Etienne Elie

Etienne Elie holds a PhD in Computer Sciences, specializing in Computational Optimization, from Université de Montréal, Quebec, Canada. He also received an M.Sc. degree and a B.Sc. in Engineering with great distinction. He is the Founder and Chief Architect at Y Square, a Digital Architecture Firm in Palo Alto, California, which is building the next-generation computational ecosystem. He believes that only crazy dreamers can change the world and make it a better place for all of us, so he has decided to join them. He is also the Founder of Accelerate USA, a nonprofit organization aiming to use advanced technology to improve digital knowledge transfer and entrepreneurship in underserved communities globally.

Before founding Y Square, Etienne was a Senior Technologist at Intel Corporation, where he founded Intel Talent Nebula and served as its principal investigator. The Nebula is a digital transformation center of excellence focusing on Data, Advanced Analytics, Operations Research, and AI to drive business operational excellence and better outcomes through savvy optimization of talent, processes, and products. At Intel, Etienne also served as a Senior Intelligent Systems Architect, focusing on bringing exascale computation to the Cloud and leveraging data intelligence as a competitive advantage for business operations. He led solutions architecture, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence efforts for multiple organizations at Intel. Before Intel, Etienne served as a product architect, designer, and builder at AMD and Nortel Networks. Outside of the semiconductor industry, Etienne served as the Technology Director and Datacenter Architect at Cartagene, the Quebec branch of a pan-Canadian precision medicine organization, where he led the datacenter infrastructure and security architecture and managed the day-to-day operations of the technology department. He also served as the Lead Infrastructure Enterprise Architect at PSP Investments, one of Canada’s largest public sector pension fund managers.

Throughout his tenures, Etienne developed a datacenter disaster recovery architecture and cultivated close working relationships with all business units and operation teams to help drive optimal P&L, roadmaps, and strategies. Etienne is an avid educator with an insatiable passion for talent as a competitive advantage differentiator for business growth. In 2022, he founded the Intel Apprentices Program to facilitate tacit knowledge transfer from one generation of technologists to the next.