In a world that has become more fluent than ever in conflict and appallingly inarticulate in resolution, Alice Shikina has structured her work of life around one, radically unconventional premise: that in any conflict, however ingrained, there is the architecture of an agreement. A leader of the Shikina Negotiation Academy, a popular public speaker, mediator, and negotiation coach, she has spent decades transforming that belief into action, one difficult conversation at a time. Her qualifications are as fascinating as her journey. Alice, the daughter of Okinawan immigrants who settled in southern Louisiana, was a classical actor in training, competed in speech on a national scale, studied theatre in Czechoslovakia and finally developed a career in mediation, corporate negotiation coaching and conflict resolution. In 2025, she received the Raymond Shonholtz Visionary Peacemaker Award, one of the most notable awards in the discipline. In 2026, Alice was a Toastmasters Golden Gavel Award nominee. What distinguishes her is the rare quality of someone who has lived with enough intention that even the unexpected chapters read, in retrospect, like they were always part of the plan. From Okinawa to Oakland: A Life Shaped by Movement Alice’s parents immigrated from Okinawa, Japan, arriving in the United States just months before she was born. When she turned five, the family relocated to southern Louisiana, where she grew up as the eldest of four children. From early on, she moved to the beat of her own drum. At seven, she declared she wanted to become an actress. At thirteen, she auditioned at a local community theatre and earned the role of Lucy in the musical Snoopy. It was a small stage, but it confirmed her passion for theatre. By high school, she had channeled that same energy into the speech team, competing nearly every weekend. As a sophomore, she began winning regional competitions in dramatic interpretation and poetry, and earned admission to The Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts, one of the few public residential schools in the United States. She enrolled as a junior, majored in theatre, and in her very first year was cast as the lead in The Madwoman of Chaillot. She went on to Miami University, majoring in acting, and in her senior year enrolled in a study-abroad program in Czechoslovakia, immersing herself in theatre history and the Czech language. When the program ended, she stayed to teach English for two additional years, deepening her love for cross-cultural communication. While she was teaching Czech students English, she herself became fluent in the Czech language. She later pursued graduate studies in directing in Honolulu before relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area, the region that would become the home of her most consequential work. “Peace is not only something negotiated between nations; it is something we practice in our everyday interactions,” she notes. Those years of crossing borders, cultures, and languages were quietly building the foundation for exactly that. Finding Her Calling: The Road to Mediation Before building the practice, she leads today, Alice spent nearly a decade as a graphic designer at the American Red Cross. After stepping away from design, she drove part-time for Lyft while reconsidering her direction. The pivot arrived unexpectedly. While searching for a school for her children, she came across a start-up school in San Francisco. She applied for her kids to attend. Not only did she enroll her kids there, she ended up getting a job offer as well. She spent the next three years in the San Francisco start-up world, sharpening her instincts for strategy and relationship-building. When that role ended, it was her partner who redirected her attention, observing that she had a rare and consistent talent for mediating disputes. Until that conversation, Alice had assumed mediation was the exclusive domain of lawyers. A quick search proved otherwise. “I got certified for both mediation and arbitration and started my business,” she recalls. Several years in, she expanded to include negotiation coaching, and the Shikina Negotiation Academy was born. “I like to think of my contribution as bringing more peace to the world, one conflict at a time,” she says, and coming from Alice Shikina, it sounds less like a mission statement and more like a deeply personal intention. Building the Academy: Purpose Meets Entrepreneurship Alice has always carried the heart of an entrepreneur. Before her current success, she made earlier attempts at ventures that did not pan out; each one sharpened her resilience and refining her understanding of what sustainable business-building truly requires. She regards those experiences not as failures, but as essential preparation. “What I enjoy most about entrepreneurship is the challenge of building something from the ground up,” she explains. “There is something incredibly rewarding about starting with an idea and turning it into a functioning, growing business.” Alongside that intellectual appetite runs a genuine love for people. She describes herself as a natural connector, a hub through which individuals, ideas, and opportunities find each other. That quality has proven to be among the most valuable assets in building a practice that depends entirely on trust. The freedom that business ownership affords her, to design her own schedule, travel on her own terms, and work remotely from anywhere, is not a lifestyle preference. It is alignment, a life lived in accordance with the very values she espouses. Navigating the Pandemic: A Pivot That Became a Strength When COVID-19 made in-person gatherings impossible, Alice moved all her mediations online through Zoom. The initial skepticism from clients was understandable. Mediation is an intimate process, and many doubted whether a screen could carry the same weight of trust and presence as a shared room. The reality proved otherwise. Clients no longer had to travel. Scheduling became more flexible. Participants engaged from familiar environments, which often made them more relaxed and forthcoming. She states, “What initially felt like a temporary solution soon revealed itself to be a long-term opportunity. The pandemic accelerated a broader acceptance of virtual communication.” Today, Alice operates exclusively through online

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has swept the current times in its sway by leaps and bounds. In fact, the revolutionary promises and transformational possibilities the entire field has brought are unprecedented. The revamp it caused in everything—be it work, play, business, industry, finance, economics, global supply chains, education, healthcare, military, defence, geopolitics, public and private sectors, and personal and professional areas—is mind-boggling. The astonishing advancements in this exceptional stream of technology are powered by the continuous breakthroughs made by some of the most extraordinary AI leaders, like Hao Zhong, who are revolutionizing the global business horizons. In all the glitz and glamour of this technological marvel, Hao Zhong never lost his focus on the most crucial element of this evolution—data. He always enjoyed innovation, architecture, and product delivery when it comes to data management. Today, as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Co-founder of ScaleFlux, Inc.,Hao Zhong is leading the storage and memory technology trends, specializing particularly in flash memory-based storage solutions and Compute Express Link (CXL) solutions — from NAND devices, SSD and CXL controllers, to storage systems. A Constant Spark of Innovation: AI Leadership of 25 Years With a solid fourteen years of experience with National Instruments, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Broadcom (LSI/Agere), Broadcom (LSI/SandForce), and Fusion-io in engineering and leadership positions, Hao Zhong established ScaleFlux in 2014, in the San Francisco Bay Area. He recalls the time and his own inspiration behind the risk and the opportunity. “The original inspiration came from my experiences in two flash storage pioneers – SandForce and Fusion-io.  Those two companies demonstrated how startups with the right innovations can leapfrog the market.  My co-founders and I sought to recreate that spark of innovation to generate revolutionary improvements for the data pipeline.” A Holistic Blueprint Those experiences also gave Hao Zhong a view into how hard it is to scale those innovations efficiently and repeatedly over multiple product generations. Those lessons led him to a holistic blueprint for ScaleFlux: (1) a highly efficient, scalable ASIC design approach; (2) a turnkey firmware–software stack (so you’re delivering a whole, validated product—not just a chip); (3) differentiated IP that moves the TCO needle; and (4) rigorous qualification and interoperability across flash, DRAM, CPUs/GPUs/TPUs/DPUs—the whole xPU spectrum. If any one of those pillars is weak, the entire structure wobbles. “That’s been our guiding principle for how we organize the team, run the process, and ship products.” The Core Mission: Building an Ever-Adaptive Computing Infra In the face of constantly shifting industry needs and market dynamics, Hao Zhong states that ScaleFlux’s core mission has remained the same – bring new levels of performance and efficiency to the computing infrastructure through innovation in storage and memory technologies – though both the means to accomplish the mission and the definition of computing infrastructure have evolved. He adds that their initial focus was on computational storage as the means for driving a 10x improvement for data center computing.  Computational storage focused on generating efficiency through reducing data movement and distributing processing closer to where data lived. The concept was solid. The example deployments demonstrated massive improvements in application, system, and cluster-level performance and efficiency. But they were highly customized, proprietary, and difficult to scale to the mass market. “We pivoted our thinking to focus on solutions that could combine tremendous benefits with ease-of-use.” This led them to develop bleeding-edge features and capabilities in standards-based NVMe and CXL solutions. Re-architecting their SoC (system-on-chip) controllers to meet the demands of the AI workloads. “The explosion in AI over the last few years is what I meant in my reference to the definition of computing infra having evolved,” Hao Zhong explains. AI workloads and the GPUs they run on operate in a fundamentally different manner from traditional CPU-based infra and traditional enterprise applications. Storage and memory must evolve to support this new style of data consumption. Rearchitecting the Fundamentals ScaleFlux emphasizes rearchitecture of the SSD and memory controllers for the AI infra rather than turning the crank on traditional architectures. When asked how this fundamentally changes performance and efficiency outcomes for customers, Hao Zhong shares that turning the crank on traditional architectures has had the industry stuck in the pattern of roughly doubling performance and power efficiency at each new generation. “We aim to shift this to a 10x or more improvement with the rearchitecture of the SSD and memory controllers.” Delivering revolutionary gains instead of modest, evolutionary gains in storage and memory opens the doors for innovation in applications and massive performance and efficiency gains in the AI infrastructure. “One of the biggest challenges with AI is moving data onto and off the GPUs,” he reveals. Traditional storage and memory controllers, which were designed for traditional CPUs, simply will not get the job done. They need to be rearchitected for massive parallelism and finer-grain data accesses, for pooling of resources across processor clusters, and for greater RAS and security. Turning the crank on traditional architectures has resulted in a widening gap between GPUs’ ability to consume data and storage/memory’s ability to deliver the data. Fixing the Initial Challenges In translating the founding vision into real products, Hao Zhong recalls the challenges. “Early on, we stayed on FPGAs longer than we should have.” It gave them flexibility, “And let us try new acceleration ideas, but customers couldn’t deploy those at a massive scale. When we did our first ASIC, we stuffed it with nice-to-have features and over-scoped for the market.” The fix was to tighten the market investigation loop, sharpen the target customer and use cases, and bring that discipline directly into their holistic chip-plus-firmware process. You see the outcome in subsequent generations: clearer scope, better alignment, faster learning cycles, and more predictable delivery schedules. Interlocking All the Strengths: A Four-Pillared Approach The ScaleFlux team has implemented what they call the “Four Pillars” approach to their development. The pillars are: scalable ASIC design, turnkey firmware/software, differentiated IP, and deep interoperability/qualification. Think of them as the ingredients of a single recipe. Miss the salt, and the