Dr. Valliappa (Lak) Lakshmanan is the Director for Data Analytics and AI Solutions on Google Cloud where his team builds software solutions for business problems using Google Cloud’s data analytics and machine learning products. Dr. Lakshmanan founded Google’s Advanced Solutions Lab ML Immersion program and is the author of three O'Reilly books and several Coursera courses. Prior to joining Google, he was the Director of Data Science at Climate Corporation and a Research Scientist at NOAA. Dr. Lakshmanan has a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Oklahoma, a Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering from Ohio State University and a Bachelor of Technology in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India.