CAIS 2026 Leadership Committees
The team responsible for delivering the inaugural ACM Conference on AI and Agentic Systems.
Steering Committee
The Steering Committee provides strategic guidance and academic oversight for CAIS, ensuring the conference maintains the highest standards of scientific rigor and relevance to the compound AI systems community.
Steering Committee
Omar Khattab
MIT EECS & CSAIL
Assistant Professor at MIT EECS and CSAIL. Creator of DSPy, the leading framework for programming and optimizing compound AI systems, and ColBERT, which revolutionized neural information retrieval. PhD from Stanford advised by Matei Zaharia and Christopher Potts. Co-author of "The Shift from Models to Compound AI Systems." Apple Scholars in AI/ML Fellow. Winner of SIGIR 2025 Best Paper Award. 15,000+ citations.
Steering Committee
Chris Potts
Stanford & Amazon
Professor and Chair of Linguistics at Stanford University. Amazon Scholar. Senior researcher on DSPy and co-author of "The Shift from Models to Compound AI Systems." Creator of the Stanford Sentiment Treebank, winner of the ACL Test-of-Time Award. Faculty member of Stanford NLP Group, AI Lab, and HAI. Winner of ACL Best Paper Award 2024. 55,000+ citations.
Steering Committee
Naveen Rao
Unconventional AI
CEO and Co-Founder of Unconventional AI. Previously VP of AI at Databricks, leading Mosaic AI compound systems infrastructure. Founded Nervana Systems (acquired by Intel, $408M) and MosaicML (acquired by Databricks, $1.3B). Co-author of "The Shift from Models to Compound AI Systems." PhD in Computational Neuroscience from Brown University. Scientific Advisory Board Member, Allen Institute.
Steering Committee
Lingjiao Chen
Microsoft Research & Stanford
Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, AI Frontiers Group. PhD from Stanford advised by Matei Zaharia and James Zou. Co-author of "The Shift from Models to Compound AI Systems" and co-organizer of the inaugural Compound AI Systems Workshop. Creator of FrugalML/FrugalGPT for cost-efficient AI. Google PhD Fellow. Work cited in White House 2024 Economic Report.
Steering Committee
Jeff Dean
Google DeepMind
Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research. Co-lead of Gemini. Designer of MapReduce, BigTable, TensorFlow, and TPUs—foundational infrastructure enabling modern AI systems. Google's 30th employee and one of two Google Senior Fellows. Winner of the ACM Prize in Computing and IEEE John von Neumann Medal. Member of the National Academy of Engineering. 380,000+ citations.
Steering Committee
Monica Lam
Stanford University
Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield, Sequoia Capital Professor at Stanford University. Faculty Director of the Open Virtual Assistant Laboratory. Creator of Genie open virtual assistant platform and STORM multi-agent research system. Co-author of the "Dragon Book" compiler textbook. Winner of Wikimedia Foundation Research Award 2024. Member of the National Academy of Engineering. ACM Fellow. 54,000+ citations.
Organizing Committee
The Organizing Committee manages the day-to-day planning and execution of CAIS 2026, including program development, logistics, and community engagement.
Heather Miller
CMU & Two Sigma
General Co-Chair
Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon and VP at Two Sigma. Recipient of the Dahl-Nygaard Prize and ACM SIGPLAN Software Award for her work on Scala. Her research bridges distributed systems and AI infrastructure, including work on DSPy and the Language Model System Interface Model.
Matei Zaharia
UC Berkeley & Databricks
General Co-Chair
Associate Professor at UC Berkeley and Co-founder/CTO of Databricks. Creator of Apache Spark, MLflow, and Delta Lake. Lead author of "The Shift from Models to Compound AI Systems" and co-creator of DSPy. Winner of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.
Deepti Raghavan
Brown University
Workshop Co-Chair
Assistant Professor of CS at Brown University. Her research focuses on systems for ML, networking, and operating systems. She has received a Google ML and Systems Junior Faculty award, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and Distinguished Artifact Award at SOSP.
Lingjiao Chen
Microsoft Research
Workshop Co-Chair
Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research AI Frontiers. Co-author of the foundational compound AI systems blog post and co-organizer of the inaugural Compound AI Systems Workshop. His FrugalML work (NeurIPS 2020 Oral) enables 90% cost reduction in ML deployments.
Jared Quincy Davis
Mithril
Steering Committee
Founder and CEO of Mithril, building AI infrastructure for compound and agentic systems. Stanford PhD under Matei Zaharia and Jure Leskovec. Former Google DeepMind researcher; co-author of "Rethinking Attention with Performers" (11,000+ citations).
Interested in getting involved?
We're looking for reviewers, volunteers, and sponsors to help make CAIS 2026 a success.