University of Waterloo | School

Computer scientist, UC Berkeley professor, and Databricks co-founder and CTO. He created Apache Spark and works on systems for large-scale data, machine learning, and compound AI applications.

Nandan Thakur is a PhD student at the University of Waterloo working on information retrieval, vision-language models, inference optimization, and agentic systems. His public homepage says he is currently affiliated with Apple and Stanford and previously worked with researchers at Meta AI and NVIDIA.

NVIDIA's research page describes Jan Kautz as vice president of Learning and Perception Research, working across computer vision, machine learning, computational photography, and geometric vision.

Ahmad Al-Dahle joined Airbnb as Chief Technology Officer on January 14, 2026. Airbnb's announcement says he previously led Generative AI at Meta, founded Meta's Generative AI group in early 2023, and earlier studied engineering at the University of Waterloo and held senior technical leadership roles at Apple.

Michael Noukhovitch is a PhD candidate in artificial intelligence at Mila associated with Universite de Montreal. His public homepage lists interests including reinforcement learning, multi-agent systems, natural language processing, and agents with web and computer use.

Bashir Sadjad's public site says he is a software engineer at Google focused on healthcare data infrastructure; his public resume also lists long-running Google work including Cloud Healthcare efforts.

Dongfu Jiang is a Ph.D. student at the University of Waterloo affiliated with the Vector Institute and TIGER Lab. His homepage lists research interests in LLM and VLM post-training, multimodal evaluation, and agentic tool-use systems.

Matei Zaharia

Nandan Thakur

Jan Kautz

Ahmad Al-Dahle

Michael Noukhovitch

Bashir Sadjad

Dongfu Jiang