Mary is the VP of Global for the Western Hemisphere at the AI Collective, overseeing the health and growth of the grassroot "think tank" community in North and Latin Americas. She started her career in software engineering and has deep interest especially in distributed systems, which cover all spectrums in the computing world. She is also very passionate about tech advocacy and community work, and has been co-leading the AI Collective Chicago Chapter, in addition to being the VP of Western Hemisphere, and leading the Chicago Java Users Group in Chicago since 2015. She is recognized as a Java Champion and an Oracle ACE Associate.