Technology is now inevitably part of every part of the institution. IT teams, from the CIO to the individual contributors, have the great opportunity to help strategically advance the mission of the university through innovative approaches of using technology throughout the student journey. The reality for many institutions is that resource limitations (budgets, people, time, skillsets, leadership) become too great a barrier, preventing those institutions from engaging in strategic innovation. Strategic industry and community partnerships are helping Fresno State further foster a culture of innovation.

In this session, we will share our involvement with industry partners and the Lean Startup concept to ensure the value proposition and service sustainability in support of our mission to foster technology innovation and student success. We will discuss Fresno State’s continued exploration of opportunities for student engagement in areas of AI and ML, Blockchain and Robotics autonomous to motivate and inspire students to learn and innovate in the Cloud with the partnership of Amazon Web Services. We will reveal the newly established Hub of Digital Transformation and many DX initiatives including Digital Agriculture Solution Center (DASH) that facilitates multidisciplinary experiential learning (high impact practices), further fosters industry partnerships, and drives entrepreneurship among students, researchers, growers and AgTech suppliers/incubators in the Central Valley. It is through these strategic partnerships that enable and empower us to support these opportunities for students and faculty.

Come hear Fresno State and Amazon share their experiences of bringing the full stack of AWS skills to support campus computing needs as well as the opportunity to reinvest upgraded technology capability to support student success and contribute toward Digital Transformation momentum in the California Central Valley.

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Orlando is VP for IT and CIO overseeing all things relating to technology at Fresno State. Born and raised in San Francisco, Orlando attended MIT, where he received degrees in EECS, Management, and CS and Engineering. He has 20+ years of experience in the IT field with 15 years in higher ed. Orlando started out his career as a software programmer and a product manager at Oracle and has spent the past 13 years in various technology leadership roles in higher ed at UC San Francisco, Stanford, and Fresno State. He enjoys working directly with students to help raise the next generation of leaders through technology innovation, digital literacy, mentoring, coaching, and sharing life.


Max Tsai is the Innovation Architect and serves as the Coordinator of Digital Transformation at Fresno State providing thought leadership in digital disruption and driving technology innovations. He oversees the Hub of Digital Transformation and facilitates multidisciplinary experiential learning, fosters industry partnerships, and drives entrepreneurship to promote innovation and digital transformation. Max has more than 20 years of IT experience in higher education of leading technological advancements and delivering an innovation culture shift to support academic success.


Varun Pole has 7 years of experience in cloud computing technology. He holds a Masters Degree from New York University. Varun joined AWS in 2013 and has worked earlier in AWS Support as Network engineer and currently works in the AWS Solutions Architecture team helping customers in Higher
Education to help accelerate the adoption of cloud computing.