Faculty

Ed Watal is the founder and principal of Intellibus, an IT strategy consultancy with 65 transformation consultants based in Reston, Virginia. He regularly serves as a board advisor to the world’s largest financial institutions. C-level executives rely on him for IT strategy & architecture due to his business acumen & deep IT knowledge. He has also built and sold several Tech & AI startups. Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, he worked in some of the largest global financial institutions, including RBS, Deutsche Bank, and Citigroup. He is the author of numerous articles and one of the defining books on cloud fundamentals called 'Cloud Basics.' Ed has substantial teaching experience and has served as a lecturer for universities globally, including NYU and Stanford.

Jepson Taylor has over 18 years of machine-learning experience. After studying chemical engineering, Taylor worked for Intel/Micron in applied semiconductor building process control and fault models. After that, he worked as a quant at a hedge fund on a 600 GPU cluster. Taylor then joined a young Sequoia-backed HR startup called HireVue to run their data group as their Chief Data Scientist, where he delivered 14 patents in AI. In 2017 Taylor co-founded Zeff.ai to pursue deep learning for image, audio, video, and text for the enterprise. Zeff was acquired by DataRobot in 2020 where Taylor worked as their Chief AI Evangelist until resigning in July 2022. Taylor then joined DataIku as their Chief AI Strategist and left in December 2023 to pursue his new venture. He is now a co-founder of an AI startup bringing a revolutionary B2C product to the market.