Meet our speakers
Meet others from the local tech community and hear from a variety of speakers. We've invited Googlers who are experts in their fields to come and speak with you.
Adam Gardner
As part of the site leadership team that manages Google Seattle & Kirkland, Adam’s job is to make sure all Google employees in the Pacific Northwest are happy and productive, and that Google positively contributes to the Seattle community. Prior to this role, Adam led Google’s supplier diversity initiative on the Global Procurement team. At Google since 2012, he previously managed supplier enrollment and the vendor maintenance process, helping build and launch Google’s supplier enrollment portal. Adam came to Google from the US Air Force, where he worked on the GPS Program. He played three years of minor league baseball as a left-handed pitcher with the San Francisco Giants, and received a BA from Pomona College (Claremont) and a MPA from the University of Southern California. He lives in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle with his partner Ellen, and their two children, Wyatt and Emma.
Amy Unruh
Amy Unruh is a developer programs engineer for the Google Cloud Platform, where she focuses on machine learning and data analytics as well as other Cloud Platform technologies. Amy has an academic background in CS/AI and has also worked at several startups, done industrial R&D, and published a book on App Engine.
Atif Faheem
Atif is a Software Engineer on the Cloud Dataflow Site Reliability team at Google, where he focuses on production aspects of the Dataflow service. Prior to Google, Atif worked at Cisco and several startups, and has extensive background in network technologies.
Charlaé Washington
Charlaé Washington is a diversity program manager at Google where she helps lead Google’s strategic efforts to create a more inclusive CS industry, including leading the charge on the Google Sandbox program. Charlaé started at Google in 2008 working in SMB Global Customer Experience. From there she helped start a division within Google that empowers minority-owned businesses to succeed online. She went on to do marketing strategy for that division as well as brand marketing for Google’s policy team and Google Cloud, with some of our most well-known products, like Gmail and Google Docs. She has been at Google for 10 years and is a steadfast champion of intersectionality and inclusion. Charlaé is a very passionate and active Black Googler Network member, a proud Howard University alumna, and a native of Detroit, MI.
David Kurokawa
David is a Software Engineer at Google on the Duo Quality Team: he analyzes aggregate metrics to find areas to improve/fix Duo.
Divya Tyam
Divya Tyam is a Software Engineer in Google AI’s Intelligent Photography team. She is part of the Google Clips team, where she recently led the efforts to ensure that the on-device intelligence worked for a wide spectrum of users by employing ML Fairness techniques. She has previously worked at IBM and Microsoft.
Emily Glanz
Emily is a software engineer and works on a platform to enable decentralized machine learning on a federation of devices. Before Google, Emily studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Iowa (Go Hawkeyes!).
George Sadlier
George is a Director in the Cloud Programs organization responsible for GCP and TI Security, Privacy and Trust, where he is responsible for Security and Privacy program management, Compliance, Contract Operations, Incident Management/Notifications, and several other legal-and policy-based engineering efforts around search warrants, investigations, removals, etc. He spent nearly twelve years in SRE prior to taking up his current role, where he held a variety of roles across different product areas, including managing all of SREs' distributed sites in the US. George grew up in New Zealand, but has been living in the Seattle area since before he joined Google and stubbornly refuses to relocate. George is a long distance swimmer, occasional triathlete, lego geek, and parent to precocious 3 and 6 year olds.
Herman Vandermolen
Herman Vandermolen has been a Software Engineer at Google for more than 7 years. During that time, he's been involved in Search Applications and Infrastructure, Privacy and Security, and Machine Learning. He's a graduate of Google's Machine Learning Ninja Program, teaches Machine Learning to Nooglers, and currently works at the intersection of Search and Machine Learning.
James McClurkin
James McLurkin is a Sr. Hardware Engineer at Google, and the lead hardware engineer on the AIY project. The project’s plan is to put AI into the maker’s DIY toolkit, to help more people solve hard, real-world problems. James’ plan for global change is to build things that help build more engineers. He is a recovering academic; as an Assistant Professor at Rice University his research was on distributed algorithms for multi-robot systems, which is software that produces complex group behaviors from the interactions of many simple individuals. He enjoys mountain biking, all things LEGO, and using his power tools.
Joey Haymaker
Joey is a tech writing Noogler working on Google Cloud Platform, specifically machine learning API documentation (Cloud Vision API). He recently was able to assist Google Cloud Next '18 by documenting Vision Product Search Beta, Handwriting OCR Beta, Object Localizer Beta, and PDF/TIFF OCR GA. He also interned last summer and worked on Cloud Machine Learning Engine. A recent graduate from an accelerated computer science program at the University of Pennsylvania, Joey hopes to dive deeper into programming languages in his free time that he only touched on in school, namely Android, C++, JavaScript, and Node.js.
Lak Lakshmanan
Lak Lakshmanan is currently a Tech Lead for Big Data and Machine Learning Professional Services on Google Cloud Platform. Lak's mission is to democratize machine learning so that it can be done by anyone anywhere using Google's amazing infrastructure (i.e., without deep knowledge of statistics or programming or ownership of lots of hardware). Learn more at www.vlakshman.com.
Mingge Deng
Mingge is a software engineer on the Google Bigquery team, working on bigquery machine learning project. Before Google, he got his PhD in Material Physics at University of Science and Technology of China then his second PhD in Applied Mathematics at Brown University.
Mig Gerard
Mig Gerard holds degrees in Biology and Anthropology. Mig got recruited in the early 90s to do Neural Network programming since he was the only undergraduate in the entire school who understood both how to write code in C and how an action potential works in a neuron. Luckily, nobody needs to understand how neurons work anymore to do good ML. Mig is not a Data Scientist, he is a Front End engineer (HTML/JS/CSS) for an MLaaS application that's only available internal to Google... so if he can do all this, he's sure you can too!
Narayan Hedge
Software Engineer at Medical Brain, Google working to bring AI to Healthcare. Recently, he has been working on generative modelling approaches for data augmentation in computer vision. He did masters at Indian Institute of Science focusing on Machine Learning and Multi core processing.
Nathan McKinley
Nathan McKinley has been a software engineer at Google for about five years. He studied AI at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio, before moving to Seattle in 2013. He's done work with natural language processing, image recognition, and robotics, and especially enjoys connecting the abstract to the physical world.
Nicolas Frontini
Nico is a Customer Solutions Engineer at Google who delivers high-touch technical consultation and hands-on engineering solutions to Google's LCS and customers like Expedia, Hotels.com, HomeAway, etc. He is also the Technical Lead of a system that examines travel related search queries, classifies each search term into a custom taxonomy and aggregates statistics (i.e. counts of queries, impressions, clicks, etc.)
Phil Pham
Phil is Software Engineer in Machine Intelligence. He applies representation learning and natural language processing to personalization. Phil previously worked on web applications and studied math and statistics and Duke University and University of Pennsylvania.
Tucker Kirven
Tucker is a software engineer working on the Security & Privacy team for Google Cloud Storage. For the past year, he dedicated 20% of his time working with a team that is creating a framework in Tensorflow for federated machine learning. When Tucker not working he likes keeping up with the world of NLP and hiking, biking, and climbing in the lovely outdoors Seattle has to offer.