Strata 2012 Keynotes

David Campbell is a Microsoft Technical Fellow whose present role is Vice President of Product Development for the SQL Server product suite.

David graduated with a Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering (Robotics) from Clarkson University in 1984 and began working on robotic workcells for Sanders Associates – later a division of Lockheed Corporation. In 1990 he joined Digital Equipment Corporation where he worked on their Codasyl database product DEC DBMS as well as their relational database product; Rdb.

Upon joining Microsoft in 1994, David was a developer and architect on the SQL Server Storage Engine team that was principally responsible for rewriting the core engine of SQL Server for SQL Server Version 7.0.

At Microsoft, he has held numerous positions... Read More.

Alistair has been an entrepreneur, author, and public speaker for nearly 20 years. He’s worked on a variety of topics, from web performance, to big data, to cloud computing, to startups, in that time. In 2001, he co-founded web performance startup Coradiant (acquired by BMC in 2011), and since that time has also launched Rednod, CloudOps, Bitcurrent, Year One Labs, the Bitnorth conference, the International Startup Festival and several other early-stage companies.

Alistair is the chair of O’Reilly’s Strata conference, Techweb’s Cloud Connect, and the International Startup Festival. Lean Analytics is his fourth book on analytics, technology, and entrepreneurship. He lives in Montreal, Canada and tries to mitigate chronic ADD by writing about far too many things at Solve For Interesting.

Doug is a founder of several Apache open source projects, including Lucene, Nutch, Hadoop and Avro. Doug currently works for Cloudera, and previously worked at Yahoo!, Excite, Apple and Xerox PARC. Doug holds a Bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and presently chairs the Board of the Apache Software Foundation.

Edd Dumbill is a technologist, writer and programmer based in California. He is the program chair for the O’Reilly Strata and Open Source Convention Conferences, and Editor in Chief of the journal Big Data.

He was the founder and creator of the Expectnation conference management system, and a co-founder of the Pharmalicensing.com online intellectual property exchange.

A veteran of open source, Edd has contributed to various projects, such as Debian and GNOME, and created the DOAP Vocabulary for describing software projects.

Edd has written four books, including O’Reilly’s “Learning Rails”. He writes regularly on Google+ and on his blog at eddology.com.

Ben is a best-selling author, broadcaster, medical doctor and academic who specialises in unpicking dodgy scientific claims from drug companies, newspapers, government reports, PR people and quacks. Unpicking bad science is the best way to explain good science.

Bad Science (4th Estate) has sold over 400,000 copies, is published in 18 countries, and reached #1 in the UK paperback non-fiction charts. His book exposing bad behaviour in the pharmaceutical industry will be published in 2012 by 4th Estate.

Ben has written the weekly Bad Science Column in the Guardian since 2003. It’s archived on this site along with blogposts, columns for the British Medical Journal, and other writing.

There are lots of clips of Ben on telly here, and a talk at... Read More.

Jonathan Gosier is a designer, software developer, lover of data science and the co-founder of metaLayer.com which aims to change how you analyze content by offering products for atomizing and visualizing data.

From 2009 to 2011 he served as Director of Product for SwiftRiver at Ushahidi working on an open-source platform for drawing insight from real-time communication during crisis events. The SwiftRiver project was awarded the 2011 Knight News Challenge award for its potential to improve the data journalism and news gathering process.

In 2009 Jon spoke at TED in Oxford, UK about his company Appfrica and one of their projects which connected rural African villages with the internet through a call center and light infrastructure. The service, in collaboration with non-profit OpenMind, was... Read More.

Usman Haque is the founder of Pachube.com, a real-time data infrastructure for the Internet of Things used by tens of thousands of people around the world (acquired by LogMeIn Inc in 2011). Trained as an architect, he has created responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and dozens of mass-participation initiatives. His skills include the design and engineering of both physical spaces and the software and systems that bring them to life. He received the 2008 Design of the Year Award (interactive) from the Design Museum, UK, a 2009 World Technology Award (art), a Wellcome Trust Sciart Award, a grant from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, the Swiss Creation Prize, Belluard Bollwerk International, the Japan Media Arts Festival Excellence prize and... Read More.

Avinash Kaushik is the co-Founder of Market Motive Inc and the Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google. His prior professional experience includes key roles at Intuit, DirecTV, Silicon Graphics in the US & DHL in Saudi Arabia.

Through his blog, Occam’s Razor, and his best selling books, Web Analytics: An Hour A Day and Web Analytics 2.0, Avinash has become recognized as an authoritative voice on how marketers, executives teams and industry leaders can leverage data to fundamentally reinvent their digital existence.

Avinash puts a common sense framework around the often frenetic world of web analytics and combines that with the philosophy that investing in talented analysts is the key to long-term success. He passionately advocates customer centricity and leveraging bleeding edge competitive intelligence... Read More.

Coco Krumme is a PhD student at MIT, where she’s partnered with a major financial institution to study transaction data and human behavior.

Gary Lang is the senior vice president of engineering for MarkLogic. Lang is a proven leader with more than two decades experience delivering large, complex products and systems, architectural design and direction setting for high-revenue software projects. Lang is responsible for all of MarkLogic product development.

Lang comes to MarkLogic from Microsoft, where he was a leader in the development of the next version of Visual Studio. Prior to Microsoft, Gary was vice president of platforms and global engineering at Autodesk, where he led an organization of 1,200 employees worldwide providing platform and product engineering for Autodesk’s core products as well as new software and services for emerging businesses. His organization was responsible for developing code for almost all of Autodesk’s desktop and SaaS products,... Read More.

A co-founder of Greenplum, Luke served as CTO of the organization and continues in this role for the Greenplum Division. Prior to Greenplum, Luke founded Didera, a database clustering company, in 2000 and served as CEO and Chairman. Luke’s background includes 16 years of management experience in computing technology ranging from innovations in supercomputing to advances in medical imaging systems. Most recently, he directed data center integration at High Performance Technologies Inc (HPTi), scaling the business to $30M, and setting industry firsts in parallel computing subsequently adopted by IBM and Compaq. Previously he held management positions at Northrop Grumman Corporation. He holds an M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University and a B.E. in Mathematics from Vanderbilt University.

Abhishek is an expert in the areas big data and consumer payments.

He is the co-founder of Tresata, a big data startup that helps companies identify their core data assets, manage, maintain and enhance the intrinsic value in them and build data factories and products to monetize that value.

Abhishek has over a decade of experience in various strategic and operational leadership roles in banking, technology and consulting. Abhishek is also a Member of the Faculty at one of the premier Retail Banking Management Programs in the US.

A featured speaker on these topics, Abhishek is a die-hard supporter of all things open source and is recognized in the industry as a visionary on how to create value by building, transforming (or disrupting) business eco-systems.

Richard Merkin has more than 30 years of experience in the health care field. He has specific expertise in the development and administration of integrated physician systems. As the founder of Heritage Provider Network established in 1996, Dr. Merkin develops clinically focused networks to bring efficient and quality driven systems to the communities in which it operates by working with physicians and physician organizations, hospitals and integrated delivery systems, health plans, public and community-based health care entities, and other health care professionals.

Dr. Merkin is a visionary and a sought-after healthcare expert who encourages innovation and challenge. Responding to our country’s 2 trillion dollar health care crises, Dr. Merkin created, developed and sponsored the 3 million dollar Heritage Health Prize for predictive modeling to save... Read More.

Michael Olson is currently CEO of Cloudera, the company delivering an enterprise-ready data management platform based on Apache Hadoop. He was formerly CEO of Sleepycat Software, makers of Berkeley DB, the open source embedded database engine. Mike spent two years at Oracle Corporation as Vice President for Embedded Technologies after Oracle’s acquisition of Sleepycat in 2006. Prior to joining Sleepycat, Mike held technical and business roles at database vendors Britton Lee, Illustra Information Technologies and Informix Software. Mike has Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Steve Schoettler is Founder and CEO of Junyo, a learning analytics company creating tools to help teachers and students understand and improve academic success. As co-founder of Zynga, Steve helped introduce social gaming, virtual currencies, and real-time analytics on a massive scale. Prior to Zynga, Steve worked on innovative and scalable technologies in mobile, entertainment, distributed computing, and security. Steve holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

Hal R. Varian is the Chief Economist at Google. He started in May 2002 as a consultant and has been involved in many aspects of the company, including auction design, econometric analysis, finance, corporate strategy and public policy.

He also holds academic appointments at the University of California, Berkeley in three departments: business, economics, and information management.

He received his SB degree from MIT in 1969 and his MA in mathematics and Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 1973. He has also taught at MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Michigan and other universities around the world.

Dr. Varian is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the Econometric Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was Co-Editor of the American Economic Review... Read More.

Flavio Villanustre is the Vice President of Infrastructure and Products. In this position, Flavio is responsible for Information and Physical Security, overall infrastructure strategy and new product development for LexisNexis Risk Solutions and HPCC Systems. Prior to 2001, Flavio served in a variety of roles at different companies including Infrastructure, Information Security and Information Technology. In addition to this, Villanustre has been involved with the Opensource community for over 15 years through multiple initiatives. Some of these include founding the first Linux User Group in Buenos Aires (BALUG) in 1994, releasing several pieces of software under different Opensource licenses, and evangelizing Opensource to different audiences through conferences, training and education. Before working in technology, Flavio was a neurosurgeon.

A former Apple engineer, Pete Warden is the CTO of Jetpac, and writes on large-scale data processing and visualization