Prof. Sashikumaar Ganesan is a distinguished academic and entrepreneur, serving as a Professor in the Department of Computational and Data Sciences (CDS) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, and Founder & Chief AI Officer of ZenteiQ AiTech Innovations Pvt. Ltd. He earned his Ph.D. in Computational Mathematics from Otto-von-Guericke University, Germany, and held research positions at Imperial College London and WIAS Berlin.

He joined IISc in 2011 and served as the Chairman of CDS for six years (2018–2024). With over 15 years in academia, he has mentored 25+ research students and trained 1000+ professionals in AI and ML. His research spans Finite Element Analysis, HPC, Data-Driven Modeling, Scientific Machine Learning (SciML), AI and GenAI. Prof. Ganesan leads the AI for Research and Engineering eXcellence (AiREX) Lab at IISc and has published 60+ peer-reviewed works.

His deeptech startup ZenteiQ has been selected by IndiaAI, MeitY, to build the Scientific Foundation Model for science and engineering R&D.

Ken Toyoda is currently the Director at Fujitsu Research of India Private Limited. He spent more than 30 years in Human Resources at Fujitsu Limited, and since 2019 he has been responsible for management of R & D, including Research Planning, Investment, Legal and HR. He believed that in order to strengthen Fujitsu's R & D capabilities, it was necessary to utilize human resources from India and decided to establish the India research center in 2022. He has been in his current position since 2023 to quickly establish the management foundation of the rapidly expanding institute.

Mahesh Chandran heads the AI Business Unit in Fujitsu Research India, Bangalore. He leads a team of 35 researchers working on range of topics across Generative AI that includes LLM, Agentic and multi-agentic systems, Graph AI, sequential data model etc. He is a multi-disciplinary researcher with work across computational science, AI/ML, and engineering. He joined Fujitsu Research India in 2023 after working for two decades in industrial research in global companies that includes 12 years in GE Global Research, Bangalore. He has authored several research papers published in top journals and is an inventor in multiple patents.

He received PhD in Physics in 1998 and spent few years as post-doctoral researcher in TIFR Bombay and UC Davis before joining the industry.

Krishnakumar Sabapathy, Ph.D. is a quantum information scientist with over a decade of post-PhD research experience across academia and industry in India, Europe, and Canada. He specializes in building practical R&D solutions across the quantum technology stack, spanning quantum theory, algorithms, applications, and software.

Currently focused on enabling enterprise and research users to harness quantum hardware effectively, Krishnakumar also contributes to advancing hardware development through deep, application-driven insights. With a no hype, impact first approach, he brings a rare combination of theoretical depth and industry relevance, especially in areas like photonic quantum computing, fault tolerant architectures, and quantum communication. His mission is to drive meaningful progress in the emerging quantum ecosystem.

Milind works as Senior Director for Network group in India. Milind has 25+ years of experience in Optical networking and software development.

He has worked extensively in both USA and India and extensive experience working with global teams.

In recent times Milind is focussed on use of AI technology in improving productivity and quality of engineering development process.

Saurabh Chattopadhyay is a seasoned technology leader with over 25 years of experience at the forefront of engineering, applied innovation, and entrepreneurial ventures. He has been instrumental in driving transformative change across the telecom and networking industry, shaping the evolution of access technologies and disaggregated network architectures.

Currently heading the NSIBU India team at Fujitsu Research India / Fujitsu NWG / 1FINITY, Saurabh leads product and solution engineering for cutting-edge Telecom and Network-centric AI/ML products. His leadership spans the full spectrum of product lifecycle management, from conceptualization to deployment, with a strong focus on scalable, intelligent network solutions.

Amit is a Global Fujitsu Distinguished Engineer, with over 13 years of industry experience in AI and middleware science and technology. He played a key role in establishing the AI unit and building AI capabilities at Fujitsu’s Global Delivery Centre in India. Amit actively contributes to various national AI initiatives through collaborations with industry and government bodies. Recognized as one of the influential AI voices in India by multiple reputed platforms, media outlets, and industry forums, he is known for his contributions to technology and thought leadership. Amit also serves as an Adjunct Professor of AI at an engineering college. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from RGPV, M. Tech in AI from IIT and has pursued advanced studies in AI at the IISc.

Abhishek Upperwal is the Founder of Soket AI, a research-driven AI lab focused on ethical Artificial General Intelligence. He holds a Master’s in Computational Data Science from IISc Bangalore, specializing in High-Performance Computing, Distributed Systems, and Large-Scale Model Training. His expertise spans CUDA optimizations, MPI, and graph algorithms, with a strong foundation in scaling AI models efficiently.

At Soket AI, Abhishek led the development of Pragna-1B, a 1.25 billion parameter foundation model built from scratch for Hindi, English, Gujarati, and Bengali, featuring one of the most efficient Indic tokenizers. He also created the Bhasha Dataset Corpus, a high-quality, open-source dataset for Indian languages.

Abhishek is also the Principal Investigator of Project EKA supported by the IndiaAI Mission, an initiative to build state-of-the-art AI models that prioritize Indian languages while aiming to surpass global benchmarks. EKA is designed to strengthen India’s AI sovereignty, ensuring the country not only preserves its linguistic diversity in AI but also leads in cutting-edge model development and AI research.

Ramprakash Ramamoorthy leads the AI efforts for Zoho Corporation. Ramprakash has been instrumental in setting up Zoho's AI platform from scratch and comes with a rich 13+ years of experience in building AI for the enterprises at Zoho. The AI platform currently serves over 16B+ API calls in a month and is growing very fast. He is a passionate leader with a level-headed approach to emerging technologies, and a sought-after speaker at tech. conferences.