Recent TVR Speakers
Cal Al-Dhubaib
Principal Technologist | Rubrik Cal Al-Dhubaib is a data scientist and entrepreneur who founded and scaled Pandata, an AI design and development firm focused on responsible AI for heavily regulated industries like healthcare, energy, and financial services, until its acquisition by Further in 2024. That experience led him to develop Trust Engineering for AI, a framework that shifts the focus from controls alone to rebalancing human-AI interaction to reduce risk.His insights carry weight because they come from the unglamorous middle ground of AI work—not the model itself, but everything around it: orchestration, observability, and the human judgment that decides whether an AI system can actually be trusted in production.
Christopher Kruegel
Professor | UC Santa Barbara - Chief Scientist | Cisco Security Christopher Kruegel is a Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara and Chief Scientist in Cisco's Security Business Group. Before that, he co-founded Lastline, holding roles from CEO to Chief Product Officer to Chief Scientist, until the company was acquired by VMware and later Broadcom.That blend of researcher and operator is why he's a natural fit for The Velocity Room: he's spent his career studying how attackers actually think.
Keith Townsend
Founder | CTO Advisor Keith Townsend has spent his career translating tech into business outcomes—advising Fortune 500 CIOs and CTOs, leading enterprise IT transformations, and building (then selling) his own research and media firm. He's been in the infrastructure trenches, he's fluent in cloud and AI strategy, and he knows how to make that case in the boardroom.
Kyle Turner
Vice President, Global Security Solutions Sales Engineering | Cisco Kyle Turner is SEVP at Cisco, where he leads security engineering strategy. Before Cisco, he spent two decades building and running systems engineering teams at companies including Splunk and Brocade, working directly with enterprise security and infrastructure organizations. Kyle brings a practitioner's perspective grounded in his hands-on background.
Matt Rein
Lead Sales Engineer | Dynatrace Matt Rein is a Lead Solutions Engineer at Dynatrace, with prior stops as Lead Sales Engineer at Ionic and Director of Software Development at ManageAmerica. He's also taught web development as an instructor at Nucamp Coding Bootcamp for the past several years. That range—developer, engineer, educator—means he can move between the code, the architecture, and the business case, and he's spent years explaining complex technical concepts to audiences in a way that clicks.
Naasief Edross
Chief Security Architect | World Wide Technology Naasief Edross is Chief Security Architect at World Wide Technology, where he works on security architecture and strategy for enterprise clients. Naasief's background spans Google, where he led product for GKE's AI and ML platform and cloud runtime security, and Cisco's Security Business Group, where he focused on integrating the security portfolio for investigations and incident response. He brings a builder's view of security across cloud, container, and now AI infrastructure.
Steve Wilson
Chief AI and Product Officer | Exabeam Steve Wilson is the Chief AI and Product Officer at Exabeam, a global cybersecurity innovator. He founded and co-chairs the OWASP Gen AI Security Project, the organization behind the industry-standard OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model Security list.His award-winning book, "The Developer’s Playbook for Large Language Model Security" (O'Reilly Media), was selected as the best Cutting Edge Cybersecurity Book by Cyber Defense Magazine.Steve contributed to the development of Java at Sun Microsystems and held leadership positions at industry giants Citrix and Oracle. He holds 11 U.S. and international patents, and was named the Cybersecurity Innovation Leader by Enterprise Security Tech.
Sundari Parekh
VP, AI Security, Strategy & Architecture | TrendAI Sundari Parekh is a cybersecurity executive with more than 25 years leading enterprise security strategy and risk management for organizations including Activision Blizzard King, CDW, and Allstream. Her work spans reducing enterprise vulnerabilities by the millions, building centralized risk functions from scratch, and standing up Business Information Security Offices that drive cybersecurity strategy across entire enterprises.What sets her apart for TVR's community: she's led AI governance and security strategy for Fortune 500 clients, turning complex AI security architecture into board-level business decisions—exactly the translation layer between technical risk and executive action that AI infrastructure teams need right now.
Tony Thomson
CTO & Co-Founder | Middle Ground Tony Thomson is the co-founder and CTO of Middle Ground, the first AI-powered workspace built for public consultation teams—the planners, consultants, and government staff who run engagement processes for infrastructure projects, policy decisions, and resource permitting - he's building AI tools for exactly the kind of complex, real-world coordination problems TVR's audience cares about.