Bio
Dr. Edward C. Cheng is a technology strategist and visionary leader. He serves as Senior Advisor for the cross-industry Safe AI Agents Consortium Group, whose members include Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, PayPal, DoorDash, PwC, Inquiryon, and others. He is also the Chief Technology Officer and Executive Chairman of Inquiryon. Previously, Edward served as VP of AI at Oracle NetSuite and held senior leadership roles at HP.
Edward is the lead inventor of the Log-Structured Merge Tree (LSM Tree), a foundational data structure that enables low-latency, high-throughput, and high-velocity data processing. It is widely adopted by major data management systems across industry, including Google, Meta, X, Microsoft, Oracle, Hadoop, Cassandra, MongoDB, RocksDB, and many others.
His work on Safe AI Agents focuses on governance frameworks, human-centric AI principles, and multi-agent systems that align autonomous AI with democratic values and human oversight. He collaborates across academia, industry, and civil society to advance research, publish scholarly work, and help shape emerging best practices for safe and trustworthy AI agent development and deployment. He also speaks globally about the impacts and risks of AI agents and AGI with diverse communities.
Edward writes under the pen name Edward Sizhe on topics spanning faith, technology, and life purpose. His books include "AI and God," "Journey of Life or Death," and "Five Questions Toward Enriching the Meaning and Purpose of Life, available on Kindle and Amazon."
His research interests include AI agents, distributed big data systems, machine learning and deep learning, parallel search algorithms, high-performance computing, and distributed systems. He is also interested in biblical studies and archaeological evidence surrounding biblical events. Edward has published numerous scientific papers and holds multiple patents in AI, machine learning, and database systems. He previously worked with the Stanford Database Research Group and now serves as Senior Advisor and researcher at the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab.
Edward received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of London, his master’s degree from UC Berkeley, and an MBA from Columbia University.