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CAIS 2026 Committees

The people who shaped the inaugural ACM Conference on AI and Agentic Systems.

Steering Committee

The Steering Committee provides strategic guidance and academic oversight for ACM CAIS, ensuring the conference maintains the highest standards of scientific rigor and relevance to the AI and agentic systems community.

Steering Committee

Graham Neubig

Carnegie Mellon University & All Hands AI

Associate Professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and Chief Scientist at All Hands AI. Creator of OpenHands, the open-source AI agent platform achieving state-of-the-art results on SWE-Bench for agentic code generation. Built TheAgentCompany benchmark for evaluating AI agents on real-world workplace tasks. Area Chair at ACL and NeurIPS. PhD from Kyoto University. 52,000+ citations.

Steering Committee

Lingjiao Chen

Microsoft Research

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

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

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.

Steering Committee

Thang Luong

Google DeepMind

Principal Scientist and Director of Research at Google DeepMind, leading the Superhuman Reasoning team. Co-founder of Project Meena, which evolved into LaMDA and Bard. Principal Investigator on AlphaGeometry (Nature, 2024) and leader of the first AI to achieve gold-medal standard at the International Mathematical Olympiad (2025). Inventor of LuongAttention, key to upgrading Google Translate. ACL 2025 Test-of-Time Award winner. PhD from Stanford University. 52,000+ citations.

Steering Committee

Michele Catasta

Replit

President and Head of AI at Replit, where he architected and launched Replit Agent. Previously Head of Applied Research at Google X and Google Labs, contributing to PaLM and PaLM 2 coding capabilities. Research Scientist and Instructor at Stanford University, pioneering Transformer architectures for source code. PhD in Computer Science from EPFL. Research positions at MIT Media Lab, Google, and Yahoo Labs.

Steering Committee

Chris Potts

Stanford & Bigspin AI

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

Dawn Song

UC Berkeley

Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence. Leading researcher on AI safety and security for agentic systems. Creator of the LLM Agents MOOC (32,000+ learners) and organizer of the inaugural Agentic AI Summit. MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Senior Fellow. Most cited scholar in computer security (AMiner). ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. PhD from UC Berkeley.

Steering Committee

Ion Stoica

UC Berkeley

Professor at UC Berkeley EECS and Director of SkyLab. Co-creator of Ray, the distributed computing framework powering compound AI infrastructure at OpenAI, Netflix, and Uber. Co-founder of Databricks ($62B) and Anyscale. Creator of Apache Spark and Apache Mesos. His lab produced vLLM (high-throughput LLM serving) and Chatbot Arena (crowdsourced LLM evaluation). Member of the National Academy of Engineering. ACM Fellow. Winner of the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award. PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.

Steering Committee

Heather Miller

CMU & Two Sigma

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.

Organizing Committee

The Organizing Committee manages the day-to-day planning and execution of CAIS 2026, including program development, logistics, and community engagement.

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 AI

Founder and CEO of Mithril, building AI infrastructure for compound and agentic systems. Co-author of compound AI systems scaling laws and networks-of-networks theory. Jared conducted his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University and was formerly a research scientist at DeepMind where he worked on mathematical and systems methods for scalable deep learning, including early work on linear attention, transformer scaling, and neural diffusion techniques.

Heather Miller

CMU & Two Sigma

General Co-Chair & Program Co-Chair

Avi Sil

Oracle

Program Co-Chair

Senior Director of AI & Applied Science at Oracle. Former Principal Research Scientist and Manager at IBM Research, where he led foundational work in natural language processing, multilingual question answering, and enterprise AI systems. He currently leads Oracle's efforts on enterprise-grade AI agents and applied LLM research, bridging academic advances with real-world deployment at scale.

Omar Khattab

MIT EECS & CSAIL

Program Co-Chair

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.

Bogdan Stoica

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Artifact Evaluation Chair

Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research lies at the intersection of systems, programming languages, and AI, with a focus on improving the reliability and efficiency of software systems. He is the recipient of an Eckhardt Scholarship and a Distinguished Artifact Evaluator Award (EuroSys '25).

Josh Quicksall

cmpnd

Sponsorship Chair

Brand Strategy and Communications Lead at cmpnd, supporting the DSPy ecosystem and compound AI community. Previously Communications Manager at Carnegie Mellon's Software and Societal Systems Department, where he led a departmental rebrand, grew social audiences over 500%, and advised faculty leadership on communications strategy spanning AI, privacy engineering, and HCI.

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.

Program Committee

The Program Committee reviewed paper and demo submissions for CAIS 2026.

Program Co-Chairs

Avi Sil

Oracle

Heather Miller

Carnegie Mellon University

Omar Khattab

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Demo Co-Chairs

Bonan Min

Airbnb

Sri Harsha Yayi

Intuit

Yogarshi Vyas

Oracle

Area Chairs

Architectural Patterns & Composition

Pradeep Dasigi

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Yu Su

Ohio State University

Evaluation & Benchmarking

Shuyan Zhou

Duke University

Security & Privacy

Alina Oprea

Northeastern University

Cristina Nita-Rotaru

Northeastern University

System Optimization & Efficiency

Niranjan Balasubramanian

Stony Brook University

Engineering & Operations

Haoran Qiu

Microsoft Azure Research

Program Committee Members (207)

Anurag Acharya

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Emre Can Acikgoz

UIUC

Lakshya A Agrawal

UC Berkeley

Aditya Akella

The University of Texas at Austin

Kerem Akillioglu

University of Waterloo

Meysam Alizadeh

University of Zurich

Saad Alqithami

Albaha University

Anastasios Angelopoulos

LMArena

Negar Arabzadeh

UC Berkeley

Abhinav Arun

Domyn

Shubhi Asthana

IBM Research

Anish Athalye

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Rajveer Bachkaniwala

Georgia Institute of Technology

Razan Baltaji

UIUC

Shraddha Barke

University of California at San Diego

Yogesh Barve

Vanderbilt University

Brad Behnke

Intuit

William Berrios

Contextual AI

Léo Boisvert

ServiceNow Research, Mila -Quebec AI institute, Polytechnique Montréal

Marisa Boston

Reins AI

Luca Buratti

IBM

Rui Cai

UC Davis

Yuchen Cai

The University of Texas as Dallas

Lei Cao

MIT CSAIL / U Arizona

Paul Castro

IBM Research

Z. Berkay Celik

Purdue University

Om Chabra

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Madhurima Chakraborty

Axiarete.ai

Rong-Ching Chang

UC Davis

Muhammad Ahmed Chaudhry

Stanford University

Yimeng Chen

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, KAUST

Zixiao Chen

Microsoft

Abhilash Chenreddy

Microsoft

Tejas Chopra

Netflix

Sai Sree Laya Chukkapalli

IBM Research

Hy Dang

University of Notre Dame

Debanshu Das

Google

Xiang Deng

NeoCognition

Akshar Prabhu Desai

Google

Sourabh Deshpande

Accenture

Soumik Dey

Amazon Inc.

Tejas Dharamsi

Abhishek Dharmaratnakar

Google

Yuxiao Dong

Tsinghua University

Andrew Drozdov

Databricks

Gaoyuan Du

Amazon

Chenda Duan

UCLA

Oussama Elachqar

Oumi

Marquita Ellis

IBM Research

Murali Krishna Emani

Argonne National Lab

Anand Eswaran

IBM Research - India

Aideen Fay

Imperial College London

Benjamin Feuer

Stanford University

Alcides Fonseca

University of Lisbon

Carolina Fortuna

Jozef Stefan Institute

Jiayi Geng

Carnegie Mellon University

Ahmad Ghalayini

Microsoft

Tarun Gopinath

Amazon Rufus

Claire Le Goues

Carnegie Mellon University

Zhuohan Gu

MIT

Jiajing Guo

Bosch Research North America

Ishan Gupta

Netflix

Shrey Gupta

Boston College

Walid Hanafy

UMass

Shibo Hao

UCSD

Ahmed E. Hassan

Queen's University

Yifeng He

UC Davis

Smit Hinsu

YouTube / Google

Sameera Horawalavithana

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Amir Houmansadr

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Bodun Hu

University of Texas at Austin

Jingyuan Huang

Rutgers University

Ahmed Ibrahim

OpenAI

Michael Isaac

Carnegie Mellon University

Hamish Ivison

University of Washington

Reyhan Jabbarvand

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Rishabh Jain

eBay

Alexander Johansen

Stanford University

William Jurayj

Johns Hopkins University

Kostis Kaffes

Columbia University

Nik Kale

Cisco Systems

Keisuke Kamahori

University of Washington

Eunsuk Kang

Carnegie Mellon University

Amine El Khair

Nvidia

Khurram Khalil

U Missouri

Dmitrii Khizbullin

KAUST

Gyuwan Kim

University of California, Santa Barbara

Hoang-Bao Le

Dublin City University

Michael Le

IBM

Leon Leng

University of Washington

Hanchen Li

UC Berkeley

Tianyu Li

MIT / UW-Madison

Zixu Li

Sun Yat-sen University

Jiachen Liu

University of Michigan

Qin Liu

UC Davis

Shu Liu

UC Berkeley

Xiaoyi Lu

University of Florida

Xing Han Lu

McGill University

Muxi Lyu

UC Berkeley

Aman Madaan

xAI

Srirangan Madhavan

NVIDIA

Kevin Madura

AlixPartners

Michael Majurski

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Ziming Mao

UC Berkeley

Markos Markakis

MIT

Mark Marron

University of Kentucky

Shiva Mayahi

New Jersey Institute of Technology

Tasmiah Tahsin Mayeesha

U North Texas

Isaac Miller

cmpnd

Sewon Min

UC Berkeley

Muhammad Shujaat Mirza

Microsoft

Sasa Misailovic

UIUC

Ashirbad Mishra

eBay Inc.

Khalil Mrini

Oracle

Rohit Avinash Mujumdar

Target Corporation

Ajinkya Mulay

Artifact Evaluation Committee

The Artifact Evaluation Committee reviewed research artifacts for CAIS 2026 — software, datasets, and supporting materials submitted alongside accepted papers.

The Artifact Evaluation Committee roster will be published soon.