Innovation Talks

Dr. Neha Rungta
Applied Science Director, AWS Identity

Dr. Neha Rungta, a Director of Applied Science in AWS Identity, specializes in automated reasoning, a field of artificial intelligence that derives new conclusions from logical statements. Neha’s passion lies in developing products that use automated reasoning to benefit all AWS customers. Examples of AWS products using her work include Amazon S3 Block Public Access, AWS Identity and Access Management Access Analyzer, Cedar policy language, and Amazon Verified Permissions. Prior to her role at AWS, Neha made significant contributions to symbolic execution, automated program analysis, and airspace modeling as a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

Kurt Kufeld
Vice President, AWS Platforms

In his current role as VP of AWS Platform, Kurt Kufeld owns Cloud Operations, Commerce Platform (billing), Cryptography, External Security Services, and Identity (IAM, directory services, tagging, organizations, infrastructure as code, etc.). As Kurt puts it, “These teams form the glue that make AWS possible.” Kurt has a degree in Computer Engineering and joined Amazon in 2000 after spending 13 years building large, distributed control systems for the oil industry. He has held a number of positions throughout Amazon, with a heavy focus on difficult-to-deliver, large cross-company initiatives. In his prior positions at Amazon, he led the migration from a monolithic website page generation architecture to SOA and owned the Amazon Retail consumer ordering systems while they were undergoing a major rearchitecture to help scale with the business. Prior to his current role, he moved to AWS to lead the Silk browser initiative (the browser on Kindle Fire tablets).

Hart Rossman
Vice President of Security for AWS Sales, Marketing, and Global Services

Hart Rossman is the Vice President of Security for AWS Sales, Marketing, and Global Services (SMGS), including the AWS Support, AWS Managed Services, AWS Professional Services, and AWS Training and Certification businesses. He is responsible for leading a team of geographically distributed AWS builders who help customers realize the benefit of galactic-scale security solutions in the cloud with a focus on innovating and deeply collaborating with teams across the broader AWS organization and with AWS Partners. Hart has been with AWS since 2012, originally joining as an individual contributor and evolving into the leader for the AWS Professional Services Global Security and Infrastructure practice working with AWS enterprise customers to design, build, and optimize their security, DevOps, and cloud infrastructure architecture to drive business results at planetary scale before moving into his current leadership role with SMGS. Prior to joining AWS, Hart worked for over a decade as a systems integrator in the defense and intelligence, finance, and energy segments. He has earned a CISSP certification, a CSSLP certification, a BA in Communication from the University of Maryland, College Park, and an MBA from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Emily Webber
Principal Annapurna Labs ML SA, AWS

Emily Webber is a Principal Machine Learning Specialist Solutions Architect and keynote speaker at AWS, where she has led the development of countless solutions and features on Amazon SageMaker. She has guided and mentored hundreds of teams, developers, and customers in their machine learning journeys on AWS. Emily specializes in large-scale distributed training in vision, language, and generative AI. She served as the General Chair for the first and second annual IEEE WACV workshops on pretraining foundation models. She hosts YouTube and Twitch series on the topic, regularly speaks at AWS re:Invent, writes many blog posts, and leads workshops in this domain worldwide. Emily served as the tech leader for the AWS Generative AI Foundations Technical Field Community before joining the Annapurna Labs ML SA team to help customers realize price performance gains with AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia. She is also the author of Pretrain Vision and Large Language Models in Python: End-to-end techniques for building and deploying foundation models on AWS.

Tal Rabin
Director, Cryptographic Foundations, AWS

Tal Rabin is the Director of the Cryptographic Foundations group at AWS. Prior to joining AWS, she was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania, the Head of Research at Algorand Foundation, and worked at IBM Research for 23 years as a Distinguished Research Staff Member and Manager of the Cryptographic Research Group.

Tal is a cryptographer by training and her research focuses on secure multiparty computation, threshold cryptography, and proactive security. She initiated and organizes the Women in Theory Workshop, a biennial event for graduate students in Theory of Computer Science. Tal is currently Chair of the SIGACT Executive Committee. She is an ACM Fellow, an IACR Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Tal’s work won the Dijkstra Prize of 2023 and the 30-year Test of Time Award at ACM STOC. She was the 2019 recipient of the RSA Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics and was named by Forbes in 2018 as one of the World’s Top 50 Women in Tech. In 2014, Tal won the Anita Borg Women of Vision Award for Innovation and was ranked No. 4 on Business Insider’s 22 Most Powerful Women Engineers in the World.

Shai Halevi
Senior Principal Scientist, AWS

Dr. Shai Halevi received his PhD in Computer Science in 1997 from MIT. He was a Principal Researcher with IBM Research until 2019, then a Research Fellow at the Algorand Foundation until 2023 before joining AWS as a Senior Principal Scientist in July 2023. Shai is a Fellow and a Director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. He received the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award and several Best Paper and Test of Time Awards for his works. Shai also wrote HElib, the first open source software library for homomorphic encryption.

Hugo Krawczyk
Senior Principal Scientist, AWS

Hugo Krawczyk is an Argentine-Israeli cryptographer best known for co-inventing the HMAC message authentication algorithm and contributing in fundamental ways to the cryptographic architecture of central internet standards, including IPsec, IKE, and SSL/TLS. In particular, both IKEv2 and TLS 1.3 use Hugo’s SIGMA protocol as the cryptographic core of their key exchange procedures. He has also contributed foundational work in the areas of threshold and proactive cryptosystems and searchable symmetric encryption, among others.

Hugo is the author of many other cryptographic algorithms and protocols, including the HMQV key exchange protocol, the LFSR-based Toeplitz Hash Algorithm, the shrinking generator encryption scheme, the UMAC message authentication code, and the randomized hashing scheme for strengthening digital signatures. He won the RSA Conference Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics in 2015, the Levchin Prize for contributions to real-world cryptography in 2018, and two IBM corporate awards. He is a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) and the recipient of the 2019 NDSS Test of Time Award for his 1996 paper, “SKEME: A versatile secure key exchange mechanism for internet,” a precursor to KEM-based key exchange protocols central to developing post-quantum key exchange standards.

Peter M. O’Donnell (moderator)
Principal Solutions Architect, Security, AWS

Peter M. O’Donnell is an AWS Principal Solutions Architect (SA) specializing in security, risk, and compliance with the Strategic Accounts team. He has been an AWS SA for nine years and supports some of the largest and most complex strategic customers in security and security-related topics, including data protection, cryptography, identity, threat modeling, compliance, security culture, CISO engagement, and more.

A former Unix System Administrator turned Risk Management Consultant, Peter joined AWS as an Enterprise Solutions Architect in 2015 and was dedicated to a major US bank to support their journey to go all in on the cloud. In 2019, he transitioned to a Security Specialist SA role with the Strategic Accounts team, where he has built deep technical relationships with security teams and CISOs by helping to keep them safe and secure on AWS.

Peter has passed the Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional, and Security Specialty AWS Certification exams. He received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems from American University and an MBA from George Washington University.