Michael Abbott
Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Abbott joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a partner in 2011. Formerly the vice president of engineering at Twitter, Abbott led the team to rebuild and solidify Twitter’s infrastructure, scaling Twitter’s architecture to support 250 million daily tweets. Previously Abbott led the software development team at Palm that created HP/Palm’s next-generation webOS platform. Earlier Abbott was the general manager at Microsoft for .NET online services, which became Azure; he was also co-founder of Passenger Inc and Composite Software. Abbott has advised and invested in Cloudera, Hearsay Labs, Jawbone and Saynow.
Eric Berlow
Founder, Vibrant Data Labs
Eric Berlow, PhD, is an ecologist and complexity scientist. He founded Vibrant Data Labs to develop ecological approaches for simplifying complex problems facing human well-being. His current work focuses on blending collective human input and network analysis to map the landscape of big problems. A TED Fellow, Eric is internationally recognized for his research on ecological complexity published in Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Eric was founding director of the University of California’s first research center inside Yosemite National Park, where his ongoing research focuses on data-driven stewardship of natural ecosystems.
Damian Black
CEO, SQLstream
Damian started his career at HP in their European research labs, eventually running a European-wide middleware solutions business. At HP he led the team that pioneered IP Mediation - a real-time technology for analytics and billing in Telecomm, becoming market leader. He moved to XACTT as VP Product Management, acquired by Amdocs to power its real-time data mediation. Damian was also VP Sales and Business Development for Followap, a Sequoia funded company, market leader in mobile Instant Messaging and Presence until acquired by NeuStar, powering Vodafone's IM service, continuing Damian's career in real-time middleware. Damian is the author of ten patents and founder of SQLstream, a parallel engine executing continuous SQL queries against streaming big data in a cloud-based architecture.
Ron Bodkin
Founder and CEO, Think Big Analytics
Ron founded Think Big to help companies realize measurable value from Big Data. Previously, Ron was VP Engineering at Quantcast where he led the data science and engineering teams that pioneered the use of Hadoop and NoSQL for batch and real-time decision making. Prior to that, Ron was Founder of New Aspects and also Co-Founder and CTO of B2B applications provider C-Bridge, which he led to a staff of 900 service consultants and a successful IPO. Ron graduated with honors from McGill University with a B.S. in Math and Computer Science at McGill. He also earned his Master’s Degree in Computer Science from MIT, where he left his PhD program after winning the Entrepreneurship Award with the idea he presented for what would become C-Bridge.
Justin Borgman
CEO, Hadapt
Justin is Co-Founder and CEO of Hadapt. Prior to Hadapt, Justin led product development for COVECTRA, an anti-counterfeit technology firm. Before that, Justin founded an online social media company and spent the first six years of his career as a software developer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Raytheon. Justin has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar, and attended graduate school at the Yale School of Management.
Currie Boyle
Distinguished Engineer, IBM
Currie Boyle is an IBM Distinguished Engineer who leads the North American natural language Services practice. Currie exploits unstructured content analytics systems to enable natural language interactive systems which do drive new business value. For the last six years Currie has led a multi-million dollar natural language projects to invent and transform information knowledge “findability”. Currie leads avant-garde client engagements to define new models for web or call center intelligently guided selling or guided support. Currie has been with IBM for more than 25 years and 19 patent / filing / issued / published disclosures. He has deep practical experience with extensive intelligent interactive question and answers systems, included auto-machine guided interactive query refinement. As well he works with next generation user interface approaches.
Rami Branitzky
CEO, Numenta
Rami Branitzky, CEO of Numenta, brings over 15 years of experience in managing and growing software businesses. He previously held multiple leadership roles at SAP AG. Most recently Rami served as Senior Vice President, Sustainability Business, defining and driving all sustainability-related activities of SAP AG. Previously, Rami held posts as Managing Director of SAP Labs North America, and was Senior Vice President in the Global Partner Group. He joined SAP following the acquisition of TopTier Software, where he was instrumental in driving the company's product and go-to-market strategy. Rami started his career at Cheyenne Software, now a division of Computer Associates. He holds a BA from Hofstra University and an MBA in Information Systems and Finance from the Stern School of Business, New York University.
Scott Brave
Founder and CTO, Baynote
Scott is a founder and CTO of Baynote, Inc. Prior to Baynote, he was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University and served as lab manager for the CHIMe (Communication between Humans and Interactive Media) Lab. Scott is an inventor of six patents and co-author of over 25 publications in the areas of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. Scott is also an Editor of the “International Journal of Human-Computer Studies” (Amsterdam: Elsevier) and co-author of “Wired for speech: How voice activates and advances the human-computer relationship” (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Scott received his Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction, and B.S. in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford University, and his Master’s from the MIT Media Lab.
Andrew Brust
Founder and CEO, Blue Badge Insights and Analyst, GigaOM Research
Andrew J. Brust has worked in the software industry for 25 years as a developer, consultant, entrepreneur and CTO, specializing in application development, databases and business intelligence technology. He has been a developer magazine columnist and conference speaker since the mid-90s, and a technology book writer and blogger since 2005. Andrew is also Founder and CEO of Blue Badge Insights, an analysis, strategy and advisory firm serving Microsoft customers and partners.
Tamara Budec
VP Critical Systems and Engineering, Goldman Sachs & Co
Tamara Budec is a Vice President Critical Systems and Engineering Americas with Goldman Sachs Services Division based in Jersey City. Ms Budec is responsible for risk management and engineering operation of the firm’s business critical environments. Ms Budec joined Goldman Sachs in 2007. Prior to Goldman Sachs, Ms Budec was Director Critical Facilities at CB Richard Ellis Global Corporate Services responsible for large scale data center construction and management of data center engineering operations. Prior to CBRE, Ms Budec was a Senior Project Manager for Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), Project and Development Services on Goldman Sachs account. Ms Budec has received Bachelor of Science (Dipl. Eng.) degree from Zagreb University, Croatia and Masters from Cornell University.
David Card
VP Research, GigaOM Research
David Card has been following the intersection of technology, media, and consumer behavior 20+ years at GigaOM Pro, Jupiter Research, IDC and Forrester. At Jupiter, Card headed up digital media and marketing research, and acted as VP, research development. At IDC he was lead Microsoft and consumer Internet analyst. Aside from GigaOM, Forrester and Jupiter Forums, Card has spoken at major industry events such as E3, the Newspaper Association of America’s new media conference, the PBS/NPR new media forum, Texas University’s Online Journalism Symposium, Digital Music Forum East, Digital Hollywood, the Inverge conference, and Software Marketing Perspectives. He is frequently quoted in the traditional and online press and has appeared on ABC World News Tonight, ESPN, and NPR.
Ken Chahine
SVP and GM, DNA, Ancestry.com
Dr. Ken Chahine has served as Senior Vice President and General Manager for AncestryDNA, LLC since 2011. Prior to joining Ancestry.com, he held several positions, including as Chief Executive Officer of Avigen, a biotechnology company, in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Utah, and at Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals (currently Pfizer). He also teaches a course focused on new venture development, intellectual property, and licensing at the University of Utah’s College of Law. Dr. Chahine was recently invited to participate with the Presidential Bioethics Commission to discuss privacy issues facing the biotechnology industry. He earned a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Michigan, a J.D. from the University of Utah College of Law, and a B.A. in Chemistry from Florida State University.
Andrew Cronk
CEO, TempoDB
Andrew Cronk is CEO and Co-Founder of TempoDB, the time series database service for sensors, smart meters, servers, and more. A 3x entrepreneur, he realized the incredible difficulty of storing and analyzing massive amounts of time series data while working in the geothermal industry. This data is necessary for companies to learn from the past, understand the present, and predict the future - and to prove real cost and energy savings. This is why he founded TempoDB with Justin DeLay and Mike Yagley.
Doug Daniels
CTO, Mortar Data
Doug Daniels is the CTO and co-founder of Mortar Data. Mortar's open source development framework and Hadoop platform-as-a-service make it easy for engineers and data scientists to build data pipelines using Pig (Hadoop) and Python. Prior to founding Mortar Data, Doug designed and built education data integration systems that move data for millions of US students and teachers every day. Doug holds a BA Computer Science from Rice University.
Barb Darrow
Senior Writer, GigaOM
Barb has covered technology and high-tech companies for longer than she’d care to admit. She started out as a reporter for InfoWorld, covering Boston-area software companies; then moved over to CRN where she managed the news staff and covered the business both in terms of technology and how technology is sold. She was also news editor for TechWeb and senior news director at TechTarget before joining GigaOM. Barb enjoys seeing how old-school IT companies are (mis)managing their transition into the cloud computing era. She has won several ASBPE awards for her news coverage. Outside of work, she loves gardening, movies and baseball.
Jeffrey Davitz
CEO, Solariat
Jeffrey’s background includes an array of responsibilities with start ups including product management, core technical research and development, and marketing strategy. Prior to founding Solariat, Jeffrey was a Program Manager at SRI’s Artificial Intelligence Center where he founded and managed the Social Computing Group. While at SRI, Jeffrey was on the management team of the CALO project — the largest AI project in history involving research and system development efforts at over 22 universities. As part of that effort, Jeffrey’s Social Computing team developed a general framework for deploying real time agents in social networks. The framework was used to develop the first social network-based QA system. Jeffrey has degrees from the University of Chicago and Columbia.
Gaurav Dhillon
Chairman and CEO, SnapLogic
Gaurav Dhillon is the CEO of SnapLogic, which offers the market leading enterprise cloud integration product, and counts some of the leading companies in the Global 2000 as customers. SnapLogic helps these companies connect enterprise applications to the cloud for improved business agility and faster decision-making. Gaurav has spearheaded the rapid growth of the company since he joined as CEO in 2009 after seeing the tremendous potential in the company’s products, strategy and unique business model. Previously, Gaurav co-founded and served as CEO of Informatica (Nasdaq; INFA), which he led for more than twelve years – from a startup idea in 1992 to a public company and a leader in the data integration vision he pioneered for enterprise software.
Michael Driscoll
CEO, Metamarkets
Michael Driscoll is a serial entrepreneur who has built data platforms in life sciences, online retail, and digital media over the past decade. Michael began his career as a software engineer for the Human Genome Project, and later founded CustomInk.com, an early pioneer in customized apparel. More recently, Michael conceived and led Dataspora, where he remains Chairman, helping deliver data science to telcos, insurance firms, and retail banks. He is currently the CEO and co-founder of Metamarkets, a big data SaaS solution. Michael holds an A.B. from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from Boston University. He enjoys speaking and writing about big data and analytics.
Emil Eifrem
CEO, Neo Technology / Neo4j
Emil is the founder of Neo4j, the most widely deployed graph database on the planet, and CEO of its commercial sponsor Neo Technology. He plans to save the world with graphs and own Larry's yacht by the end of the decade. He tweets at @emileifrem.
Timothy Estes
Founder and CEO, Digital Reasoning
Tim Estes is the Chairman, CEO, and founder for Digital Reasoning. Tim’s academic work at the University of Virginia focused in the areas of Philosophy of Language, Mathematical Logic, Semiotics, Epistemology, and Phenomenology. It was that eclectic academic background, coupled with the belief that in the future all software would learn from data as a core capability, which gave rise to Digital Reasoning. Tim and his team at Digital Reasoning work closely with leaders in government and industry to solve extraordinarily valuable and morally compelling problems in National Security, Finance, Legal, and Health Care by automating the understanding of unstructured data. Recent Speeches: London School of Economics (2013); O’Reilly Strata Conference New York (2012); DoDIIS Worldwide Conference (2012)
Phil Francisco
VP, Big Data Product Management, IBM
Francisco brings 20+ years of experience in technology development and global marketing. As VP of Product Management, he fosters new business and product strategies and directs the product portfolio. Francisco came to IBM from the Netezza acquisition. Previously, he was VP of Marketing at PhotonEx and VP of Product Marketing for Lucent Technologies. Francisco spent 10+ years in software, hardware and systems engineering at AT&T/Lucent Bell Laboratories. Francisco holds a patent in advanced optical network architectures. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and B.S. in Computer Science magna cum laude, from the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at UPENN. He earned his Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and completed the Advanced Management Program at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.
Robert Frohwein
CEO, Kabbage
As CEO and Founder, Rob conceptualized and co-founded Kabbage. Prior to Kabbage, Rob was CEO of LAVA Group, Inc., an intellectual property and technology investment bank. Prior to LAVA Group, Rob held the positions of SVP, Business Development and General Counsel of ZapMedia, VP of Strategic Alliances and General Counsel of Security First Network Bank, and an attorney with Troutman Sanders LLP, an international law firm. He has co-authored and published three books on intellectual property and created and co-hosted a talk radio show about jobs & careers that was sponsored by USA Today. He also has a donor's lifetime pass to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY - ask him about it.
Ryan Garrett
VP of Product, MemSQL
Ryan Garrett is the Vice President of Product at MemSQL. Ryan has worked at numerous companies in the data warehousing and business intelligence space, including Aster Data, Teradata and most recently ClearStory Data, where he helped shape many early product features and requirements. Ryan holds an MBA from Boston University and a Bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Kentucky
William Gerhardt
Director, Service Provider Practice Internet Business Solutions Group, Cisco Systems
William Gerhardt is a Director responsible for service provider strategy within Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), an industry-leading consulting organization that works with customer executive teams to accelerate their success in leveraging new technologies for competitive advantage. His primary objectives are to cross global theaters and segments to implement business strategies that evolve the use of mobility, video and analytics to create new opportunities for monetization while also seeking out areas for greater efficiency. Current topic areas include Fixed Mobile Convergence, Next Generation Mobile Workforce, Multiscreen TV and SP Wifi. Bill brings over 20 years of engineering, sales and product marketing experience within the telecommunications industry. Prior to joining Cisco, Mr. Gerhardt was a line of business manager within Verizon.
Bhaskar Ghosh
Senior Director of Engineering, Data Infrastructure, LinkedIn
Bhaskar is Senior Director of Engineering at LinkedIn, where he leads the Data Infrastructure teams responsible for building and running the back-end platforms for data serving, analytics and warehousing that drive LinkedIn's business. Before LinkedIn, Bhaskar was Director of Engineering at Yahoo!, where he led the Serving and Marketplaces team of the Yahoo Rightmedia Ads Exchange and built one of the first real-time bidding engines in the display-ads industry. Bhaskar's initial interest in "data" grew from writing parallel database engines at enterprise database companies (Informix, Oracle). He has a CS PhD from Yale, has published widely in systems and dbms conferences, is passionate about open-source projects being the future of big-data (see http://data.linkedin.com/opensource) and has co-authored over twenty patents in database and internet ads technologies.
George Gilbert
Principal, TechAlpha Partners and Analyst, GigaOM Research
George is co-founder of TechAlpha Partnersk, a management consulting and research firm that advises clients on the technology and business implications of the shift to data-driven services delivered by cloud computing. Previously, George was the lead enterprise software analyst for Credit Suisse First Boston, one of the leading investment banks to the technology sector. During 7 years as an analyst, he advised institutional investors on Microsoft, Oracle, BEA, Veritas, SAP, PeopleSoft, JDEdwards, i2 Technologies and Siebel, among others. George advised numerous companies in the capital raising process including Actuate, Baan, CommerceOne, E.piphany, i2 Technologies, JDEdwards, Retek, and Selectica.
Sean Gourley
CTO, Quid
Sean Gourley, Quid co-founder and CTO, did research into the mathematics of war for his PhD thesis at Balliol College, Oxford. His findings appeared as the featured article in "Nature" (December 2009) and were the subject of a popular TED talk (2009). His work on statistical analysis, probability, and algorithm development applied to complex systems and large datasets inspired the creation of Quid. Sean is a Rhodes Scholar PhD in Physics (Complexity) from the University of Oxford; his undergraduate degree is in Physics from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
Jonathan Gray
Founder and CTO, Continuuity
Jonathan Gray is an entrepreneur and software engineer with a background in startups, open source, and all things data. Prior to founding Continuuity, Jonathan was a software engineer at Facebook where he helped drive HBase engineering efforts including Facebook Messages and several other large-scale projects. As an open source evangelist, he was responsible for helping build the Facebook engineering brand through open source and developer outreach. Before joining Facebook, Jonathan was the founder of Streamy.com, a consumer Internet startup founded in 2006 focused on realtime sharing and discovery of content. Streamy’s data problems led Jonathan to become an early adopter of Hadoop and HBase and a core contributor and active committer in the community. Jonathan holds a degree in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
David Gutelius
Chief Social Scientist, Jive Software
David Gutelius is Chief Social Scientist at Jive Software, driving Jive’s Data R&D and strategy. Prior to Jive, he co-founded and served as CEO at Proximal Labs, acquired by Jive in 2011. Previously, he was co-founder and CTO at Social Kinetics (acquired by RedBrick Health), a machine learning spin-out from SRI International and was Product Manager on DARPA’s CALO project, the largest AI project in history. He has a PhD in Economic History from Johns Hopkins University and taught at Stanford University.
Jeff Hammerbacher
Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Cloudera
Prior to co-founding Cloudera, Jeff conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook. The Data team was responsible for inventing and building powerful data analysis applications on Hadoop. That system is the core data platform at Facebook for improving the user experience and driving revenue. Before he joined Facebook, Jeff worked as a quantitative analyst on Wall Street. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from Harvard University.
Derrick Harris
Senior Writer, GigaOM
Derrick has been a technology journalist since 2003 and has been covering cloud computing, big data and other emerging IT trends for GigaOM since 2009. He has written the words “cloud” and “Hadoop” possibly more than any other person on the planet. Derrick lives in Las Vegas and has a law degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Away from the office, Derrick trains in muay thai and is active in animal welfare issues.
Phil Hendrix
Director, immr and Analyst, GigaOM Research
Dr. Phil Hendrix is the founder and director of immr and an analyst with GigaOm Pro, specializing in market opportunities for disruptive new products and services. Utilizing innovative research methods, Dr. Hendrix helps clients verify opportunities, optimize strategy and accelerate adoption. Within the digital landscape, Phil focuses on the intersection of mobile, location and social (SoLoMo), M-commerce and mobile payments. Recent reports have examined Mobile and Loyalty, Consumers' Digital Signals, SoLoMo and its Impact on Advertising and Retailing, Hyperlocal Mobile Advertising, and Location-based Innovation. Before founding immr, Phil was a partner with DiamondCluster (now PwC strategy group) and principal with Mercer Management Consulting (now Oliver Wyman). Previously, he was a professor at Emory University and the University of Michigan, where he also received his PhD.
Ki Mae Heussner
Staff Writer, GigaOM
Ki Mae joins GigaOM from Adweek, where she was a staff writer covering technology. Prior to that, she produced the science and technology section for ABCNews.com and reported on topics ranging from social media and innovation to space and science fiction. Ki Mae’s previous roles include writing for an independent political news site in Malaysia, creating public advocacy campaigns for Lifetime Television and working for a U.S. Senator. She works out of GigaOM’s East Coast office and covers New York startups.
Stacey Higginbotham
Senior Writer, GigaOM
Stacey is happy when immersed in SEC filings, tech specs or poking through a data center. She has spent the last 11 years covering technology and finance for publications such as The Deal, the Austin Business Journal, The Bond Buyer and BusinessWeek, and works remotely from Austin, Texas. At GigaOM, Stacey covers broadband, data center infrastructure, policy and regulation, and entrepreneurs/startups, and is particularly excited to discover news ways technology is changing the world.
Ira (Gus) Hunt
CTO, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Mr. Gus Hunt currently serves as the Chief Technology Officer for the Chief Information Officer at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In this capacity, Mr. Hunt is responsible for setting the strategic technology direction to enable CIA’s missions, for driving the rapid insertion and adoption of new capabilities to keep pace with technology change in the commercial sector, and for engaging actively across the IC to share and communicate IT solutions.Before joining the Agency, Mr. Hunt spent seven years in the private sector as an Aerospace Engineer designing advanced manned space flight systems and satellite orbital transfer vehicles. He holds a ME in Civil/Structural Engineering from Vanderbilt University and is married with two grown children.
Grant Ingersoll
Chief Scientist, LucidWorks
Grant Ingersoll is co-founder of LucidWorks and the Apache Mahout machine learning project, a member of the Lucene community and the Apache Software Foundation. Grant worked at the Center for Natural Language Processing at Syracuse University. Grant earned his B.S. in Math and Computer Science and his M.S. in Computer Science. Grant is co-author of “Taming Text” from Manning Publications.
Mathew Ingram
Senior Writer, GigaOM
Mathew covers media in all its forms — social and otherwise — as well as web culture and related issues. He is an award-winning journalist who has spent the past 15 years writing about business, technology and new media as a reporter, columnist and blogger. Prior to joining GigaOM, he was a blogger and technology writer for the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, and was also the paper’s first online Communities Editor. Mathew is one of the founders of mesh, Canada’s leading web conference.
Naveen Jain
Founder and CEO, inome
Naveen Jain has an established record as a philanthropist, entrepreneur, and technology pioneer. Mr. Jain is founder of three companies - Moon Express, InfoSpace, and currently, Inome. He is also founder and CEO of the World Innovation Institute. Mr. Jain is a member of the Board of Trustees at the X Prize Foundation and of Singularity University. He also serves as member of the Board of Directors of Flow Mobile, a company dedicated to bringing innovative mobile broadband service to under-served and un-served rural towns in the US. Naveen Jain holds a bachelors degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology at Rourkee and a masters of business administration degree from XLRI Graduate School of Business in Jamshedpur.
Robert Jenkins
Co-Founder and CTO, CloudSigma
Robert Jenkins is the co-founder and CTO of CloudSigma and is responsible for leading the technological innovation of the company’s pure-cloud IaaS offering. Under Robert’s direction, CloudSigma has established an unprecedented open, customer-centric approach to the public cloud.
Karim Lakhani
Associate Professor, Harvard Business School
Karim R. Lakhani is an associate professor in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at the Harvard Business School. He is also a faculty affiliate of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science and a faculty fellow of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He specializes in innovation management and leadership in firms and communities. He has extensively studied the emergence of open source software communities and their unique innovation and product development strategies. He has also investigated how critical knowledge from outside of the organization can be accessed through innovation contests. He is the principal investigator and director of the Harvard-NASA Tournament Laboratory, which aims to systematize the use of innovation tournaments for the space agency.
Anukool Lakhina
Founder and CEO, Guavus
Anukool founded Guavus with a vision to provide solutions for dynamic, data-driven decision-making. He brings more than a decade of thought leadership in large-scale data analytics and has published more than a dozen papers on the subject. His Ph.D. dissertation put forth the theory and algorithms for streaming analytics on high-dimensional data, which forms the basis for the technology at Guavus. Prior to Guavus, Anukool was at Intel Research and Sprint Labs. He holds a B.S., M.S. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Boston University.
Jennifer Lin
Product Management Lead, Juniper Networks
Jennifer Lin leads SDN Product Management activities at Juniper Networks. Prior to Juniper, Jennifer was VP, Product Management at Contrail Systems, a software startup which was acquired by Juniper Networks. Previously, she led Product Management and Product Marketing activities for Cisco's Connected Energy Networks, Wireless Networking, Mobility Services, and Enterprise Routing businesses. She has led numerous partner/developer ecosystem programs to drive interoperability across grid, sensor networking and wireless/mobility services in both enterprise and SP environments. Jennifer holds BSE from Princeton University and MSE from Stanford University.
David Linthicum
Analyst, GigaOM Research
Leading technology publications frequently name David S. Linthicum among the top 10 enterprise technologists in the world. He is a true thought leader in the industry, and an expert in complex distributed systems, including cloud computing, data integration, service oriented architecture (SOA), and big data systems. As the author of over 13 books on computing with over 3,000 published articles, as well as radio and TV appearances as a computing expert, he is often quoted in major business and technology publications. In addition, David is a frequent keynote presenter at industry conferences, with over 500 presentations given in the last 20 years.
Mike Lydon
CTO, TopCoder
Mike Lydon is a Co-Founder and has been the Chief Technology Officer of TopCoder, Inc. since April of 2001. Lydon and his team built the TopCoder web site and distributed, competitive development methodology, the user interface, and the incentives that motivate performance as well as participation by TopCoder’s over 425,000 registered members. Lydon is the Principal Investigator on the DARPA CS-STEM program to leverage games and crowdsourcing to develop skills and interest in CS among high school students. Lydon is also a Co-Principal Investigator on the DARPA InSPIRE program, leading TopCoder's effort in working with MIT to build zerorobotics.org - a robotics competition aboard the International Space Station. Lydon is an expert on crowdsourcing and on leveraging a competitive development methodology to construct enterprise software.
Jo Maitland
Research Director, GigaOM Research
Jo Maitland is Research Director for the Infrastructure/Cloud channel at GigaOM Pro. Jo has been a technology journalist and analyst for 15+ years specializing in enterprise IT trends, specifically infrastructure virtualization, storage and cloud computing. At Forrester Research and The 451 Group, Jo covered cloud-based storage and archiving and the challenges of long term digital preservation. At TechTarget Jo was Executive Editor of several websites covering virtualization and cloud computing. She managed a team of reporters and editors and wrote news, features and columns for those sites which became leading information resources under her guidance. Jo has spoken at several major industry events including NetWorld + Interop and VMworld on virtualization and cloud computing trends. She has a BA (Hons) in Journalism from the University of Creative Arts in the UK. In her spare time Jo enjoys adventures in new places, extreme sports, writing screenplays and watching movies.
Om Malik
Founder and Senior Writer, GigaOM
Om Malik has more than 15 years of experience as a journalist covering technology and business news. He was part of the founding team of Forbes.com as a Senior Editor. He then went on to become a senior writer at Red Herring during its glory days before joining Business 2.0 in March 2003, covering telecom, innovation and broadband stories. His contributions have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and MIT Technology Review. Additionally, Om is the author of “Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist.” He is also the recipient of many industry awards, including Excellence in Journalism from the Society of Professional Journalists in 2001 and the Gold Award from American Society of Business Publication Editors in 2001.
Paul Maritz
Chief Strategist, EMC
Paul Maritz is Chief Strategist of EMC Corporation. With revenues of $20 billion in 2011 and more than 53,000 people worldwide, EMC is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. As Chief Strategist, Maritz drives EMC's technology strategy with a particular focus on Big Data and the next generation of cloud-oriented applications. He is also responsible for M&A, strategic investments and emerging technologies.
Heather Marquez
Manager, Asset Strategy and Optimization, Facebook
Heather is a dedicated hardware Asset Manager with over eight years of experience in high growth technology Operations, IT and Engineering departments. She has developed a true passion for the data lifecycle and asset strategy, which was not even a thought during her studies to originally become a Marine Biologist. Heather has a proven ability to think strategically and bring a clear understanding of the alignment required to scale the hardware asset portfolio, while ensuring the lowest cost. Currently managing the Asset Strategy & Optimization team at Facebook, she is helping to change the industry.
Douglas Merrill
Founder and CEO, ZestFinance
Dr. Douglas C. Merrill is the founder and CEO of ZestFinance, a financial services technology company that uses data to help make better credit underwriting decisions in order to provide credit alternatives to the underbanked. He is also the author of Getting Organized in the Google Era. Previously, Merrill was CIO and VP of Engineering at Google where he oversaw internal engineering and technology and led multiple strategic efforts, including Google's 2004 IPO and its related investor program and regulatory activities. He most recently served as COO of New Music and President of Digital Business at EMI Music. Merrill holds an MA and Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton University, and a BA from the University of Tulsa in Social and Political Organization.
Stephen Messer
Vice Chairman, Collective[i]
Mr. Stephen Messer is Co-founder and Vice Chairman of Collective[i], the first Big Data network to deliver enterprise-wide analyses curated and developed by the world’s leading data scientists directly to business users in order to answer essential questions about marketing, sales, service and support data. Mr. Messer is Chairman of the Council for Accountable Advertising, an industry association for best-of-breed advertising technologies, and is Co-Founder and President of World Evolved, a platform for global investment and expansion. Prior to these ventures, Mr. Messer, along with his sister, Ms. Heidi Messer, founded, built and managed LinkShare Corporation until its sale in 2005 to Rakuten for $425m. Mr. Messer holds a J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and a B.A. from Lafayette University.
Paul Miller
Founder, Cloud of Data and Analyst, GigaOM Research
Paul is an analyst and consultant, based in the Yorkshire (UK) market town of Beverley, but working with clients world-wide. He mainly helps them understand the opportunities (and pitfalls) around cloud computing, big data, and open data, but also podcasts and writes for technology sites such as GigaOM Pro and SemanticWeb.com. His background includes public policy and standards work, several years in management at a UK software company... and a Ph.D in Archaeology.
Ravi Murthy
Engineering Manager, Facebook
Ravi Murthy is engineering manager of Analytics Infrastructure at Facebook. He leads development of the big data platform for one of the largest data warehouses in the world. His teams develop popular open source software such as Hive and Hadoop(Corona), as well as systems for interactive queries, real-time stream processing, and graph analytics. Previously he was Senior Director of Engineering at Oracle Corporation leading a new product for end-users to build database applications with spreadsheet-like interface. He also worked on various aspects of Oracle RDBMS-extensible data management, parallel/distributed, object-relational and indexing technologies. Ravi holds more than 80 approved patents and several publications in academic and industry conferences. He has a Masters degree from University of Wisconsin, Madison and Bachelors degree from IIT Madras.
Mohan Namboodiri
VP, Customer Analytics, Williams-Sonoma
As VP, Customer Analytics for Williams-Sonoma, Inc., Mohan Namboodiri is in charge of helping the company understand customer behavior across channels and oversees the Statistical Modeling and Customer Insights teams. Having led analytic teams at Williams-Sonoma for the the past 7 years, he is primarily focused on the application of statistical and data mining analytics to a wide range of commercial problems, particularly as they relate to customer relationship management. Namboodiri has spent more than 20 years working in data analysis roles ranging from Epidemiologic research at the American Cancer Society to studies of new drug efficacy at Merck Research Labs and CRM analytics at SAS Institute. He holds a B.S. in Physics from Cornell University and a Masters in Public Health from Emory University.
Ann Neidenbach
SVP of Technology, The NASDAQ OMX Group
Ann is responsible for managing the strategic planning and development of the Global Technology products and services for NASDAQ OMX markets and commercial offerings. She is additionally responsible for the delivery team of NASDAQ OMX Market Technology customers worldwide. Ann rejoined NASDAQ OMX from Citi, where she served as Managing Director, responsible for the technology, infrastructure and support for Citi’s Electronic Trading Group in the U.S.,Europe, and Asia. Ann was also Global Head of Operations for Lava Trading, managing all aspects of Lava’s operations of its equities and F/X platforms, overseeing many business units. She previously spent 20 years at NASDAQ OMX holding positions as COO/CIO of NASDAQ Europe and NASDAQ Deutschland.
Dave Ohara
Founder, GreenM3 and Analyst, GigaOM Research
Dave Ohara has spent his employment career at HP, Apple, and Microsoft working in manufacturing, distribution, purchasing, hardware and software product development, marketing and evangelism. Seven years ago Dave took the journey into data centers, cloud, and big data as an independent to have more freedom to explore innovation beyond typical boundaries. Days are now spent working on new services, consulting, researching, and blogging to explore new areas. A recent topic is Data Center Capacity Planning which require an internal and external situation awareness to plan for the expected and unexpected.
Michael Palmer
Head of Innovation, Aetna
Michael Palmer is Head of Innovation at Aetna, and leads the Aetna Innovation Labs. Michael has over twenty six years of healthcare consulting and operating leadership in: innovation; IT strategy; large scale transformation initiatives; organizational design; and change management. Prior to joining Aetna, Michael held a variety of leadership positions at Accenture from 1993 to 2011, serving clients across the provider, payer and medical technologies industries. Before that, he worked in healthcare at EDS (now HP) for 6 years. Michael has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. He has lectured for various industry/corporate organizations worldwide, and serves on several boards. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
Todd Papaioannou
Founder and CEO, Continuuity
Todd Papaioannou is Founder and CEO of Continuuity, a stealth Big Data startup. Todd has over 15 years of Internet and Enterprise software experience covering a variety of senior leadership roles in R&D, product and corporate strategy, marketing and PS. Prior to Continuuity, Todd was an EIR at Battery Ventures where he focused on developing opportunities in the Cloud, BigData and Digital Media markets. Prior to Battery, Todd was the Chief Cloud Architect at Yahoo! and held exec leadership positions at both Teradata and Greenplum. Todd likes to think he was doing BigData before the term became popular. Before that, Todd was Co-Founder and CEO of DALi, Inc, an early stage distributed social gaming company. Todd holds a PhD in artificial intelligence and distributed systems.
DJ Patil
Data Scientist in Residence, Greylock Partners
Dr. DJ Patil, Data Science in Residence, Greylock Partners. DJ has held roles as the Chief Scientist, Chief Security Officer and Head of Analytics and Data Products Teams at LinkedIn. He’s also held roles at Skype, PayPal, and eBay. He is known for co-coining the term Data Scientist. In 2011 he was ranked in Forbes Data Scientist list as #2 behind Larry Page. At the University of Maryland, his research focused on nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory and he helped start a research initiative on numerical weather prediction. As an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow for the Department of Defense, Patil directed efforts to leverage social network analysis and the melding of computational and social sciences to anticipate emerging threats to the US.
Jan Puzicha
Co-Founder and CTO, Recommind
Dr. Puzicha is the Chief Technology Officer at Recommind, where he is responsible for translating abstract research into Recommind's highly scalable product line. He is an expert in real-time information optimization and statistical modeling. Previously, he held a research fellow position in the Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley, where he worked on machine learning problems and cutting-edge research in graphical models and computer vision. Dr. Puzicha holds a Ph.D. from the University of Bonn, where he graduated with honors. His strengths lie in his ability to turn mathematical models and algorithms into working industrial products.
Samantha Ravich
Co-Chair, National Commission for the Review of R&D in the Intelligence Community
Dr. Samantha Ravich consults with private industry and government on international security, financial, and political risk. She is Co-Chair of the National Commission for Review of Research and Development Programs in the Intelligence Community and a Senior Advisor to The Chertoff Group. Ravich was Deputy National Security Advisor to VP Cheney and served in the White House for 5½ years. Ravich was the VP's representative on Asian and Middle East Affairs, Counter-Terrorism, and Counter-Proliferation. At the WH, she also worked on Free Market and Democracy Promotion, spearheading a number of government wide initiatives. Ravich received her Ph.D. in Policy Analysis from the RAND Graduate School and her MCP from the University of Pennsylvania as well as her BSE in Finance from the Wharton School.
Silvius Rus
Director, Big Data Platforms, Quantcast
Silvius Rus directs, manages and participates in the development of Big Data Platforms at Quantcast: data language runtimes (SQL, Sawzall), proprietary petabyte-scale MapReduce, interactive Big Data analytics, stream and realtime processing, cluster resource management and distributed file systems. Before Quantcast he was at Google working on Gmail load balancing, server performance and C++ compiler optimization. Silvius holds a PhD in computer science from Texas A&M University.
Vlad Sejnoha
CTO, Nuance Communications
As Nuance's Chief Technology Officer, Vlad Sejnoha oversees Nuance's research and focuses on core technology and product strategy, with an emphasis on emerging areas including natural language processing and mobile applications. Prior to joining Nuance, Vlad was the Chief Scientist at L&H, and earlier at Kurzweil AI, where he was responsible for creating technology for a number of commercially successful speech recognition products, including large vocabulary continuous speech dictation systems. Vlad has over 20 years experience in the field of speech recognition and holds thirteen US patents.
Arijit Sengupta
CEO, BeyondCore
Arijit Sengupta is the CEO of BeyondCore and Chair of the Big Data and Advanced Analytics group at SRII. BeyondCore Lucid automates the Data Scientist function. BeyondCore received awards such as Gartner Cool Vendor 2012 and GigaOm Structure Launchpad 2011. Arijit has guest lectured at Stanford; spoken at conferences in a dozen countries; and was written about in The World Is Flat 3.0, New York Times, San Jose Mercury News, etc. Arijit held leadership positions at several industry associations and previously worked at Oracle, Microsoft, and Yankee Group. He has been granted eight patents in the domains of analytics and privacy. Arijit holds an MBA with Distinction from the Harvard Business School and Bachelor degrees with Distinction in Computer Science and Economics from Stanford University.
Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan
Founder and CEO, ClearStory Data
Sharmila has spent 18+ years building game-changing software companies in a variety of markets. She has been EVP & CMO at numerous software companies, including Netscape, Kiva Software, AOL, Opsware, and Aster Data. She drove the creation of several multi-billion dollar market categories, including application servers, data center automation, and big data analytics. She is on the board of Hadapt and Lattice Engines, advisor to numerous companies, large and small, and an active investor in early stage companies.
Vipul Sharma
Director of Data Engineering, Eventbrite
Vipul Sharma is leading the Data Engineering group at Eventbrite, a self-service ticketing platform, where he and his team work on big data problems like platform, recommendation systems, search, and social graph mining. Throughout his career, he has spent many years fighting spam using machine learning and big data.
Justin Sheehy
CTO, Basho
Justin Sheehy is the CTO of Basho Technologies, the company behind the creation of Webmachine and Riak. As Chief Technology Officer, Justin Sheehy directs Basho's technical strategy, including integration with other platforms and new research into storage and distributed systems. Most recently before Basho, he was a principal scientist at the MITRE Corporation and a senior architect for systems infrastructure at Akamai. At both of those companies he focused on multiple aspects of robust distributed systems, including scheduling algorithms, language-based formal models, and resilience.
David Shim
Founder and CEO, Placed
David Shim is the Founder and CEO of Placed, Inc. Previously David held the role of Director of Product and Operations at Quantcast. As Director of Product he drove Quantcast Marketer from concept to an audience platform used by hundreds of advertisers and measuring over 6 billion actions a month. David pivoted to Director of Operations as part of the launch of Quantcast Lookalikes, the primary revenue generating product for Quantcast. Prior to Quantcast, David held leadership roles at WebTrends and Farecast (acquired by Microsoft in 2008). David has presented at numerous industry conferences including MobileBeat, ad:tech New York, iMedia Breakthrough Summit, O’Reilly Strata, Where, and Under the Radar.
Tomer Shiran
Director, Product Management, MapR Technologies
Tomer Shiran heads the product management team at MapR and is responsible for product strategy, roadmap and requirements. Prior to MapR, Tomer held numerous product management and engineering roles at Microsoft, most recently as the product manager for Microsoft Internet Security & Acceleration Server (now Microsoft Forefront). He is the founder of two websites that have served tens of millions of users, and received coverage in prestigious publications such as The New York Times, USA Today and The Times of London. Tomer is also the author of a 900-page programming book. He holds an MS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in Computer Science from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.
Gurjeet Singh
Co-Founder and CEO, Ayasdi
Gurjeet Singh is a co-founder of Ayasdi, has a Bachelor’s degree from Delhi University, and a Master’s and Ph.D. degree in Computational Mathematics from Stanford University. Gurjeet first met Gunnar Carlsson at Stanford during his PhD and this led to Gurjeet’s graduate work and thesis on the theory, algorithms and applications of Topological Data Analysis (TDA), as well as, Gurjeet’s participation on Gunnar’s DARPA funded research project to study how topology can be applied to solve real world problems. During this time, Gurjeet designed and developed various TDA algorithms to bring out the shape and meaning of data. This led to the creation of Ayasdi's core technology and machine-learning algorithms. Gurjeet previously worked at Google and Texas Instruments.
John Sotham
VP, Finance, BuildDirect
John joined BuildDirect in 2006 as the Vice President of Finance. In addition to his primary duties, which include raising capital and overseeing all aspects of financial reporting and control, John is also a key member of the strategic analytics team. In this role, his duties include developing both real-time KPIs to support day-to-day performance analysis; and predictive analytics to support and validate strategic decision-making. He brings an extensive background in audit, taxation, and business advisory services to the company. Prior to joining BuildDirect, John was a senior accountant at KPMG. He started his career in the environmental technology industry with Microsep International. John is a designated Chartered Accountant, and holds a Diploma in Technology in Operations Management.
Amaya Souarez
Director, Datacenter Services, Microsoft
Over the past 24 years, Amaya Souarez has been working in various roles as an IT Technical Operations professional, starting with PC support in 1988. Her technical roles included support for various Unix OS, Netware, NT, DOS and Windows workstation and server platforms, servers, network switches/routers, multiplexers, PBX, CAD platforms and a wide variety of other infrastructure. In 1994, she launched an IT systems consulting sole-proprietorship, and supported more than 50 small and medium businesses in the Seattle area for more than 7 years, gaining valuable business experience. In 2001, she joined MS as an Architecture PM on the Networking team, leading to several leadership roles managing MS online infrastructure. Currently, Amaya is Director of the DC Strategy & Automation team, within Data Center Services.
Ashok Srivastava
Venture Advisor for Trident Capital and Principal Scientist for Data Sciences, NASA Ames Research Center
Ashok N. Srivastava, Ph.D. leads the Data Sciences group at NASA Ames Research Center where he helps set the strategic direction for Data Science at the agency. He is also a Venture Advisor at Trident Capital focusing on big data analytics. He has helped a number of Trident Capital portfolio companies advance their use of data analytics to enhance interaction with customers and operating performance, including Extole, eGistics and Jobvite. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a thought leader in the areas of big data analytics, machine learning and data mining, Ashok has won numerous awards for his influence on these fields including the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award for "pioneering contributions to intelligent information systems.”
Bradford Stephens
CEO, Drawn to Scale
Bradford is the CEO of Drawn to Scale, creators of Spire, the application database for Hadoop. Bradford has a long history in databases and distributed systems, starting at Microsoft working on SQL Server. He was one of the first users of Hadoop and HBase. Prior to a technical career, Bradford ran a large U.S. Presidential campaign and a House race. He holds a BS in Computer Science and Political Science.
Muddu Sudhakar
VP and GM, Cetas Cloud and Big Data Analytics Platform, Pivotal
Sudhakar Muddu is a seasoned and successful entrepreneur. Muddu is currently Vice President of the Big Data and Cloud division within VMware, soon to be a part of the new Pivotal Initiative. Muddu founded Cetas in 2010 to solve customer challenges in Big Data, On-line App Analytics and Hadoop Analytics. Before Cetas, Muddu was at EMC as the Chief Strategy Advisorand VP/GM of Cloud Information Services. Muddu came to EMC from Kazeon which he founded and sold to EMC in 2003. Before co-founding Kazeon in 2003, he co-founded Sanera Systems, a next-generation SAN technology company, which was acquired by McData in 2003. Muddu holds a Ph.D. and an M.S. from UCLA and a B.S. from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Ashish Thusoo
Co-Founder and CEO, Qubole
Ashish is the CEO and Co-founder of Qubole, a company that provides a Hadoop/Hive based analytics service in the cloud. Before starting Qubole Ashish ran the Data Infrastructure team at Facebook. Under his leadership the team created one of the largest data processing and analytics platform in the world - a platform that achieved the bold aim of making data accessible to analysts, engineers and data scientists alike within the company. In the process he helped drive the creation of tools, technologies and templates for successful "big data" deployments - artifacts that have become mainstream in the "big data" revolution. He is also the co-creator of Apache Hive and served as the project's founding Vice President at the Apache Software Foundation.
Omer Trajman
VP Field Operations, WibiData
Omer joined WibiData in 2012 to run Field Operations. Prior to WibiData, Omer served as VP Technology Solutions and VP Customer Solutions for three years at Cloudera, bringing Hadoop to the enterprise market. He was previously at Vertica (now HP) where he led the Field Engineering team. Omer holds a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Tufts University and was a visiting scholar at Oxford University reading in Computation and Engineering, focusing on architectures for large scale distributed systems.
Emile Werr
Head of Product Development and VP, NYSE
Emile is Head of Development for NYSE Big Data Group, a commercial solutions division within Nyse Technologies division, and runs Enterprise Data Architecture for NYSE Euronext. His responsibilities encompass data management and integration strategy, software engineering practices, common data services, federated data architecture, high-performance computing, grid computing and cloud integration. For the past two decades, Emile has provided IT architecture and systems engineering expertise to large Financial Securities organizations, including FINRA, Morgan Stanley, Barclays Capital, Lehman Brothers, Citi, Credit Suisse, Susquehanna and Solomon Brothers. Emile founded Xpheria, a niche middleware and data integration company in 2003, that implemented high-performance data services for Capital Markets, Financial Services, and Regulatory businesses. Emile has software patents in Big Data integration and streaming technologies.
Ben Werther
Founder and CEO, Platfora
Ben is the Founder & CEO of Platfora, a technology that instantly transforms raw data in Hadoop into interactive, in-memory business intelligence with no ETL or data warehouse required. Prior to Platfora, Ben was VP of Products at DataStax, the commercial leader in Apache Cassandra™. Ben also spent a number of years as head of products at Greenplum (through the EMC acquisition), where he drove product strategy, prioritization and product definition for the company.
Matt Wood
Principal Data Scientist, Amazon Web Services
Matt Wood focuses on the technical and business aspects of data-intensive computing at Amazon Web Services . With a background in the life sciences and a PhD in Bioinformatics, Matt is interested in helping teams of all sizes bring their ideas to life through technology. Before joining Amazon he worked on web-scale search engines at Cornell University, sequenced DNA in Hinxton and helped build software that drove a new era of genomics in Cambridge.
