Oren is the founder of the AI2 Incubator, and the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), which he led from 2013 to 2022, and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Washington. A pioneer in applied AI, he has authored 200+ technical papers and founded multiple companies, including MetaCrawler, Farecast (acquired by Microsoft), and Decide.com (acquired by eBay). Oren has advised the White House, written for The New York Times and Nature, and shaped AI policy and research agendas globally. At the incubator, he helps founders bridge the gap between frontier research and commercial opportunity.

Ines Hanrahan, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission (WTFRC). She provides administrative leadership to the organization, oversight of the WTFRC staff, and contributes to strategic planning for the WTFRC. Ines strives to ensure all funding is geared towards investments in industry priority areas to enable increased productivity, improved product quality and to help growers stay economically viable in a globally competitive marketplace. She is committed to fostering vibrant public-private partnerships with tree fruit scientists worldwide, is highly dedicated to connecting with the next generation of industry professionals, both as a mentor and as an industry leader, and to setting a positive example for an increasingly diverse global work force. Her interest in farming is not only part of her roots, education, and work. Her family owns and operates a commercial tree fruit orchard in the Yakima valley that produces cherries, pears and apples. Ines received her Ph.D. in Horticulture from Washington State University.

Ananth Kalyanaraman is a Professor, Boeing Centennial Chair in Computer Science, and the Interim Director for the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University in Pullman. He is the Director of the NSF-USDA NIFA funded AgAID AI Institute for Transforming Workforce and Decision Support in agriculture. He holds a joint appointment at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and affiliate faculty positions at the Molecular Plant Sciences Graduate Program and the Paul G. Allen School for Global Health. Ananth received his bachelors from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology in Nagpur, India (B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering, 1998); and subsequently M.S. (Computer Science, 2002) and Ph.D. (Computer Engineering, 2006) from Iowa State University.

Ananth works at the intersection of parallel computing, graph analytics, and bioinformatics/computational biology. His focus is on developing algorithms and software for scalable analysis of large-scale data from various scientific domains and particularly agriculture, plant and life sciences. Research in his lab has been supported by various funding sources including the National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Ananth is a recipient of U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Award, and his student-led research works have received multiple conference best paper awards and a prestigious graph challenge award. Ananth serves/has served on the editorial boards of several reputed journals (including TPDS, TCBB, JPDC, ParCo), and also regularly serves in various capacities including organizational capacities at various conferences in the areas of parallel processing and bioinformatics. He is currently serving as a Vice-Chair for the IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel Programming (TCPP). Ananth is a senior member of IEEE, and a member of ACM and SIAM.

Derek I. Sandison was appointed Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) director in June 2015, where he continues to strengthen both Washington’s food and agriculture systems nationally and internationally. In the agriculture industry and beyond, he applies a solution-oriented approach to issues. Along with serving as director of WSDA, Derek currently serves on the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) Executive Board as the Second Vice President. He is also the immediate past president for the Western United States Agricultural Trade Association (WUSATA). A lifelong Washington resident, Sandison has worked in the private and public sectors for over 49 years. Before his appointment with the WSDA, he served as director of the state’s Office of Columbia River (OCR) within the Department of Ecology between 2008 and 2015. During that time, he developed and laid the groundwork for the future development of new large-scale water projects for cities, farms, and fish. Prior to his service with OCR, he was the Central Regional Director for the Department of Ecology. Sandison has a Master of Science in natural resource management and a bachelor’s degree in biological science, both from Central Washington University.