Jalal Abdallah has built three businesses. He runs one of them today, and closing the other two was as deliberate a decision as starting them.

An attorney based in Dearborn, Michigan, Jalal graduated from Fordson High School, earned a history degree at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and completed his law degree at Cooley Law School in 2018. He passed the bar exam in 2020. In 2021, rather than take a position at an established firm, he founded his own practice, focused exclusively on personal injury law.

He did not stop there. Alongside the firm, Jalal opened, owned, and operated an insurance agency and a title insurance agency handling real estate closings. He describes himself plainly as someone who loves being an entrepreneur, and the appeal is the challenge and independence that come with building something from nothing.

The harder call came later. As his law practice grew and his political career took shape, Jalal recognized that running three businesses meant giving none of them everything they needed. He closed the insurance and title agencies so he could focus completely on his firm and on serving his community through public office. Knowing what to stop is a form of leadership that gets discussed less often than knowing what to start.

That focus has produced results. Jalal won the Democratic primary for Michigan House, District 15, an achievement he places alongside passing the bar exam and launching his practice as the ones that mean the most to him. He is also currently pursuing an MBA, driven by a conviction that leadership, whether in a courtroom, a company, or public office, requires ongoing learning rather than a fixed set of skills.

His approach to clients follows the same logic as his approach to business. Personal injury clients are dealing with real disruption to their lives, and Jalal built his practice so he could work with them directly rather than at a distance.

Jalal has been married to his wife, Leila, for nearly five years. Outside the office, his time belongs to family. He is a lifelong history enthusiast, a follower of sports and sports history, a dedicated film buff, and a regular at concerts and music festivals.

The pattern across all of it is consistent: build carefully, commit fully, and stay accountable to the people relying on you.

Jalal Abdallah has built three businesses. He runs one of them today, and closing the other two was as deliberate a decision as starting them. An attorney based in Dearborn, Michigan, Jalal graduated from Fordson High School, earned a history degr... Show more

Raquel Langworthy is a professional interiors and architecture photographer serving New Jersey, New York, and surrounding regions. She specializes in capturing luxury interiors, architectural design, and lifestyle spaces with a strong focus on natural light and storytelling. Her approach combines editorial styling with technical precision, resulting in imagery that highlights both detail and atmosphere. Raquel works closely with designers, architects, and brands to create authentic visual narratives that reflect each project’s unique identity. Her photography has been widely published in major outlets, establishing her as a trusted creative partner in high-end interior and architectural photography throughout the Tri-State area.

Raquel Langworthy is a professional interiors and architecture photographer serving New Jersey, New York, and surrounding regions. She specializes in capturing luxury interiors, architectural design, and lifestyle spaces with a strong focus on natura... Show more

Matt Kovatchis, CPCC, is an ex-corporate banker turned mental health and stress management speaker and executive coach. He delivers high-energy and interactive keynotes and facilitates transformative workshops for associations, corporations, and leadership teams across the country – focusing on stress management, self-compassion, and heart-led leadership.

Before launching his speaking career, Matt spent seven years in corporate banking at multinational banks including PNC and Capital One. Externally, he looked like a massive success. Internally, he felt empty and alone. That disconnect led him on a journey of emotional healing and self-discovery - ultimately revealing a deeper purpose: to help others navigate the same struggles he once endured.

Trusted by organizations including SHRM Georgia, Illinois Bankers Association, CBRE, IREM Phoenix, and BOMA Orlando, Matt brings both lived experience and professional rigor to every stage he steps on.

Matt is also the author of the guided journal Enjoying Your Own Company and the host of The Men in the Arena, a top 1% podcast on mental health. Based in Chicago, IL, when he's not speaking or coaching, you'll find him exploring a new coffee shop, or hanging out with his dog, Patty.

Matt Kovatchis, CPCC, is an ex-corporate banker turned mental health and stress management speaker and executive coach. He delivers high-energy and interactive keynotes and facilitates transformative workshops for associations, corporations, and lead... Show more

Ahouab Aliouche is a cloud architect and DevOps professional with over 8 years of experience. Certified in AWS and Kubernetes, Ahouab Aliouche focuses on building scalable and efficient cloud infrastructures, using tools like Terraform and Kubernetes to optimize performance and support digital transformation initiatives.

Ahouab Aliouche is a cloud architect and DevOps professional with over 8 years of experience. Certified in AWS and Kubernetes, Ahouab Aliouche focuses on building scalable and efficient cloud infrastructures, using tools like Terraform and Kubernetes... Show more

Bibin Prathap is a Microsoft MVP (Microsoft Foundry) and AI & Analytics Leader
with 14+ years of experience driving enterprise-grade AI transformations for
government and private sector clients across Abu Dhabi, UAE.

His expertise spans the full AI stack — from mission-critical ERP deployments
to cutting-edge Graph RAG systems for sovereign cloud environments. He is the
creator of VeritasGraph, an open-source reference architecture that solves
"Vector Blindness" in standard RAG implementations, delivering high-precision,
citation-backed AI for government-grade workloads.

Bibin regularly publishes technical guides on Medium and the Microsoft MVP
platform, covering topics ranging from AI-powered agents to real-time analytics.
He bridges the gap between Microsoft Foundry capabilities and real-world
enterprise deployment challenges in the Middle East.

Bibin Prathap is a Microsoft MVP (Microsoft Foundry) and AI & Analytics Leader with 14+ years of experience driving enterprise-grade AI transformations for government and private sector clients across Abu Dhabi, UAE. His expertise spans the fu... Show more

Harshit Taak is an architect and furniture designer turned UX practitioner, trained at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. This unusual path gives him a more fundamental understanding of design than most — one rooted in physical space, material, and craft before it ever touched a screen. Over the years, he has learned 20+ tools deeply, which shaped his thinking on what makes a tool worth mastering. He currently works as a lead designer at Arcesium, building complex data transformation software for hedge funds — work that sits squarely at the intersection of high-stakes users and dense, professional tooling.

Harshit Taak is an architect and furniture designer turned UX practitioner, trained at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. This unusual path gives him a more fundamental understanding of design than most — one rooted in physical space, mater... Show more

Raahul Singh has spent nearly six years at Phaidra as a Staff AI Research Engineer focused on one problem: making AI systems reason reliably about complex physical infrastructure. He is a co-inventor on US patent US20250021061A1, granted in January 2025, covering deterministic thermal constraint control systems directly related to the architectural concepts discussed in this session. Prior to Phaidra, he contributed to Google Summer of Code through SunPy/OpenAstronomy, developing forecasting systems for high-dimensional solar physics time-series data.

Raahul Singh has spent nearly six years at Phaidra as a Staff AI Research Engineer focused on one problem: making AI systems reason reliably about complex physical infrastructure. He is a co-inventor on US patent US20250021061A1, granted in January 2... Show more

Johanna Granados Vega es CEO & Founder de Grupo Disruptivus y Asociados S.A.S., Arquitecta, MBA, Especialista en Gerencia de Proyectos, Coach Empresarial y Executive Business Coach.

Cuenta con más de 14 años de experiencia en el mundo corporativo y empresarial, habiendo ocupado cargos gerenciales y liderado proyectos de alto impacto en reconocidas multinacionales y grupos empresariales en Colombia en áreas de construcción, expansión, administración, gerencia de proyectos y desarrollo de negocio.

Hoy, desde Grupo Disruptivus, acompaña a CEOs, fundadores, líderes y empresas en procesos de estrategia, liderazgo, marca personal corporativa, networking, relacionamiento empresarial para B2B y B2C, posicionamiento y agilidad empresarial. A través de su firma ha impactado a más de 12.500 líderes, acompañado a más de 300 empresas en Colombia y Latinoamérica y desarrollado procesos de transformación para organizaciones, empresarios y equipos de alto desempeño.

Ha dictado más de 25 conferencias internacionales, es autora del libro “Emprende con Alma” —del cual ha vendido más de 2.000 ejemplares— y creadora del podcast “Quo-gruencia” y de la newsletter “Punto Quo-gruencia”, espacios desde los cuales comparte tendencias, herramientas y reflexiones sobre liderazgo, negocios, networking y transformación empresarial.

Es creadora del Método Sé Disruptivus®, una metodología que integra liderazgo, marca personal, estrategia de negocio y agilidad ejecutable para ayudar a profesionales y empresas a crecer con propósito, visibilidad y resultados reales.

En 2025 recibió el reconocimiento Exceptional Woman of Excellence del Women Economic Forum Ecuador y fue destacada por la Revista Factor de Éxito entre las “50 Mujeres que Transforman los Negocios en Colombia”. Además, ha sido invitada a diferentes medios, publicaciones y espacios empresariales de alto reconocimiento.

Actualmente es miembro activa de BNI Colombia y Directora Consultora de BNI Apex, fortaleciendo ecosistemas de networking empresarial, relacionamiento estratégico y crecimiento profesional.

Hoy se define como Arquitecta de Negocios Disruptivus, construyendo negocios, marcas y líderes con estructura, confianza y visión de futuro.

Johanna Granados Vega es CEO & Founder de Grupo Disruptivus y Asociados S.A.S., Arquitecta, MBA, Especialista en Gerencia de Proyectos, Coach Empresarial y Executive Business Coach. Cuenta con más de 14 años de experiencia en el mundo corporativo ... Show more

Srikrishna Sallam is an AI Governance Architect and long-time Microsoft Business Applications engineer specializing in Dynamics 365 CE, Power Platform, and enterprise-scale Copilot adoption. He serves as a panelist at the IEEE-USA IWRC AI & Autonomy Summit, focusing on AI safety, autonomy governance, and enterprise control-plane design. With 17+ years of real-world delivery experience, Sri brings a unique blend of engineering depth and strategic AI oversight.

Srikrishna Sallam is an AI Governance Architect and long-time Microsoft Business Applications engineer specializing in Dynamics 365 CE, Power Platform, and enterprise-scale Copilot adoption. He serves as a panelist at the IEEE-USA IWRC AI & Autonomy ... Show more

With over two decades of experience as a seasoned software architect, I am fueled by a passion for technology, cloud computing, and software development. Throughout my career, I have designed, built, and managed systems of varying scales across a diverse range of industries, including insurance, financial services, and mobility.

I take great pleasure in sharing my insights and experiences with others, whether by teaching, speaking at conferences, organizing hands-on workshops, or writing articles. By engaging with the community, I aim to inspire and provide practical insights drawn from my hands-on experience.

With over two decades of experience as a seasoned software architect, I am fueled by a passion for technology, cloud computing, and software development. Throughout my career, I have designed, built, and managed systems of varying scales across a div... Show more

Pierre Hulsebus has spent more than 40 years pushing the boundaries of what service teams can achieve with technology and AI. As Global Field Service Director at Alithya, he works directly with leaders and frontline teams to cut through complexity, unlock new performance, and keep customers at the center of every decision. One of Microsoft’s original Global Black Belts for service, Pierre has helped shape the evolution of modern service platforms and the way organizations think about frontline operations.
His background spans sales, coaching, architecture, and service leadership, giving him a rare ability to see across the entire service ecosystem and turn insight into action. A four‑time Titanium Award recipient, he is known for elevating teams, accelerating growth, and bringing clarity to challenges that stall others.
Beyond the enterprise world, Pierre invests deeply in education and access. He serves on the Curriculum Advisory Board at Ferris State University and works with Expanding Boundaries International to bring STEAM learning to underserved communities across Africa and Baltimore. He continues to share ideas with the global service community, blending decades of experience with a passionate belief in what people can accomplish when complexity gets out of their way.

Pierre Hulsebus has spent more than 40 years pushing the boundaries of what service teams can achieve with technology and AI. As Global Field Service Director at Alithya, he works directly with leaders and frontline teams to cut through complexity, u... Show more

Kevin is a freelance solution architect, Pluralsight author & consultant, living in Antwerp (Belgium). These days he's mainly focused on architecture & security for web and mobile applications, using .NET.

He's a Microsoft MVP, and a keen proponent of open-source software.

Also: wine.

Kevin is a freelance solution architect, Pluralsight author & consultant, living in Antwerp (Belgium). These days he's mainly focused on architecture & security for web and mobile applications, using .NET. He's a Microsoft MVP, and a keen propo... Show more

Matthias is Lead Architect for E-Mobility at EnBW AG. With expertise in Domain-Driven Design, he shapes the IT landscape and team topologies for e-mobility. Despite his strategic focus, he stays close to the code with Java and Spring Boot, developing prototypes and performing refactorings. As a trainer, he has been teaching practical software architecture for years, bridging theory and project realities.

Matthias is Lead Architect for E-Mobility at EnBW AG. With expertise in Domain-Driven Design, he shapes the IT landscape and team topologies for e-mobility. Despite his strategic focus, he stays close to the code with Java and Spring Boot, developing... Show more

Andrew Babiec has 20+ years of experience in software development and design, consulting for numerous companies and industries.
He is an active speaker at New England Code Camps and user group meetings, offering insights from his hands-on work with high-profile clients.
In addition, Andrew was a member of the Microsoft Virtual Technical Specialist program and has been certified as a PMP and Trainer for the Professional Scrum Developer program.

Andrew Babiec has 20+ years of experience in software development and design, consulting for numerous companies and industries. He is an active speaker at New England Code Camps and user group meetings, offering insights from his hands-on work with... Show more

Nathan has worked for Microsoft for over 27 years and is the Product Manager for Microsoft 365 Copilot search capabilities over Dynamics and Power Apps data. He has also worked on Copilot Agent Knowledge, Dataverse data models, virtual tables, and more. He has presented hands on workshops for Power Platform and Copilot features for every Power Platform Community Conference, as well as labs in Microsoft //Build and Microsoft Ignite providing the ability to get experience using and learning about the newest capabilities provided.

Nathan has worked for Microsoft for over 27 years and is the Product Manager for Microsoft 365 Copilot search capabilities over Dynamics and Power Apps data. He has also worked on Copilot Agent Knowledge, Dataverse data models, virtual tables, and mo... Show more

Leon Nunes is a Senior Customer Success Engineer working around Cloud-native technologies, Agents, Agent-gateways and Service meshes, he's also active in various Open-Source communities and Cloud native communities and loves talking about his varied interests in tech.

Leon Nunes is a Senior Customer Success Engineer working around Cloud-native technologies, Agents, Agent-gateways and Service meshes, he's also active in various Open-Source communities and Cloud native communities and loves talking about his varied ... Show more

Venkateswara Reddy Dasireddy is a technology professional with 18+ years of experience in enterprise data analytics, business intelligence, cybersecurity analytics, and application security. His work focuses on transforming complex enterprise and security data into meaningful risk intelligence that supports vulnerability management, remediation prioritization, security metrics, and executive decision-making.

His professional interests include application security risk intelligence, cybersecurity analytics, vulnerability management, enterprise reporting, data-driven risk prioritization, and security decision support. He is also actively working on research and publications related to application security, cyber risk intelligence, and enterprise analytics.

Venkateswara Reddy Dasireddy is a technology professional with 18+ years of experience in enterprise data analytics, business intelligence, cybersecurity analytics, and application security. His work focuses on transforming complex enterprise and sec... Show more

Mustafa Dayıoğlu is a senior security architect and cloud-native solutions leader with nearly 25 years of experience, specializing in cybersecurity, DevSecOps, and AI-driven security architectures. He began his career at TÜBİTAK, leading national projects in network and information security, compliance, and digital identity. As a director at TÜBİTAK’s National Cyber Security Institute, he managed flagship NATO SPS projects and contributed to national security standards.

Beyond his technical leadership, Mustafa holds a PhD in Business Model Innovation, focusing on the commercialization and large-scale adoption of technology-driven solutions. His research was published in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management in 2023, underlining his commitment to bridging the gap between innovative engineering and practical business impact.

Today, Mustafa focuses on building open-source, privacy-preserving, and self-improving AI systems on Kubernetes and Kubeflow, with an emphasis on explainable security, federated learning, and compliance (NIST CSF, MITRE ATT&CK, GDPR, HIPAA). His recent work integrates vLLM, GraphRAG, and ONNX to deliver practical, autonomous security pipelines for healthcare, OT, and critical infrastructure.

An active participant in CNCF and Secure AI events, Mustafa’s mission is to enable security and DevSecOps teams to implement interpretable, adaptive, and policy-aware AI defenses in production environments. He is committed to fostering an open-source ecosystem that advances both technical excellence and real-world adoption of cybersecurity intelligence.

Mustafa Dayıoğlu is a senior security architect and cloud-native solutions leader with nearly 25 years of experience, specializing in cybersecurity, DevSecOps, and AI-driven security architectures. He began his career at TÜBİTAK, leading national pro... Show more

Ingeniera en Informática y Sistemas con experiencia en gestión, administración e implementación de servicios en entornos multi-nube, incluyendo AWS, Azure y Google Cloud. Ha liderado proyectos de arquitectura cloud, automatización con Infrastructure as Code y adopción de buenas prácticas de seguridad, gobernanza y optimización en la nube.

Ingeniera en Informática y Sistemas con experiencia en gestión, administración e implementación de servicios en entornos multi-nube, incluyendo AWS, Azure y Google Cloud. Ha liderado proyectos de arquitectura cloud, automatización con Infrastructure ... Show more

Christie Tufts is the Founder and CEO of Rebel Tech Labs, Inc., where she independently develops AI-powered applications and the shared intelligence infrastructure supporting them.

Her work spans agentic AI, cloud infrastructure, operational automation, security, and human-centered governance. Through Rebel Assistant, Rebel Blueprint, and the company's Rebela intelligence infrastructure, she explores how autonomous systems can execute meaningful work while remaining observable, recoverable, and accountable to human authority.

Drawing on a multidisciplinary background in technology, business operations, and behavioral systems, Christie approaches AI architecture through a central principle: intelligence should expand human capability without displacing human sovereignty.

Her focus is translating that principle into practical systems that can operate responsibly in production.

Christie Tufts is the Founder and CEO of Rebel Tech Labs, Inc., where she independently develops AI-powered applications and the shared intelligence infrastructure supporting them. Her work spans agentic AI, cloud infrastructure, operational autom... Show more

Dragos Petcu is a Principal Tech Lead at Sixense, where he builds Beyond Monitoring, a structural-health monitoring platform used on major infrastructure projects.

Over the last two years, he went from ordinary developer to ~5x output through hands-on agentic engineering with Claude Code, custom subagents, and MCP integrations.

He then spent the harder half of the journey making that transfer to his team: an internal plugin ecosystem of 78 commands, skills, and agents across 6 plugins, domain-scoped agents, and cross-model review pipelines running on a production enterprise codebase.

He writes about AI-assisted development and AI adoption for tech leads and CTOs on LinkedIn

Dragos Petcu is a Principal Tech Lead at Sixense, where he builds Beyond Monitoring, a structural-health monitoring platform used on major infrastructure projects. Over the last two years, he went from ordinary developer to ~5x output through han... Show more

Ashutosh Jha is an AI and full-stack engineer who owns products end to end. At Insitu Energy he owns an AI product for economic-development organisations, shipping weekly to 40+ customer deployments: Gemini parsing of RFI workbooks and PDFs, scoring, follow-up rounds and map search over 100k+ property listings on Google Cloud. Before that he built AI member-matching at South Park Commons that doubled engagement, shipped 50+ SDK samples that halved partner integration time as a Developer Relations Engineer at Transak, and built Go observability APIs at CubeAPM handling 100K+ events a minute. He is on the organising team of AWS User Group Bengaluru.

Ashutosh Jha is an AI and full-stack engineer who owns products end to end. At Insitu Energy he owns an AI product for economic-development organisations, shipping weekly to 40+ customer deployments: Gemini parsing of RFI workbooks and PDFs, scoring,... Show more

I am an EVV Reporting Analyst at Tempus Unlimited, where I develop healthcare analytics and compliance reporting solutions that transform complex operational data into actionable business insights. I specialize in SQL, Power BI, data modeling, ETL processes, and healthcare reporting, with a focus on improving transparency, compliance monitoring, and decision-making within Medicaid and healthcare programs.

I hold a Master of Professional Studies in Analytics from Northeastern University and have experience designing scalable reporting frameworks, interactive dashboards, and data-driven solutions across healthcare and operational domains. My work focuses on bridging the gap between raw data and business outcomes through modern analytics platforms and visualization techniques.

I am passionate about sharing practical, real-world approaches to analytics, data engineering, Microsoft Fabric, and Power BI, helping organizations leverage data more effectively to solve business challenges.

I am an EVV Reporting Analyst at Tempus Unlimited, where I develop healthcare analytics and compliance reporting solutions that transform complex operational data into actionable business insights. I specialize in SQL, Power BI, data modeling, ETL pr... Show more

I’m a software engineer with 8+ years of experience building distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and observability platforms.

At Microsoft, I built observability infrastructure for distributed systems, including an observability platform handling nearly 20,000 requests per second. My experience includes OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, metrics, logging, Kubernetes, microservices, and reliability engineering.

My current interests focus on applying observability to AI systems and agentic workflows—using telemetry and evaluations to understand agent behavior, diagnose failures, measure quality, and improve latency, reliability, and cost.

I’ve also presented at Microsoft Build and enjoy sharing practical lessons from building and operating production systems at scale.

I’m a software engineer with 8+ years of experience building distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and observability platforms. At Microsoft, I built observability infrastructure for distributed systems, including an observability platform ha... Show more

Shreya has a Master's from Carnegie Mellon University, where her research focused on federated learning. At present, she is a Software Developer at AWS Annapurna Labs, where she builds tools for profiling and analyzing deep learning models to help scale workloads on Trainium and Inferentia. Her work bridges framework, runtime, and hardware layers to give ML engineers deep visibility into performance bottlenecks.

Shreya has a Master's from Carnegie Mellon University, where her research focused on federated learning. At present, she is a Software Developer at AWS Annapurna Labs, where she builds tools for profiling and analyzing deep learning models to help sc... Show more

Karta dharta at Asambhav Solutions, completely into Agents, GPT ,diffusion and langchain, MERN stack dev, A.I. enthu , Scrum Master | Been programming for more than a decade building tech and products | Author in making | Founder : AutoResume.ai | linkedinprofiler.ai | sitesGPT | connektwithme | Asambhav etc

Given more than 70+ talks , mentored and judged 40+ hackathons. Organised and volunteered for 50+ events as GDG Gandhinagar Organizer and Open Source Weekend organizer and other roles.

Karta dharta at Asambhav Solutions, completely into Agents, GPT ,diffusion and langchain, MERN stack dev, A.I. enthu , Scrum Master | Been programming for more than a decade building tech and products | Author in making | Founder : AutoResume.ai | li... Show more

- Designed and developed AI autonomous Agents for monitoring and incident triage
- Architected and developed an end-to-end monitoring system using Java and Spring Boot. Mentored a few developers who collaborated into the project. Replaced Celery-based workers with a Quartz scheduler for alert rule evaluation. Implemented configurable lookback periods, automated threshold generation using LLMs, and rule-based decision logic to suppress false positives. Introduced decision rules for holiday periods, budget constraints, model forecasting, and metric comparisons, reducing false positive alerts by over 84% starting November 1, 2025. Currently developing agent-based root cause analysis to enhance alert explainability.

- Designed and developed AI autonomous Agents for monitoring and incident triage - Architected and developed an end-to-end monitoring system using Java and Spring Boot. Mentored a few developers who collaborated into the project. Replaced Celery-bas... Show more

Born in Belarus in 1984, Kiryl Mikhalkevich emigrated to the U.S. in 2005 and settled in San Diego. He later established Route 66 Moving and Storage, serving communities from La Jolla to Del Mar, Encinitas, Carlsbad, Oceanside, Rancho Bernardo, Escondido, San Marcos, Carmel Valley, Poway, and Rancho Santa Fe. The company also handles larger moving and storage needs in Orange County, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

For the last ten years, Kiryl has also worked in real estate development, building high-end custom homes in Rancho Santa Fe, Del Mar, and La Jolla.

Before moving to the U.S., he graduated from the Belarusian State Medical University in Minsk, where he was a gifted student. The university is known as a center for education, science, medicine, and pharmaceutical practice.

Kiryl named Route 66 Moving and Storage after the historic U.S. highway. During the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, more than 300,000 people traveled to California through Route 66 in search of opportunity. Established in 1926, the highway runs from Chicago, Illinois, to Santa Monica, California, crossing Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

The route became a symbol of resilience, travel, and fresh beginnings. Ten decades later, it remains part of American culture through songs, literature, road trips, history, scenery, and local communities. His own search for opportunity influenced his decision to name his first U.S. business after Route 66.

Since opening Route 66 Moving and Storage in 2008, Kiryl has focused on reducing the stress of moving through responsive communication, accurate quotes, answers to customer questions, and careful handling of fragile, perishable, and valuable possessions. The company focuses on residential and commercial moves between San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Kiryl also views the business as a way to provide jobs, support the U.S. and California economies, help families, and give back for the opportunities he received. His work helped him expand into real estate development, and he believes entrepreneurship can help immigrants contribute their skills, ideas, and experiences to their communities.

Outside of work, Kiryl Mikhalkevich is a private pilot certified to fly Cessna and Cirrus aircraft. He also gives back to his local community of Del Mar, San Diego, recognizing the importance of supporting the community that contributed to his journey.

Born in Belarus in 1984, Kiryl Mikhalkevich emigrated to the U.S. in 2005 and settled in San Diego. He later established Route 66 Moving and Storage, serving communities from La Jolla to Del Mar, Encinitas, Carlsbad, Oceanside, Rancho Bernardo, Escon... Show more

Benjamin M. Soto has dedicated over 30 years to the practice of real estate law and development. He owns two real estate-focused companies and is licensed with the DC Bar and the Pennsylvania Bar.

He established Premium Title & Escrow, LLC in 2000. The company provides settlement and title services for residential and commercial transactions in Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, and Tennessee. For over two decades, it has been one of the highest volume title firms in the DMV area. With a team that brings more than 100 years of combined experience, the company conducts thorough title searches, issues Owner’s and Lender’s Title Policies, manages escrow funds, coordinates documents, and records them in Land Records to ensure accurate and seamless closings.

He also owns Paramount Development, LLC, a commercial development company in Washington, D.C. The firm has contributed to projects such as The Wharf and developed several apartment buildings, including 555 E Street, SW, which features a hotel, residential units, and retail space. Additional projects include 1031 4th Street, NW, 350 Maple Drive, and the Hyatt Place Hotel at 400 East Street, SW. The Hyatt Place, completed in 2015, also includes a fire station that houses units tasked with protecting the U.S. President.

He serves on the Boards of Directors of EagleBank, the DC Chamber of Commerce, the DC Public Education Fund, and the American University Real Estate Council. Earlier in his career, he handled bankruptcy cases before focusing entirely on real estate transactions. Over the years, he has also served on civic boards and worked as treasurer on numerous mayoral and council campaigns.

A native of Washington, D.C. and a graduate of American University, he has been married for 27 years and has two children, Danielle and Alex. He enjoys traveling and reading.

Benjamin M. Soto has built his career on dedication and fairness, ensuring clients are protected as they make some of the most important investments of their lives.

Benjamin M. Soto has dedicated over 30 years to the practice of real estate law and development. He owns two real estate-focused companies and is licensed with the DC Bar and the Pennsylvania Bar. He established Premium Title & Escrow, LLC in 2000... Show more

Shashwat Pandey is a Machine Learning Engineer specializing in the design and development of reliable, scalable, and trustworthy large language model systems. His expertise spans generative AI, natural language processing, retrieval-augmented generation, uncertainty quantification, hallucination detection, MLOps, and production AI evaluation. He has experience owning machine learning systems across the complete lifecycle, including problem definition, model development, deployment, monitoring, evaluation, and observability.
Shashwat currently works as a Machine Learning Engineer at Zillow Group, where he leads AI-powered customer communication and call intelligence initiatives. His work has contributed to the AI-Generated Messages platform, which has supported approximately 165 partners, more than 100,000 messages, and approximately 9,000 weekly active users. He also led the development of automated follow-up email and SMS generation for Zillow Home Loans and helped transform call summarization capabilities into a productized machine learning platform.
At Zillow, Shashwat established evaluation frameworks covering more than 600 calls and 500 long-call summaries. His work improved summary quality by 28% and reduced the hallucination rate from 11.4% to 8.2%. He also developed production monitoring metrics, observability systems, and compliant event architectures to strengthen the reliability, governance, and safety of borrower-facing AI applications.
Previously, Shashwat worked as a Machine Learning Engineer at the University of California, where he architected and deployed Cruz Chat, the university’s first AI-powered chatbot. He developed its retrieval-augmented generation platform using Elasticsearch, FAISS, and LlamaIndex, processing more than 10,000 documents. He also deployed GPU-accelerated LLM inference systems on NVIDIA A100 infrastructure and improved retrieval latency, answer quality, experimentation speed, and conversational system performance.
Earlier in his career at Amdocs, Shashwat contributed to a large-scale Azure migration involving more than 50 billion subscriber records across over 30 enterprise systems. He developed churn prediction models that achieved 91% accuracy and supported a 48% reduction in churn. He also applied transformer-based models, including BERT and GPT-3, to customer sentiment analysis and optimized machine learning workloads using CUDA, reducing model training time by 50%.
Shashwat holds a Master of Science in Computer Science with a specialization in Natural Language Processing from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and Electronics from Jaypee Institute of Information Technology. His research focuses on the reliability of large language models—including uncertainty quantification for reasoning LLMs and independent, black-box auditing of deployed on-device models for calibration, confident confabulation, and over-refusal, together with mitigations that require no model access. His LLM research has been disseminated through arXiv and the IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Applications.

Shashwat Pandey is a Machine Learning Engineer specializing in the design and development of reliable, scalable, and trustworthy large language model systems. His expertise spans generative AI, natural language processing, retrieval-augmented generat... Show more