Stan Shih / Acer's co-founder
Stan Shih, Acer’s co-founder, returned as Chairman in November 2013 with the objective of leading the company through a third corporate transformation and back to profitability.
Shih dedicated his efforts to promoting public interests after his initial retirement from Acer at the end of 2004. In recent years, he has been publicly speaking on the Wangdao ideology in relation to organizational sustainability in modern times, and hopes to engrain its principles into Acer to reshape the corporate culture. Through this, Shih expects to help Acer set a new business direction, develop more competitive products, and invest in new potential businesses of the future.
A social entrepreneur all his life, Shih serves as the chairman of Stans Foundation and iD SoftCapital Group. In social and public services, he is the chairman of APEC Digital Opportunity Center 2.0 project’s non-government steering committee, and the chairman of National Culture and Arts Foundation. He is on the board of directors of National Chiang Kai-Shek Cultural Center and Taiwan Public Television Service Foundation.
In 2007, Shih was a member of Taiwan’s special envoy to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders’ Summit in Sydney, Australia. In recognition of his long-term outstanding contributions, Shih received the Order of the Brilliant Star with Grand Cordon from the president of Taiwan in October 2011, and honored as one of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) Laureates in 2012.
Ming-Kai Tsai / Chairman and CEO, MediaTek Inc.
Ming-Kai (MK) Tsai is the chairman and CEO of MediaTek Incorporated, a leading fabless semiconductor company established in Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 1997. Under Chairman Tsai's leadership, MediaTek has grown to one of the top-three fabless semiconductor companies in the world, and is the first and only top-listed fabless semiconductor company headquartered outside USA. MediaTek ranks, by revenue, the largest in optical storage, optical disk players and DTV chipsets, and the second largest in mobile phone cellular baseband chipsets in the world.
Chairman Tsai received a BSEE from National Taiwan University and a MSEE from University of Cincinnati. He pioneered his early career to incubate and develop Taiwan's first IC design industry at the Electronic Research & Service Organization in Taiwan's esteemed Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), and thereafter at United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), where he held various senior positions. In 1994, he was made president of UMC's Business Unit II, which produced chipsets for consumer and multimedia products. Three years later, the division was spun off and formed into what is now MediaTek.
Chairman Tsai has received various awards and accolades for his achievements, including the ITRI Laureate Award, honorary doctoral degrees from National Tsing Hua University and National Chiao Tung University, and the Distinguished Graduate Alumni Award from National Taiwan University. In 2012, Chairman Tsai was recognized among "100 Best-Performing CEOs in the World" by Harvard Business Review, of which, he is among the group of 9 Best-Performing CEO's in the world's Information Technology Industry.
Simon Segars
/ CEO, ARM
Simon Segars joined the Board in January 2005 and was appointed CEO in July 2013. He was previously President. Earlier senior roles included EVP, Engineering; EVP, Worldwide Sales; EVP, Business Development; and EVP and General Manager of the Processor and Physical IP Divisions. He joined ARM in early 1991 and worked on many of the early ARM CPU products. He led the development of the ARM7 and ARM9 Thumb® families. He holds a number of patents in the field of embedded CPU architecture.
Shane Owenby /
Managing Director, APAC
Amazon Web Service
Shane Owenby has been the Managing Director of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Asia Pacific (APAC) since Oct 2009. In this capacity, Owenby leads the customer-facing teams that help organizations across APAC learn about and implement AWS cloud computing platform. His AWS management responsibilities include developing business through channels and alliances, growing customer base, supporting business operations and marketing.
Owenby has served customers across Asia Pacific for more than a decade, operating from Singapore for the past ten years and another two years from Sydney, Australia. The AWS APAC team helps customers across all business sizes ranging from start-ups, small and medium companies, enterprises, government agencies and educational institutions to accelerate their time to market, save money and focus on their core business by using AWS services.
With more than 18 years in the IT industry, Owenby began his career at IBM in Research Triangle Park on the east coast of the U.S., and then moved to CollabNet, a Silicon Valley startup. Prior to joining AWS, Owenby also held senior management positions at Oracle and Red Hat across the APAC region.
San-Cheng (Simon) Chang / Minister of Science and Technology
PhD in civil engineering from Cornell University, Simon has been a professor in Civil Engineering at National Taiwan University, Director of Planning & Evaluation at National Science Council, Vice President at Acer e-Business group, and more recently Regional Director of Hardware Operations at Google.
Since 2000, Simon has engaged in the building of data center and value-add services at Acer for over 10-years. In 2010, Simon became the Regional Director at Google overseeing the data center and infrastructure operations of Google in Asia. Overall Simon made noticeable contributions to cloud computing in Taiwan.
In 2012 the cabinet of Taiwan government was reformed and Simon became of the first cabinet member ever to come from the IT industry. In 2014, Simon was appointed the Minister of Science & Technology. On this position, Simon was responsible to continue the momentum of academic research, and foster the research results for practical applications.
* Speakers' profiles are arranged in the order that they will give their presentations.