you up to date on the latest career developments in the enterprise AI community -- promotions, new hires, and accolades. Here's the AI career news for early November:

Peter Mertens
Recogni announced that Peter Mertens joined its Board of Directors. Mertens has a 35-year career in the automotive industry, including senior positions at Mercedes Benz, General Motors, and Tata. He was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Volvo Cars for six years and CTO at Audi AG until November 2018. Mertens has served as a member of the Board of Directors at Polestar SE, Zenuity SE, Audi Sport GmbH, Audi China, and Volkswagen Financial Services.

"I am excited to work with the Recogni team that is solving bottlenecks associated with autonomous driving today," Mertens said. "This is a great opportunity to achieve higher machine intelligence as autonomous systems are becoming smarter and are driven by more powerful edge processing."

Kumar Mainali
Chesapeake Conservancy's Conservation Innovation Center announced the addition of Kumar Mainali to the company's technology team under the role of Geospatial Data Scientist. Mainali's first project tackles the uses of AI to identify the land cover type of every square meter of the Chesapeake Bay. Through machine learning, he is teaching the computer to detect a forest, shrub, or tree over a sidewalk or a building at a fine spatial scale and with very high accuracy.

"I am thrilled to join the Conservation Innovation Center's team. I am passionate about working on burning issues of conservation and the environment. These are by far the most rewarding and where AI holds great promise to accelerate our impact," Mainali said.

Scott Noteboom
Submer Technologies has announced Scott Noteboom has been appointed to the role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to help build the next generation of data infrastructures. Noteboom has served as Head of Infrastructure Strategy, Design, and Development for Apple and VP of Engineering & Operations at Yahoo!. Under this new role, he plans to drive strategic innovation across Submer's line of immersion cooling systems and autonomous infrastructure platform.

"The most fulfilling work of my career is helping to lead meaningful efficiency improvements in the world's data center infrastructure. Electric consumption in data centers is approaching 9% of global capacity, so our progress as an industry truly makes a difference for the world," Noteboom said. "With growing demands for high performance computing in hyperscale cloud and edge locations, I believe Submer's hyper-efficient autonomous infrastructure platform is the future, and I'm excited to be a part of it."

William Conley, Ph.D.
Mercury Systems, Inc. announced that William Conley, Ph.D., joined the company as Senior VP and CTO. Before joining Mercury, he was a member of the Federal Senior Executive Service, serving as the Director for Electronic Warfare in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In that role, he led the $7 billion annual investment to develop and acquire electronic warfare weapon systems, while also serving as an executive secretary for the Electronic Warfare Executive Committee. As CTO, Dr. Conley plans to accelerate Mercury's technology vision and leadership in innovative technology for the aerospace and defense markets.

"It's a privilege to join Mercury at such a pivotal time in our industry and to be with a company at the intersection of technology and defense," Dr. Conley said. "I look forward to working with the leadership team and all my new Mercury colleagues to continue driving technological change, charting our future, and bringing innovative products and services to our valued aerospace and defense industry customers."

Amir Faintuch
GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF) has appointed Amir Faintuch as Senior VP and general manager of the company's computing and wired infrastructure strategic business unit (CWI SBU). In this role, Faintuch will oversee the strategic direction, roadmap definition, and client engagements of differentiated features for the company's CWI SBU.

"This is a new era of 'The Renaissance of Compute,' where the rise of silicon architecture is complemented by silicon processes and will drive new compute engines and emerging workloads," Faintuch said. "I am excited to join GF to help drive this market transformation by leveraging GF's specialized applications solutions that will enable its clients to differentiate and win in the market."

Rowan Scranage
Alluxio has announced the appointment of Rowan Scranage as Vice President, Global Sales and Business Development. Rowan joins Alluxio from Peltarion where he was Chief Revenue Officer, Before Peltarion, he was VP and general manager for Couchbase. He has held senior management positions at leading B2B technology companies over the last 20 years, including Amdocs, Guavus (Thales), Mformation (Nokia), and Lucent.

"I am excited to join Alluxio, a company that is at the intersection of cloud, AI, and open source with a platform that uniquely addresses the challenges that have come out of decoupled architectures in today's modern workloads," said Scranage. "I am looking forward to sharing my experiences and tapping into my open source and AI background to continue to drive Alluxio's growth on a global scale, working with partners and customers as they identify new, innovative use cases for leveraging data across frameworks, clouds, and storage."

Vinay Srinivas
Cerebras Systems has announced that Vinay Srinivas, former Vice President of Engineering at Synopsys, has joined Cerebras Systems to lead its software organization. Vinay is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay and has led software engineering at startups and Fortune 500 companies alike. Most recently, as Vice President of Engineering, he led the development of the rapidly growing emulation product at Synopsys.

"Cerebras is an industry pioneer, and I look forward to helping the company achieve its quest to dominate in AI acceleration," Vinay said. "The Wafer Scale Engine is the result of fearless engineering, exceptional focus, and tireless dedication to solving the problem of AI compute. I'm excited to join the Cerebras team and help define the future of AI — and to ensure that all of Cerebras's solutions are simple to install, easy to use, and exceptionally flexible, all while delivering record-breaking performance."

Dr. Necip Sayiner
Rambus Inc. has announced the appointment of Dr. Necip Sayiner to its Board of Directors. Prior to joining the Rambus board, he held the role of Executive Vice President and general manager at Renesas Electronics Corp., following their acquisition of Intersil, where he served as president and CEO. Before Intersil, Dr. Sayiner was President and CEO of Silicon Laboratories and held various executive roles at Agere Systems. He is currently a board member at Power Integrations.

"Rambus is in the midst of executing a transformation of its business to a product-focused enterprise," said Dr. Sayiner. "I look forward to working with the board and executive team to support the growing portfolio of high performance leading-edge semiconductor solutions."

Jim Nicholas
Codeplay announced the appointment of Jim Nicholas to the role of Chairman. He is joining a team in Edinburgh to accelerate artificial intelligence technologies. He plans to support the evolution of Codeplay in enabling AI to be open, safe, and accessible to all. Nicholas has over 25 years of international leadership experience in the high tech business. Currently, he is CEO of Uniphy, and in the past, has been CEO of MIPS, EVP at Imagination Technologies, and had VP responsibilities at ARM, ST-Ericsson, and Frontier Smart Technologies. He has also served as the GM of STMicroelectronics's Microcontroller Division.

“I have known and admired Codeplay's contributions to the industries that we've served for a long while," Nicholas said. "I am honored to be given the opportunity to support Codeplay in achieving its ambitions. Codeplay has the technologies, great people, and vision to ensure that its value and impact will become more profound and widespread."

Paul Marosvari
Micron Technology, Inc. announced the company has named Paul Marosvari as Micron's Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer. In this position, Marosvari oversees all accounting, controllership, and financial reporting including Sarbanes-Oxley controls. Since joining Micron in 1996, Marosvari has held several roles. In October 2018, he was appointed to as Micron's vice president and corporate controller. Prior to that, he served as Micron's senior director, corporate controller, from October 2016 to September 2018, and as a senior director, assistant controller, from January 2010 to September 2016.

Pawel Osterreicher and Bartek Klimczak
Deepsense.ai has appointed two new members to its Management Board. Pawel Osterreicher has assumed the role of Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and Bartek Klimczak has taken the role of Chief Operating Officer (COO).

Osterreicher has been Deepsense.ai's Director of Sales and Strategy since April 2018. He came over from Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where he headed up projects in the financial and consumer/retail sectors, focusing his efforts on strategy, transformation, the building out of digitalization, and implementation of advanced analytics. Bartek Klimczak joined Deepsense.ai in mid-2019 as a Managing Director. Before that, he spent seven years at The Boston Consulting Group (most recently as Principal), focusing on a broad spectrum of strategic and operational projects for leading global players in industrial goods and processing sectors as well as energy and the global oil & gas sector.

Do you know someone that should be included in next month’s list? If so, send us an email at oliver@taborcommunications.com. We look forward to hearing from you.