Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR, is building a sharded blockchain protocol with usability. He also currently serves as a consultant to Ringfence. He previously worked on the MemSQL, Google AI, and Tensorflow teams. While at Google, he was a major contributor to TensorFlow and led the team that produced Q&A solutions for core Google search. He is passionate about machine intelligence and natural language processing and is a former ICPC finalist.