A Strong Alliance of Industrial and Academia Experience

Salman Avestimehr
Co-founder
- More than 10 years academic, R&D, and management experience in information theory, machine learning and AI, distributed computing, and security/privacy
- Dean’s Professor of ECE and CS Departments at USC
- Director of USC-Amazon Center on Secure & Trusted ML
- Director of vITAL Research Lab
- Amazon Scholar in Alexa AI (2020-present)
- PhD, UC Berkeley (2008); IEEE Fellow
- Numerous awards for research, including a PECASE award from the White House (President Obama) and the Best Paper Award for FedML.ai
- Raised more than $25M in research funding from NSF, DARPA, ONR, ARO, and Industry
- Homepage: https://www.avestimehr.com/

Chaoyang He
Co-Founder
- 10 years R&D experience in top-tier Internet companies:
Principal Software Engineer and Engineering Manager, Tencent, 2014-2018; Senior Software Engineer, Baidu, 2012-2014; Software Engineer, Huawei, 2011-2012; Part-time researcher with Google/Facebook/Amazon (2018-present) - 3 years experience in engineering management and development with business & production-driven strategies for Tencent Cloud, Tencent WeChat Automotive / AI in Car, Tencent Games, Tencent Maps.
- PhD in CS, University of Southern California
- Industrial-level Awards: Tencent Outstanding Staff Award, 2015-2016 WeChat MyCar, Special Award for Innovation, 2016; Baidu LBS Group Star Awards, 2013 Q3&Q4
- Homepage: https://chaoyanghe.com/