Leadership

Nelly Porter is a lead of the Confidential Computing in Google with over 10 years’ experience in platform security, virtsec, PKI, crypto, authentication, and authorization field. She is working on multiple areas in Google, from root of trust, Titan, to the Shielded and Confidential Computing, has 25 patents and defensive publications. Prior to working at Google, Porter spent some time working in Microsoft in the virtualization and security space, HP Labs advancing clustering story, and Scientix (Israel) as a firmware and kernel driver eng. She has two sons, both are in the CS field, one of them is working for Google.

Emily Fox is a DevOps enthusiast, security unicorn, and advocate for Women in Technology. She promotes the cross-pollination of development and security practices. She has worked in security for over 13 years to drive a cultural change where security is unobstructive, natural, and accessible to everyone. Her technical interests include containerization, least privilege, automation, and promoting women in technology. She holds a BS in Information Systems and an MS in cybersecurity. Serving as chair on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and co-chair for KubeCon+CloudNativeCon China 2021, Europe 2022, North America 2022, Europe 2023, and CloudNativeSecurityCon 2023, she is involved in a variety of open source communities and activities.

Anand Pashupathy is Vice President and General Manager of Security Software & Services (S3) Division in the Software and Advanced Technology Group where he leads a team of senior leaders to deliver security software technologies and services that activate and differentiate
silicon security features, and cultivate a high standard of security, operational & cultural excellence. Anand is also responsible for Intel’s Confidential Compute vision, strategy, and execution. Previously Anand has held many engineering, program wide and GM leadership
roles at Intel. Additionally, Anand has been granted six patents. Anand is a strong advocate for women and underrepresented people in technology, he serves as the Executive Sponsor for an internal employee resource group. For his advocacy and leadership contributions to diversity and inclusion, Anand received the 2023 Global Diversity and Inclusion Achievement Award for Executive Advocate for D&I. Outside of work, Anand and his family love to travel and experience cultures from around the world. He earned his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, and a Master’s degree in Computer Science and has been with Intel since the nineties.

Hugo Romero is a Vice President of Engineering and Head of Product Security at AMD. He oversees several key areas of Security Architecture, including Confidential Computing Architecture and Root of Trust Architecture. With extensive experience in both hardware and software security, Hugo brings a comprehensive expertise to his role. Prior to joining AMD, he spent 24 years at Qualcomm, where he honed his skills and contributed to numerous security innovations.

Manu Fontaine is the Founder and CEO of Hushmesh, a dual-use Public Benefit cybersecurity startup in the Washington DC area. The company believes that people, companies and democracies need safe and authentic data, just like they need clean water and stable electricity. To achieve this, Hushmesh leverages Confidential Computing to automate decentralized, pairwise, and end-to-end cryptographic security, at the person and non-person entity level and at global scale. Secured by the Universal Name System (UNS) and the Universal Certificate Authority (UCA), the Mesh provides global assurance of data provenance, integrity, authenticity, confidentiality and privacy for all entities. Manu lives with his wife in Northern Virginia, and is the proud father of two daughters pursuing electrical engineering and physics career paths.

Marc leads Ecosystem Development projects at Arm as part of the Infrastructure Line of Business. Marc is part of the Ecosystem Development team at Arm, leading projects with partners in the field of security and networking.  Marc is involved in a number of Linux Foundation projects including Parsec and Project Magma.  He is representing Arm on the governing board as well as the outreach committee of the Confidential Computing Consortium.

Mark is a Computer Scientist from Aarhus University, Denmark. He has extensive experience in cloud-native architecture, infrastructure as code, and blockchain architecture. His work has had a huge impact on products used today in industries such as fintech, IoT, and Telco. In his previous positions, he operated on various projects at TDC NET, Cloud-compliance solutions for Danske Bank, Managed product development for a real-time recommendation engine for Jyllands-Posten, and Toit creating the first secure IoT platform.

Michael O’Connor is a system software architect and senior director of software architecture at NVIDIA. Michael is the chief architect for Confidential Computing at NVIDIA and is also leading software architecture for NVIDIA AI Enterprise and NVIDIA Certified.  Prior to working in Confidential Computing, Michael led the open-source contribution efforts from NVIDIA for GPU optimizations in Deep Learning Frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, MXNet, and Caffe.

Mingshen is a research scientist at TikTok, leading applications and innovations of the trusted/confidential computing technologies. Previously, Mingshen worked on multiple open-source projects in security with trusted execution environments. In particular, he was fortunate to lead Apache Teaclave. Mingshen also published several academic papers on topics at the intersection of privacy and security, operating systems, and programming languages. Mingshen has two fluffy cats that keep playing hide and seek around the home all day.

Peixin Hou is currently serving as the Chief Architect of Open Software and Systems in the Central Software Institute, Huawei. He has been working in the software industry for over 20 years and has experience in operating systems, mobile software, media processing, and cloud computing. Peixin started his open source journey in 2000 and is now an active strategist and evangelist in the field. He is involved in defining various key strategies on open source for Huawei and leads the company’s FOSS development in areas such as Linux and containers. He also serves as a board or steering committee member in several open source projects, such as Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Core Infrastructure Initiative. Peixin has also represented Huawei on the board of Linaro.

Peixin received his Ph.D. from the University of Surrey, UK in electronic and electrical engineering.

Samuel is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Rivos, where he works on defining and implementing Confidential Computing and trusted IO on RISC-V platforms. He’s been working in the software industry for more than 15 years, and has experience with operating systems, virtualization, container technologies and cloud computing. Prior to joining Rivos, he worked for Nokia, Intel and Apple. Samuel is a long time open source contributor and maintainer. He co-created and still maintains multiple open source projects like e.g. Kata Containers, Cloud Hypervisor or Confidential Containers.

Shankaran is a technical lead manager for Network Platform Security at Meta leading efforts on Confidential Computing and platform Security. He has developed a platform for confidential computing and is also working on multiple areas from Platform root of trust, Intrusion Detection, to Anti-DDoS protection in Meta. Shankaran has over 15 years of experience in security. Prior to Meta, Shankaran worked at Netskope and Juniper Networks. At Netskope, he was the architect for deep application packet inspection engine powering inline CASB and worked on multiple data plane solutions from Data Leakage Prevention to Network Security. He has worked on SSL VPN and Mobile Security at Juniper Networks.

Stephen is a principal program manager working in the Azure team at Microsoft and leads the Governing Board for the Confidential Computing Consortium. Prior to that he was a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Stephen has been a technical executive, a founder, a writer, a systems developer, a software construction geek, and a standards diplomat. He has worked in the IT industry since 1980 as both customer and vendor, working with open source for 25 years. He blogs about open source and software business at “Once More unto the Breach”, opensource.com, and on Medium.

Dan Middleton is a Senior Principal Engineer with over 20 years at Intel. He has been privileged to develop and release products in emerging areas, including Services, SaaS, Computational Imaging, Blockchain, and Confidential Computing. Dan has a track record of leadership in the open-source ecosystem. He has represented Intel in other Linux Foundation projects, including Hyperledger, CNCF CoCo, and the Open Source Security Foundation.

Mike Ferron-Jones is the Go-to-Market Lead for Data Center Security Technologies at Intel. Mike joined Intel in 1994 and held product management, marketing, and sales roles across a wide range of technology areas in both client and data centres. He has covered Confidential Computing since 2020.

Rachel is a Lead Product Manager at IBM, specializing in data privacy and security, with a focus on confidential computing and AI technologies. She leads product development in Confidential Computing/Confidential AI strategy and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, helping companies ensure data compliance and security throughout the entire data lifecycle. Additionally, Rachel sits as chair of Outreach Committee at the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC), where she previously led the CC brand repositioning efforts, evolving the messaging from awareness “What is Confidential Computing” to adoption “Why it matters”.

Yash is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, where he is currently focused on productizing confidential computing technologies in RHEL and Red Hat OpenShift. Previously, Yash has been an active contributor to several open source projects related to Virtualization technologies including KVM userspace components like QEMU and libvirt, and has been a member of the CentOS Virt SIG.