Governing Board

Akio Kawabata is a member of the LF Edge Governing Board & the Vice President and Head of NTT Network Technology Laboratories. He received B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan, in 1991, 1993, and 2016, respectively. In 1993, he joined Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, where he has been engaging to develop switching systems, and researching network design and switching system architecture. He is currently working on managing research of future network architecture and technologies as the general manager, the head of NTT Network Technology Laboratories.

Cole Crawford is CEO and founder of Vapor IO, creators of the Kinetic Edge and the leading provider of tower-connected edge colocation and interconnection services. He was previously the founding executive director of the Open Compute Project and a co-founder of OpenStack. He is a founding board member of the Open19 Foundation and has been a thought leader in data center technology for over a decade. He is leading Vapor IO in developing the largest nationwide edge colocation and interconnection platform at the edge of the cellular network. Cole has been named to Data Economy’s list of The World’s Most Influential Data Economy Leaders and The World’s First Top 50 Edge Computing Influencers.

Daniel currently serves as a Senior Technical Program Manager at the CTO office at OSIsoft, focusing on technology, research and innovation projects related to IIoT, Open Source and Energy (Distributed Energy Resources). Daniel acts as technical liaison for strategic partners and represents OSIsoft at the Industrial Internet Consortium. Prior to joining OSIsoft in 2010, Daniel collaborated in various international research and development projects related to both edge and cloud.

Daniel holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Valladolid University (Spain) and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Aalborg University (Denmark).

Dave Landsman is the Director Industry Standards at Western Digital.

David Boloker is a member of the LF Edge Governing Board. He is also leading the Business Development activities around IBM’s Edge Computing Initiatives and holds the title of Distinguished Engineer. Previously, he was CTO of IBM’s Emerging Technology group and was responsible for forming IBM’s technical strategy around the emerging areas ranging from Mobile, Cloud Services and Big Data. In that role, he lead a globally distributed IBM team researching new areas in software design and development. As part of his Emerging Technologies work, he was responsible for the commercialization of the Watson machine. David and his team took the system that played Jeopardy and created a multipurpose machine that analyzed information and provides solutions across the industry from healthcare to finance to retail.

Throughout David’s extensive career at IBM, he has held the role of CTO for Java technology, and he’s worked at IBM’s esteemed Thomas J. Watson Research Center as well as the Cambridge Scientific Center doing research in the area of remote distribution and control of hardware and software systems and secure Internet gateways. David has also developed an Internet-based data exploration tool to support development and testing of hypotheses regarding complex genetic and environmental relationships in the development of chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD) in collaboration with COPDGene investigators in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Center for Advanced Medical Imaging and COPDGene.

Erik Salo is an LF Edge Governing Board Member & The Senior Director of enterprise business development for Seagate Technologies LLC. Erik is responsible for enabling Seagate products and solutions that address the needs of IT4.0 applications and the new generation of IT3.0 private clouds.In his 6 years at Seagate, Erik has worked in product management and participated in several acquisitions including Xyratex, Dothill and Evault.

Prior to joining Seagate, Erik was Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Mission Motors, a San Francisco based high tech firm focusing on cloud software and electronics for the electric vehicle industry. Erik was Chief Strategist for AMD’s computing group, Business Unit leader for AMD’s embedded computing group and Business Unit leader for National Semiconductor’s Information Appliance division. Erik has also held positions as Director of Technical marketing for National Semiconductor and Cyrix Corporations.

Gang Chen is a technical lead at Baidu 5G MEC team. He obtained his Doctor’s degree in Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2008 and joined Baidu in 2017. Before working with Baidu, he was a standard representative in China Mobile. He has work experience on IETF, 3GPP and GSMA for several years. He was also the chairman of GSMA VRirTT WG. He is currently leading Baidu 5G MEC team and focusing on edge computing platform, architecture design as well as AI driving 5G ecosystem

Hatsumi is the Senior Director of Strategic Planning Unit in Fujitsu Ltd. She is currently responsible for the open source and community strategy, and leading to create 5G era global network & business architecture. Her previous roles included director positions of both Product Planning and Business Management of global photonic business. She was assigned to Texas US for more than 8 years and her main business has been for big carries in US market.

She has BS for Mathematical Statistics, and resides in Kawasaki city, Japan.

Henry leads system and software architecture for HP retail, hospitality, healthcare products and solutions. Henry has over 30 years of experience developing embedded systems, VOIP gateways, and mobile phones from startups to global companies.

Henry holds a M.S. in Computer Engineering from University of Southern California and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of California San Diego.

Jason Shepherd is VP of Ecosystem at IoT Edge orchestration company ZEDEDA. Prior to joining ZEDEDA, Jason was CTO for the Dell Technologies Edge and IoT Solutions Division. His proven track record as a thought leader in the market is evidenced through his leadership building up the award-winning Dell IoT Solutions Partner Program and establishing the vendor-neutral, open source EdgeX Foundry project to facilitate greater interoperability at the IoT edge. Jason is active various industry efforts focused on IoT and edge computing and was recognized as one of the Top 100 Industrial IoT influencers of 2018 and 2019. He has spent his career in roles spanning CTO, engineering and marketing functions and holds 14 granted and over 20 pending US patents.

Jim St. Leger has been creating, nurturing, and growing open source projects for more than ten years. He was part of the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and the Fast Data I/O (FD.io) open source project creation teams. Today he holds community leadership roles in DPDK and LF Edge. His focus is on networking and edge computing projects. His personal pursuits include lifelong learning, outdoor recreation, and advancing STEM disciplines.

Jim Xu is a principal Engineer at Zenlayer. Zenlayer is an innovative company in the Edge Cloud business. Before joining Zenlayer, he was a Tech Leader in Cisco’s flagship products, a Principal Engineer at Futurewei Technologies enterprise networking and Edge Computing products. He also partnered with several companies before, on the Edge Computing IoT and on Decentralized Cloud. He has been granted over 20 US and international patents. He was actively involved in early DPDK community, managed the ODL projects within company, and advocated blockchain and Hyperledger technologies across other partners.

Joel Markham is a Chief Engineer in the Edge Computing & Controls Lab for GE at the Research Center in Niskayuna, NY. He received his M.S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Clarkson University. As part of the center, he focuses on the development of industrial software and networking technologies to enable controls convergence for GE. He is a highly skilled software architect and technologist with a focus on safety-critical real-time embedded systems. Prior to joining GE, he worked on mission critical systems for Lockheed Martin related to autonomous systems. Some of those programs include USMC Cargo UAS, Army’s Autonomous Technologies for Unmanned Air Systems and ONR’s Autonomous Aerial Cargo/Utility System.

Joseph is the Vice General Manager at inwinSTACK. He is responsible for marketing and community development. During the last 10 years, he has been involved with technology innovation as an experienced IT industry evangelist.

Juha Oravainen is a member of the LF Edge Governing Board & the Head of Open Source Software for Cloud at Nokia. He has extensive experience in the telecommunication world after joining Nokia 1994. Juha has had several responsibilities in GSM, 3G, and 4G after moving to open source. Currently, Juha is coordinating Nokia’s open source activities and he is active in open source projects like Akraino, O-RAN Near-RT RIC, OpenStack, OPNFV, OCP, and CNCF.

Coming Soon

Kandan is the Director at AT&T labs. Kandan served on the OpenStack board of directors from 2017 to 2019. Kandan has led several opensource initiatives, and a big Open Source advocate. He has been vocal about the potential of 5G, Edge Computing and frequent speaker on the IEEE, OpenStack, Linux Foundation and other Opensource forums. He has more than 16 years of experience in Telecommunication industry.

Kevin is the Sr. Director of Software Ecosystem Development at Arm. In his current role, he is responsible for developing the open source and commercial software ecosystem. In previous roles, Kevin has driven software ecosystem, marketing and product management activity in start up and large enterprise solutions providers, across enterprise and carrier markets.

Martin Bäckström is a member of the LF Edge Governing Board & The Head of Industry Area Datacom. Martin is responsible for leading ICT technology convergence and fostering co-operation between industries in areas such as Software Defined Infrastructure, Virtualization, Cloud, Analytics, Automation, Digitalization, and IoT. Prior to this position, Martin joined Smart and PLDT in Manila in The Philippines as The Chief Technology and Information Advisor for several years. His previous positions in Ericsson include being head of Radio Technology Development, Principal designer for GPRS and Packet PDC, and CTO for Ericsson APAC Innovation. Martin has been actively participating in ICT technology evolutions from 2G, 3G, to 4G and 5G and actively leading engagements related to standardization and open source projects to drive for convergence and harmonization.

Melissa E. Evers-Hood is vice president in the Intel Architecture, Graphics, and Software group and general manager of Software Business Strategy at Intel Corporation. Her responsibilities span guiding the strategy and defining software strategies across Intel collaborating with teams and business units. Her team builds tools, insights, systems and processes to ensure our software initiatives drive maximum impact to Intel’s business.

Based in Portland, Oregon, Evers-Hood leads Intel’s open source software coordination, strategy and engagement in our associated communities. Outside of Intel, she is a member of the Linux Foundation board and serves as governing board chair of LF Edge, an umbrella project within the Linux Foundation.

Before assuming her current Intel role in 2019, Evers-Hood worked across the system software stack in open source communities, from device to edge to cloud. She has led development in a breadth of open source development areas, including Android, Chrome, graphics, media, OpenStack, Cloud Native Computing and StarlingX. In 2017, her contributions to Chrome OS earned her an Intel Achievement Award, the company’s highest recognition. Since joining Intel in 2004, Evers-Hood has worked across engineering, finance  and product management functions. Before joining Intel, she worked at Dell Inc. and Exxon Mobil Corp.

Evers-Hood holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. She also earned an MBA degree from the university’s McCombs School of Business. An active champion of diversity and inclusion, as well as a certified coach, Evers-Hood frequently coaches leaders internally and externally. She is also a frequent keynote speaker at industry events.

Coming Soon

Dr. (Peter) Moonki Hong has been taking responsibilities for technical and business enabling project management based on Edge/IoT open source ecosystem in Samsung Electronics. His open source contributions span from IoTivity and EdgeX Foundry to Home Edge Project in LF Edge since 2014 and he has one a several award like Outstanding Contributor Award from OCF (Open Connectivity Foundation) in 2017. He is currently leading Samsung’s open source activities in Home Edge in LF Edge, ONAP (Open Networking Automation Platform) in LF Networking, and O-RAN SC (Software Community) and so on, which must be core components to build up the innovative ecosystem in 5G and beyond 5G regarding open source projects. He is also a Samsung representative of OPC (Open Platform Communications) Foundation.

Vice President, Technology & Strategy at Radisys.

Mr. Ren Xudong（Bill Ren）is a member of the LF Edge Governing Board. He also serves as the General Manager of ICT Infrastructure Open Source Business at Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, and as the chief liaison officer of Huawei. He is fully responsible for the implementation of open source solutions for operators/enterprises in the network automation industry, using open source means to build industrial ecology, expand industrial space, build a healthy and harmonious industrial environment, and support the success of the company’s business.

Bill Ren holds a Bachelor Degree from Shanghai Jiaotong University. Since Joining Huawei in 1998，Bill served as an Intelligent Network Research and Development Engineer, Product Manager and Architect of India Branch, General Manager of Business OSS, Vice President of Network OSS, Vice President of Network OSS Strategy and MKT, Vice President of Solution MKTG, etc. He has accumulated rich experience in R&D, marketing and product management.

Rob has been creating software to automate infrastructure for over 20 years. His latest startup, RackN, focuses on providing continuously integrated data center capabilities for both Edge and Enterprise. He has been involved in numerous open source efforts including LF Edge (Board), CNCF (SIG Chair) and OpenStack (Board). He is also co-host of the L8ist Sh9y podcast. Rob received degrees from Duke University and Louisiana State University.

Rohit is the head of business development for Multi Access Edge Computing at HPE. Rohit has been with HPE for over 4 years and is driving HPE’s 5G and MEC strategy for Telecom service providers. Rohit has been in the telecom industry for over 12 years and have successfully led critical projects like NFV transformation and virtual RAN.

Prior to joining HPE, Rohit was at Ericsson where he was part of the CTO team.

Rohit graduated from University of Southern California with a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering.

Saji is a technologist with 25+ years of industry experience. During his distinguished career, he has made outstanding contribution in the areas of Platforms, Data Center, High Performance Compute, Automation & System Integration. He created multiple practices and incubated many new IPs at Wipro, contributing significantly to the value of IT overall.

Wipro’s FluidState Data center was a product that was developed and launched by Saji and was the industry’s first blueprint for converged infrastructure. He also designed and deployed Wipro’s public cloud, which was one of the 1st public clouds to go live in the Indian sub-continent. Modular remote liquid cooled Edge data centers as resilient Edge computing was another recognized product launched by him and was nominated for many global awards.

In his current position he carries the charter to transform Wipro’s infrastructure services offerings to address the requirements of the digital era. He drives the innovation themes Wipro is investing into namely 5G Edge, AI Ops, Blockchain application.

Tom is the co-founder and CEO of Dianomic, a major contributor of the LF-Edge project “Fledge”; an open source framework and community for the industrial edge focused on critical operations. Fledge developers build smarter, better, cheaper industrial solutions for: condition-based monitoring, predictive maintenance, smarter machines and situational awareness all integrated with the operator’s existing “brown field” systems.

Tom is a serial computer software and services entrepreneur with broad experience in networking, security, database and cloud-based service offers. Tom and his teams have raised over $400M in funding and had 5 exits totaling more than $3.5B.

Tom is Technical Director for NFV at Red Hat where he leads a team of some 25 engineers focusing on the area of Open Source Networking including SDN, NFV, data plane acceleration, Open Daylight and container networking efforts. In addition, Tom works across Red Hat’s products and business to strengthen and sure up its networking technologies around these products by working on M&A, partner and company strategy. Tom continues working as an Apache Committer and as co-Maintainer of The Public Yang Repository on GitHub.

Prior to Red Hat, Tom was a Distinguished Engineer at Brocade where he was The Chief Architect of Open Source in the Software Business Unit. Tom lead teams responsible for building commercial products based on open source, as well as contributions to upstream open source projects such as Open Daylight, OPNFV and OpenStack. Tom is co-chair of the IETF NETMOD Working Group, which is responsible for the standardization of the Yang modeling language as well as Yang models.

Trevor Conn is the Chair of the EdgeX Foundry Core Working Group and has been developing software for over 20 years. He has in-depth experience in designing and building distributed platforms based on event-driven, reactive programming models and microservices. Prior to his involvement with EdgeX Foundry his team pioneered Dell’s migration toward Pivotal Cloud Foundry, enabling application development and practices for robust support in the cloud.

Lead product Manager at MobiledgeX laying out the infrastructure and virtualization landscape to move immersive and AI applications towards edge. In past Led the technology strategy and architecture for Verizon Internet services platform and was a founding engineer at affirmed networks. Active contributor in Linux and author at IETF. I am very interested in data-path programmability and accelerations which can be open-sourced for community benefit.

Walid Negm is Altran’s Group Chief Innovation Officer and has responsibility for bringing the latest innovations to clients through R&D activity in Altran global centers. He is a member of Altran’s Global Executive Committee. In addition to overseeing Altran’s technology strategy, Walid is responsible for new capability (including Open Source software) development in strategic areas of 5G/Edge, Digital Therapeutics, ADAS/AD and VTOL/ Electrification. Walid launched the Open Source and co-innovation model at Altran accelerating innovation in SDN/NFV, Blockchain and Cyber Security and is currently a member of the Linux Foundation Edge (LF Edge) Governing Board. Previously, Walid was Accenture’s global lead of R&D and helped launched Accenture’s cloud platform and established Accenture’s Washington, DC cyber defense lab. Walid co-founded network security and mobile infrastructure startups and earned his bachelor and master of science in computer engineering from Boston University. He earned his masters of business administration from Georgetown University.

Previously, Wenjing was a Distinguished Engineer at Dell Research and a Chief Architect at VMware. He was an entrepreneurial technologist in the startups Sentient Networks, Inc. and WiFi pioneer Airespace, Inc., both of which were acquired by Cisco and whose flagship products became major business lines at Cisco Systems. He was a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco and also held the position of Senior Director of Product Management in Security at Nokia.

Mr. Yachen Wang is the General Manager of Wireless and IoT Network Center in Tencent. He is mainly leading in Tencent IoT Network, 5G, edge computing, Radio and wireless network related technical research, platform development and network deployment. before Mr. Yachen Wang joined in Tencent, he was the Deputy General Manager of Network Technology and AI R&D Center in China Mobile, President of ONAP, Vice Chair of Linux Networking Fund including ONAP, ODL, OPNFV etc. and Vice-Chairman of ITU-T SG13 IMT-2020/5G Working Party. He has much experience in 4G/5G, NFV/SDN, network evolution, international standardization, and open source etc.