More speakers to follow.
Sam Smith
Sam Smith, the inventor of KERI.
Samuel received a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Brigham Young University in 1991. He spent 10 years at Florida Atlantic University, reaching full professor status before retiring to become an entrepreneur.
Dr. Smith is a serial entrepreneur and an active participant in open standards development and governance.
He has over 100 refereed publications in the areas of machine learning, autonomous vehicle systems, automated reasoning, and decentralized systems. He was principal investigator on numerous federally funded research projects.
Karla McKenna
Karla McKenna is an international standards specialist in financial services. Ms. McKenna is Managing Director, GLEIF Americas, as well as Head of Standards for the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation. Ms. McKenna led the development of the digital use of the LEI, concentrating on the implementation of the verifiable LEI (vLEI), and is also responsible for facilitating the development and implementation of GLEIF standards and leveraging international standards to maximize data quality and the operational integrity of the Global LEI System. Ms. McKenna chaired the International Organization for Standardization Technical Committee 68 (ISO/TC 68), Financial services, from 2006 to 2018, and continues ISO work in the areas of standards interoperability and regulatory use of international standards as co-convenor of the TC 68 Standards Advisory Group.
Ms. McKenna is a member of the inaugural Boards of the Eurofiling Foundation and the KERI Foundation, the Steering Committee of Trust over IP, and the transitional Board of the Ayra Foundation; is the Immediate Past Chair of the Securities Market Practice Group (SMPG) and also has served on the Boards of XBRL International, the International Securities Association for Institutional Trade Communication (ISITC) and the Accredited Standards Committee X9 (ASC X9).
Ryan Hansen
Ryan Hansen has nearly 30 years of experience designing and building software solutions in a broad range of industries, including FinTech, healthcare, and digital identity. Ryan is a core engineer on the KERI Foundation team, focused on improving the KERI developer experience and building tools to help organizations more easily understand, adopt, and deploy KERI solutions in the real world.