Real World Applications Panel: Enterprise and Industry

Kenneth Neil Cukier is the Japan business and finance correspondent of The Economist in Tokyo. Earlier, he was the telecoms and IT correspondent for the paper in London, where his work focused on the international politics of technology, particularly intellectual property and Internet governance. Previously, he was the technology editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong and a regular commentator on CNBC Asia; before that he was the European Editor of Red Herring. From 1992 to 1996 he worked at The International Herald Tribune in Paris. From 2002 to 2004 Mr. Cukier was a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he worked on the Internet and international relations. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Prospect, The Financial Times and Foreign Affairs, among others. He has been a frequent commentator on business and technology matters for CBS, CNN, NPR and the BBC and others. Additionally, Mr. Cukier serves on the board of directors of International Bridges to Justice, a Geneva-based NGO promoting legal rights in developing countries, and on the board of advisors to the Daniel Pearl Foundation.

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Adam Hurwitz is a PM on the Information Services team at Microsoft, focusing on Big Data and the cloud. Previously he was CIO of Business Intelligence Associates, Inc. (BIA) where he oversaw the development of BIA’s industry leading e-discovery software for collection and processing of electronically stored information (ESI). He spoke at the first Strata conference on a Real World panel. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and has a BA from Vassar College in both Physics and Philosophy.

As a Technology Evangelist at Amazon, Jinesh Varia helps businesses take advantage of disruptive technologies like Cloud Computing that are changing the way businesses compete in the new web world. Jinesh has spoken at more than 150 conferences around the world. His passion lies in architecture, design and XML Web services. Jinesh has over 15 years experience in XML and Web services and has worked with standards-based working groups in XBRL. Prior to joining Amazon as an evangelist, he held several positions in UBmatrix including Solutions Architect, Enterprise Team Lead and Software engineer, working on various financial services projects including Call Modernization Project at FDIC. He was also lead developer at Penn State Data Center, Institute of Regional Affairs. Jinesh’s publications have been published in ACM and IEEE. Jinesh is originally from India and holds a Master’s degree in Information Systems from Penn State University.

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Has a BSc in EE and MSc / DSc degrees in OR. He is PSR’s founder and president, and has been involved in the following areas: E&G market reform – In the market reform area, Dr. Pereira has been an advisor to Brazil, Chile, China, the six countries of Central America, Colombia, Peru, Turkey and Venezuela. In Brazil, Dr. Pereira has been an advisor to the regulator, National System Operator; and Wholesale Energy Market. He was also the principal advisor to the Ministry-level committee that managed the 2001 energy supply crisis; to the Presidential committee that investigated the causes of rationing; and to the Energy Minister on post-rationing reforms. Since 2003, with the government change, Dr. Pereira has been a special advisor to the new Energy Minister on E&G issues. In particular, he has been directly involved in the design and implementation of the energy contracting auctions for discos, which since 2004 have resulted in the award of US$ 60 billion in contracts to generation investors. Market studies – Dr. Pereira has been a principal architect of Brazil’s Bioelectricity program, for private investment in several thousand MWs of competitive cogeneration from sugarcane-based ethanol. He has also coordinated several valuation studies of generation and distribution assets, and investment analysis of new generation and transmission projects, gas pipelines and international G&E interconnections. Model development – Dr. Pereira developed the well-known stochastic dual DP methodology, used by the National System Operator for the dispatch of Brazil’s 95 GW hydrothermal generation systems; and by the Wholesale Energy Market for the calculation of spot prices. He also contributed to the development of mathematical decomposition techniques used in integrated resource planning, risk management; and physical / financial port-folio optimization. Lecturing/academic – Dr. Pereira has been an invited speaker on power sector issues in almost all Latin American countries, plus Austria, Canada, China, France, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and USA. He was a professor of electrical engineering at PUC-Rio; a visiting professor at the IIT, in Spain; and has authored four books and two hundred papers in refereed journals and conferences. Dr. Pereira received the Franz Edelman Award from the American Operations Research Society for his work on hydrothermal coordination in Brazil; the Rio Branco Medal, from Brazil’s Presidency, for his contributions to the country’s power sector; and is an elected member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

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