About Alexy

I am an Open-Source Science and AI community leader, and a community-led devrel/GTM strategy advisor and executive in the San Francisco Bay Area and globally.

I am an Agentic AI and Language Model pioneer, having been co-advised by Prof. George Cybenko at Dartmouth.

I’ve created and built the Open-Source Science initiative at NumFOCUS as the OSS strategy for science, as well as the Map of Science project (MOSS). I am the founding elected Chair of OSSci at NumFOCUS and the MOSS Interest Group Chair.

Previously I was a founding Open-Source Science Director at IBM Research, a General Manager of the Reactive Foundation (at Linux Foundation), a Chief Community Officer of the Trusted IoT Alliance, a Chief Scientist at Nitro, and a founder/Research Engineer/Director of Analytics at various internet startups and enterprises, including Amazon. Some of my handles are @chiefscientist on X and Telegram, and chiefscientist on LinkedIn. I used to move between industry and academia until I finished my Ph.D. from UPenn and moved to the startup capital of the world, San Francisco, to join, found, lead, and advise innovative technology communities.

I’ve created and run Scala By the Bay, the biggest meetup-driven Scala conference in the world, and the main one on the US West Coast. We started in 2013 as the Silicon Valley Scala Symposium, for FunConf, and continued in 2014 as Scala By the Bay. In 2015 we added Big Data Scala and a unique SMACK Stack training in between, and in 2016 we morphed Scala into Scalæ, reflecting the diversity of the SMACK Stack and expansion beyond Scala into Java, Clojure, Go, Haskell, Erlang, Rust, C++11, and all other ways to put together SMACK Stacks, and just Scale since 2017. The conference went online during Covid and returned live to its home in Oakland in 2023.

From 2014 to 2016, I was the first Chief Scientist at Nitro, a public Australian company with a San Francisco HQ and global engineering. I’ve helped hire and lead an innovative ML team using Spark for NLP at scale. The hiring was done through the community and lead to high quality and no recruiter fees. It also established Nitro reputation as OSS leader, punching much above its weight. I ran Scala and Spark meetups at the HQ and in Dublin offices. Brought in the VP Engineering, who replatformed the company on AWS, and initiated a strategic M&A that brought in the head of product and the director of ML. I later advised Nitro on its M&A strategy.

In March 2017, I built a new, groundbreaking AI By the Bay conference:

oh.hai.ai — an AI 101 conference, taught by the AI leaders
self.driving.cars — the first AI-centric Self-Driving Cars conference
ai.vision — foundational AI strategy conference by full-stack AI leaders

In 2023, AI By the Bay returned with the Reliable Agentic AI focus. I convened a Reliable Agentic AI Manifesto as the framework of the distributed system reliability topic to undergird the agents.

In April 2017, I created and moderated the first AI panel at Bosch Connected World, working directly with the Bosch VP of Partnerships.

In June 2018, I created and ran Rethink Trust, the first Enterprise Blockchain Engineering conference, held in Amsterdam.

From September 2018 to January 2020, I was the Chief Community Officer of the Trusted IoT Alliance. We ran an electric Jaguar with Bosch from Barcelona to Berlin, enabling startups innovating on the blockchain in Munich, Stuttgart, Zurich, and Paris. I set up design meetings at BMW, Siemens, and Daimler, and we ran a joint Siemens/Bosch event as the Siemens HQ running a blockchain/IoT cooperation project onsite (Bosch Jaguar entering Siemens parking lot by permission). I ran the jury and gave the awards for our design challenges at the Bosch Connected World 2019.

Throughout 2020, I’ve been the founding General Manager of Reactive Foundation, a Linux Foundation project dedicated to reactive systems, both those that are elastic and resilient and those enabling efficient cloud dataflows with backpressure. In that role, I’ve updated its board, set up its structure, produced and programmed Reactive Summit 2020, which was sequenced and co-produced with Scale By the Bay 2020, both online in an innovative immersive environment.

In 2020, I started Quantum Conversations, an online community of researchers, practitioners, and learners of Quantum Computing, originally based on the West Coast and then opened globally, in collaboration with IBM.

In 2022, I created Open-Source Science at NumFOCUS, and as OSSci Director at IBM, had it funded and established, and hired for it both at NumFOCUS and IBM. I’ve set up the whole organization with a Steering Committee, Interest Groups, and established and led the MOSS project to map all of OSS used to accelerate science.

In 2023, I was a cofounder and convener of the AI Alliance, bringing in dozens of key companies, startups, and universities advancing OSS AI. I established the Community working group, and as its founding Head of Community, we were the first to meet and lead the Alliance. The folks I brought to IBM are leading and co-leading core engineering workstreams. The community partners I’ve found and brought to the Alliance are key to its OSS deliverables.

Also in 2023, I helped establish Generative AI Commons at the Linux Foundation for AI and Data, and was elected its first Chair.

In 2024–2026, I was the AI Community Architect at Neo4j, positioning it as an Agentic AI company in the OSS AI ecosystems around the world.

In 2026, I founded CR4AI, the Community Research Center for Reliable AI at Northeastern University, based in Oakland at the former Mills College, now the Northeastern Oakland campus.