Toshinori "Tosh" Arita, Principal, Honda Strategic Venturing

Dr. Forest Baskett, General Partner

Greg Reznick, Pivotal Ventures, LLC

Sebastian Thrun, Professor, Stanford University & Director, Stanford AI Lab

Tosh is a founder and Principal of Honda Strategic Venturing (HSV), a corporate venture arm of Honda Motor based in Mountain View, California. HSV seeks for technology partners primarily in venture community to excel Honda's innovative activities, and invest in companies to support collaborative partnership to share and harness the innovative power between Honda engineers and entrepreneurs. Prior to joining Honda, he was a founder and CEO of eAgriMac, a startup providing web-based business services to food industry in Japan and Korea. Previously, he was a Merger and Acquisition banker in the investment banking division of JP Morgan in both New York and Tokyo, responsible mainly for Japanese clientele in automotive, chemicals, among others. Before that, he was a part of corporate advisory division of Fuji Bank (now Mizuho Financial Group), involved in US-Japan cross-border M&A transactions. Tosh holds an MBA from Graduate School of Business at University of Chicago and BA from Chuo University in Tokyo.
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Forest joined NEA in 1999 as a venture partner working with information technology companies. Present board memberships include Aeluros, Atheros Communications, Catalytic, E20 Communications, Fulcrum Microsystems, Nanochip and T-RAM. He also serves as an advisor to Chelsio Communications, DataDomain, FineGround Networks, Foveon, Luxtera, PolyServe, ReShape and Spreadtrum Communications. Previous board memberships include Newisys. He was previously Senior Vice President of R&D and Chief Technology Officer of Silicon Graphics Inc. He founded and directed the Western Research Laboratory of Digital Equipment Corporation from 1982 to 1986 before joining SGI. Prior to that he was a professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from 1971 to 1982. He also spent two years at Los Alamos National Laboratory building an operating system for the original Cray-1 computer and a year and a half at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center as a Principal Scientist doing VLSI research. At Stanford, he worked with Andy Bechtolsheim on the SUN workstation project, with Jim Clark on the Geometry Engine project, and with John Hennessy on the MIPS microprocessor project. Dr. Baskett received a BA in Mathematics from Rice University, a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
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Greg Reznick is a private investor and advisor to entrepreneurs. Most recently, he was president of the Xros Division of Nortel Networks. Xros developed the world's most advanced photonic cross connect, a key enabler in the deployment of the next generation All Optical Networks. He joined Xros in1998 and sold the company to Nortel Networks in 2000. Prior to Xros, Greg held executive management and senior marketing positions at firms including Silicon Vision, NetSource Communications, Micronics/Orchid Technology, and Media Vision. He participated in the formation of the Microcomputer Software Association, and was the founding Chairman of the Video Electronic Standards Association (VESA). Greg holds a BA and an MBA from Stanford University.
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Professor Sebastian Thrun is the Director of the Stanford AI Lab, home to more than 120 researchers at Stanford University, California. He recently changed to Stanford from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was an associate professor and held an endowed chair. Thrun has pioneered the area of probabilistic robotics, but also pursues research on machine learning, AI, and multi-agent systems. Thrun has won several best paper awards (AAAI-98, DAGM-98, ICRA-00, AAMAS-03, FSR-03, ICRA-03), and is a frequent keynote speaker at international conferences in AI and robotics (KI-05, ICAR-05, IROS-04, ICML-02, UAI-02, ECAI-02, NIPS-01, BNAIC-01, IJCAI-01, FSR-01). Thrun has published over 275 papers, including seven books and edited volumes, and he serves on the editorial board of a number of journals in robotics and AI. He was general chairperson of the 2003 NIPS conference and the 1998 CONALD conference, and is the founding chair of the 2005 Robotics Science and Systems conference.
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