An examination of the Product Lifecycle and departmental obligations of production and manufacturing. Discussing the largest pain points when it comes to product innovation and bringing a product to market and how technologies like AI and machine learning play a role in solving the problems.

Vik Parthiban - Panel Moderator and Topic Expert

Director of Innovation and Product Strategy, Arrow Electronics / SiliconExpert
Research Affiliate, MIT
Former Team Captain of MIT Hyperloop II

Anna Thornton - Panelist and Topic Expert

Professor of the Practice (ME)
Boston University

Dr. Thornton earned her B.S.E. from Princeton University and her Ph.D. from Cambridge University. She started her career as a faculty member in MIT’s Mechanical Engineering department. During her time at MIT, her research focused on product development, manufacturing, and quality systems. After leaving MIT, she was a senior partner in Analytics Operations Engineering. At Analytics she worked with over 40 large companies to implement, streamline, and improve their product development, manufacturing, and quality systems. As the Director of Engineering and Quality at Dragon Innovation, she helped over 30 new hardware startups to transform prototype designs into final products. Dr. Thornton is the author of many articles, blogs, and a book and is a frequent speaker in multiple university programs and industry forums.

Vipul Bhatia - Panelist and Topic Expert

Integrating Manager
Keysight Technologies 

Vipul is the R&D Program Manager for Merger & Acquisitions and has had the opportunity to integrate 3 companies and counting. Vipul also manages the Engineering Services Organization in India, which is a part of Central Technology function of Keysight Technologies. The Organization is a Centralized Team for managing the Corporate Part set up, maintaining the Engineering Information and all the critical information required for PCB layout & schematic design. The team also manages the active lifecycle for 100K+ parts along with critical Regulatory information.