Speaker: Irina Calciu
Location: Soda Hall, 510
Date: March 14th, 2025
Time: 12 – 1 pm PT
From Systems Research to AI Startups: Challenges and Opportunities in Enterprise AI
Abstract:
Enterprise AI has the potential to transform business operations and improve efficiency, reshaping how organizations leverage their data, gather insights, set goals, write code, and make strategic decisions. Despite its promise, enterprise AI remains challenging due to messy data, high infrastructure costs, scalability, usability and deployment barriers.
In this talk, I will discuss my journey from systems research to co-founding an AI startup, focusing on challenges and opportunities in enterprise AI. First, I will talk about why foundation models and retrieval augmented generation alone are not sufficient for real-world enterprise needs and how Graft tackles these issues. Next, I will discuss Project Peaberry, a hardware accelerator for disaggregated memory and live virtual machine migration at VMware, aimed to improve memory utilization and migration downtimes for enterprise AI workloads.
Speaker Bio:
Irina Calciu is a co-founder at Graft, an AI startup that unifies, enriches, and operationalizes an organization’s collective intelligence. Previously, she was a Sr. Researcher at VMware Research, where she worked on systems for disaggregated memory and helped establish VMware’s first hardware-software product group. Irina earned a PhD in Computer Science from Brown University, with a focus on distributed systems and concurrency. She has co-authored papers at top-tier conferences, including best papers at ASPLOS and Transact, and holds over 30 patents.