Strata 2011 Speakers

Joseph Adler has many years of experience in data mining and data analysis at companies including DoubleClick, American Express, and VeriSign. He graduated from MIT with an B.Sc. and M.Eng in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. He is the inventor of several patents for computer security and cryptography, and the author of “Baseball Hacks” and “R in a Nutshell”. Currently, he is a senior data scientist at LinkedIn.

Jim Adler is the Chief Privacy Officer and General Manager of Data Systems at Intelius. As part of the Executive Leadership Team, Mr. Adler is the chief consumer advocate for the company and responsible for the data systems that power Intelius’ products. Mr. Adler is a national leader on privacy, cryptography, and security and speaks frequently on these issues. He has testified before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), US Congress, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and spoken at leading academic institutions.

Prior to Intelius, Mr. Adler served as President and Chief Technology Officer at Identity.net, an Internet company giving consumers control of their online identity and reputation. From 1998 to 2005, Mr. Adler was the founder and CEO of VoteHere, a pioneer... Read More.

Alasdair Allan is the author of Learning iPhone Programming and iPhone Sensor Programming published by O’Reilly Media. He is a senior research fellow in Astronomy at the University of Exeter, and as part of his work there he is building a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, can reactively schedule observations of time-critical events and carry out complex long term monitoring of variable objects. Notable successes include contributing to the detection of the most distant object yet discovered, a gamma-ray burster at a redshift of 8.2. Alasdair also runs a small technology consulting company writing bespoke software, building open hardware and providing training. He sporadically writes blog posts about things that interest him, and more... Read More.

Tasso Argyros is Vice President for Marketing and Product Management within the Aster Data Center of Innovation. Tasso has a background in data management, data mining and large-scale distributed systems. Before co-founding Aster Data, he was in the Ph.D. program at Stanford University. Tasso is responsible for Aster Data’s marketing and product management strategy. He works with customers, partners, and industry leaders to help define the technology requirements created by the need to address the rapid emergence of diverse new types of data and diverse new types of analytics. He leverages his experience across the full technology solution stack to identify ways in which Aster Data technology can help to deliver solutions for big data analytics that apply to leading challenges across industries. Aster Data... Read More.

Ron Avnur has been working in the fields of database management systems and enterprise search engines for over 10 years, and joined MarkLogic Corporation in 2003 prior to its initial product release. His experience includes both Silicon Valley start-ups and large enterprise software companies, where he has specialized in database query optimization and performance. Ron held engineering, consulting and pre-sales positions at Cohera, a distributed database startup eventually acquired by PeopleSoft. In other positions, he helped lead business development at Business Layers, a security software startup acquired by Netegrity and also served as a programmer at Informix Software, which was purchased by IBM in 2001. Ron holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science and a master’s degree in computer science from... Read More.

Amr is co-founder and CTO of Cloudera where he is responsible for all engineering efforts from product development to release, for both the open source projects and Cloudera’s proprietary software. Prior to Cloudera, Amr served as vice president of engineering at Yahoo!, and led a team that used Hadoop extensively for data analysis and business intelligence across the Yahoo! online services. Amr holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Cairo University, Egypt, and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Ken Bado is president and CEO of MarkLogic. He is responsible for the company’s worldwide business and serves on the Board of Directors. As president and CEO, Ken brings a wealth of expertise to MarkLogic in corporate strategy, development, engineering, and global field operations including marketing, sales and support, alliance and channels, and customer programs. Prior to MarkLogic, Bado drove extreme growth at Autodesk as the executive vice president of sales and services, and had an 11 year career at Mentor Graphics. Ken graduated with a bachelor’s degree from West Virginia’s Bethany College

Breck Baldwin is the President of Alias-i, creators of the popular LingPipe computational linguistics toolkit. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1995 from the University of Pennsylvania. In the time between his thesis on coreference resolution and evaluation and founding Alias-i in 1999, Breck worked on DARPA-funded projects through UPenn.

Solon Barocas is a doctoral student in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and Student Fellow at the Information Law Institute at New York University. His research examines the ethics and implications of data mining, particularly for purposes of strategic communication. Solon has worked with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Center for Global Communication Studies, the Stanhope Centre for Communication Policy and Research, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He obtained his MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and graduated from Brown University with a BA in Art-Semiotics and International Relations.

Trajan Bayly leads global commercial operations for healthymagination: GE’s $6B cross-business strategy to build better health at lower cost for more people all over the world. Trajan was part of the leadership team that created healthymagination and he drove its incubation as the project leader. Trajan currently leads the $100MM open innovation challenge launched last week.

Prior to this role, Trajan was Director of Strategic Initiatives at GE headquarters and led pricing strategy and “Imagination Breakthrough” innovation programs across GE business divisions globally.

At GE, Trajan has held multiple sales and marketing leadership roles. He is passionate about innovating and delivering targeted value propositions to customers. During his tenure at GE Security, he developed a software solution to measure and quantify value for customers and... Read More.

Tyler Bell is the Director of Product for Factual, an LA-based startup that is, amongst other things, creating a global coverage of the world’s places and local businesses. He previously taught archaeology at the University of Oxford and, more recently and topically, was the Product Lead for Yahoo’s Geo Technologies Group. He writes about semantic- and geo-technologies for O’Reilly Radar at http://radar.oreilly.com/tylerb/

Ryan Boyd is a developer advocate at Google focused on enabling developers to extend Google Apps and build businesses on top of Google technology. He previously worked on OpenSocial and led the developer relations team for Google’s AtomPub APIs. Prior to joining Google, Ryan worked in higher education as a web architect for RIT’s central web hosting environment and as web app developer building admissions and student systems.

Paul Brown is the Chief Architect for Paradigm4 and SciDB: an open source array database management system designed to scale in support of very large analytic workloads. Prior to Paradigm4, Paul spent a decade working for IBM Research at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA where he focused on advanced database systems research. Before IBM Paul worked for 15 years at a number of database companies all distinguished by the fact their names started with the letter ‘I’; Ingres, Illustra, and Informix. Paul is the author of several books about database technology, and a dozen research papers over the last fifteen years covering data analysis and DBMS implementation.

Elizabeth founded Cataphora and has led it from concept to successful profitability and to a successful pre-IPO divestiture that is unprecedented in the history of bootstrapped Silicon Valley software startups. To do this, she has drawn on her prior experience as a CEO and on her extensive knowledge of information retrieval technology and business. She was CEO and founder of Troba, an industry leading Customer Relationship Management software company which she sold in 2001. Elizabeth has significant experience in engineering management, management consulting, and restart management at such companies as Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. Elizabeth holds a BS in Theoretical Mathematics from the University of Michigan Honors Program.

Drew Conway is a PhD student in political science at New York University. Drew studies terrorism and armed conflict; using tools from mathematics and computer science to gain a deeper understanding of these phenomena.

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.

As interactive lead at the Guardian, Alastair has played games with the UK budget, created one of Steve Jobs’ favourite iPad apps, visualised the Wikileaks war logs and played ball with Twitter.

This builds on two decades of tinkering, encompassing early dalliances with BASIC, architecting popular kids games and involvement with art pieces like the Folk Songs Project.

Having won a few awards for his Guardian work, he’s recently been given the chance to build a small team aimed at pushing the boundaries of interactive news development. This has led to a series of talks at conferences and user groups around the UK and the US.

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.

Ted Dunning is Chief Application Architect at MapR Technologies and committer and PMC member for the Apache Mahout project. He contributing to the Mahout clustering, classification and matrix decomposition algorithms. He was the chief architect behind the MusicMatch, (now Yahoo Music) and Veoh recommendation systems and built fraud detection systems for ID Analytics.

Jonathan is CTO and co-founder at DataStax. Prior to DataStax, Jonathan worked extensively with Apache Cassandra while employed at Racksace. Prior to Rackspace, Jonathan built a multi-petabyte, scalable storage system based on Reed-Solomon encoding for backup provider Mozy. In addition to his work with DataStax, Jonathan is project chair of Apache Cassandra.

As Chief Technologist for Pervasive DataRush, Jim is responsible for the architectural design of Pervasive DataRush™, a software development platform that lets you rapidly build parallel applications that deliver high throughput on big data, fully leveraging the parallel processing capabilities of multicore processors in a multicore server, SMP machine, cluster or Hadoop cluster. (seewww.pervasivedatarush.com).

Jim has 20 years of large-scale software development experience in roles including development manager, software architect, and principal engineer. Prior to joining Pervasive, Jim was Software Development Manager for NexQL, as Director of Software Architecture for Voyence, as Software Development Principal for Net Perceptions/KD1, and as Senior Software Engineer for Convex Computer. Jim also held senior technical positions with Sequel Systems and E-Systems.

Jim is an active public speaker, including... Read More.

Ken Farmer has twenty years of experience in delivering innovations through data logistics: the unglamorous part of data science involved in acquiring, standardizing, validating, transforming, integrating, and enabling the availability and access to vast amounts of data.

Ken is a senior data architect at IBM where he leads their security & compliance data warehouse. Prior to this role Ken consulted on search engines and data warehouses in the insurance, telecom, entertainment, and retail industries.

Sara is Global Pulse’s Chief Platform Architect. She’s spent over 20 years as a lead engineer, innovations strategist and manager of fast-paced creative small teams developing new technologies and business cultures, and is passionate about turning theory into reliable practice. Her specialist areas include innovations theories, technology strategy, business analysis, intelligent systems, systems engineering, information fusion and autonomy.

Lee Feinberg joined Nokia in 2009 with the vision of “making data a part of every conversation.” Lee’s team has since brought business intelligence technologies to Nokia, providing 500+ employees access to dashboards and analysis.

Lee joined Nokia from his management consulting practice Unfair Revenue, which helped clients identify growth opportunities using the Internet, social marketing, and mobile platforms. The firm guided investment decisions by gaining control of customer information and interactions in digital channels.

Previously, as strategy director at Microsoft-Razorfish on the Ford Motor Company account, Lee established an analytics performance management practice and launched the social media site autoshows.ford.com. Lee also worked at Digitas, where he served on IBM’s corporate task force to define online metrics standards and introduced visualization technology that... Read More.

Elissa Fink is Tableau Software’s CMO. A true data geek, Elissa has been helping companies improve their marketing operations through applied data analysis for 20+ years. She has held executive positions in marketing, business strategy, product management, and product development. Elissa first discovered Tableau late one afternoon at her previous company. Three hours later, she was still “at play” with her data. “After just a few minutes using the product, I was getting answers to questions that were taking my previous company’s programmers weeks to create. It was instantly obvious that Tableau was on a special mission with something unique to offer the world. I just had to be a part of it.” Elissa is a graduate of Santa Clara University and holds an... Read More.

Jake Flomenberg is Director of Product Management at Splunk, responsible for Splunk’s search and user experience. Jake has a special interest in Big Data and making data analytics more accessible to the masses. Previously, Jake worked at Cloudera working directly with the founding team to tackle a broad array of sales, marketing, and product issues. Prior to business school, Jake held several roles ranging from software development to business strategy and M&A at Lockheed Martin as a member of their Engineering Leadership Development Program. Jake holds a B.S.E. in Computer Science, Electrical Computer Engineering, and Economics from Duke, an M.S.E in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

He was a professional software developer for ten years, and has been hacking code for much longer. Ben’s past clients include investment banks like JPMorgan Chase and Credit Suisse, the hedge fund Natura Capital, and EdF Trading an energy trading house. He built a taxonomy browser for Encyclopaedia Britannica in 2004, and previously worked for ThoughtWorks as a convert to agile software engineering.

Ben teaches and speaks on machine learning, software engineering, financial analysis, and the culture of quants. While living in London, Ben was an early contributor to the grassroots cartography project OpenStreetMap. He continues to manage a portfolio of financial assets via a quantitative trading strategy built upon sentiment and predictive analytics. He has an MSc in Finance from London Business School and... Read More.

Hjalmar is a serial entrepreneur, founder of four startups in gaming, mobile, web search and data since 1996. Prior to launching DataMarket, Hjalmar worked on new media and business development for companies in the Skipti Group (owners of Iceland Telecom) after their acquisition of his search startup – Spurl. DataMarket is based largely on Hjalmar’s vision to build a global exchange for structured data.

Anthony is the Founder and CEO of Kaggle. He assists companies with framing modeling tasks as data prediction competitions, ensuring that competitions reflect real-life projects. Before founding Kaggle, Anthony worked in the macroeconomic modelling areas of the Reserve Bank of Australia and before that the Australian Treasury. In these roles, Anthony was responsible for building macroeconomic models, generating economic forecasts and simulating the impact of changes in interest rates and fiscal policy on the Australian economy. Anthony holds a first class honours degree in economics and econometrics from the University of Melbourne and has published in The Economist magazine and the Australian Economic Review.

Arnab discerned that the information explosion created an unprecedented opportunity for value creation, and that a firm that combined superior talent with the techniques and technology required to distill insights from massive data reserves could deliver dramatic performance improvement. Accordingly he founded Opera Solutions in 2004 and has since guided the company in providing rapid, significant, and sustained profit improvement to leading global organizations. Prior to Opera, Arnab founded and sold a number of other companies, including Mitchell Madison Group, which achieved a recurring revenue base of $275MM within 4 years, and Zeborg, a business intelligence software company. He began his career at McKinsey & Co., where he was a partner, and also served as a partner at A.T. Kearney. Since 2004, he has worked... Read More.

Denise Hemke is a Director of Software Engineering at Salesforce.com based in Tampa, FL. She has been working at Salesforce.com since 2008 and currently manages software development teams that are responsible for monitoring & management, debugging utilities & services, and productivity tools. These tools are critical to detecting and troubleshooting the health of the Salesforce.com infrastructure and its applications. Denise has 10 years of experience working on large scale monitoring and reporting. Prior to working at Salesforce.com, she worked for both HSBC and AT&T.

Steven Hillion has been leading large engineering and analytics projects for 15 years. Prior to Greenplum, he was VP of engineering at M-Factor, where he built analytical applications that became global standard for demand-modeling at companies like Coca-Cola. Before that, he led development of a new application platform at QRS. At Kana Communications, Steven led the engineering group during the two largest releases of its flagship product, which was the engine for online support at companies like Yahoo! and eBay. Steven received Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California and was a King Charles I scholar at Oxford University.

Andrew Hogue is a Senior Staff Engineer and Engineering Manager in the Search Quality group at Google New York. He has worked on a wide array of projects including question answering, Google Squared, sentiment analysis, local and product search, and Google Goggles. His is interested in the areas of structured data, information extraction, and machine learning, and their applications to search and search interfaces. Prior to Google, he earned a M.Eng. and B.S. in Computer Science from MIT.

Now – President and Chief Scientist: Kaggle. Earlier – Founder: FastMail; Founder: Optimal Decisions. Long ago – Consultant: McKinsey & Co, A.T Kearney

Jeremy Howard is the President and Chief Scientist at Kaggle. Previously, he founded FastMail (sold to Opera Software) and Optimal Decisions (sold to ChoicePoint – now called LexisNexis Risk Solutions). Prior to that he worked in management consulting, at McKinsey & Company and A.T. Kearney, but he is now nearly fully recovered.

Jeremy’s passion is applying algorithms to data. At FastMail he used algorithms to automate nearly every part of the business – as a result the company only needed a total of 3 full time staff, and got over a million signups. Optimal Decisions... Read More.

J. Trevor Hughes is the President and CEO of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP). In this role, Hughes leads the world’s largest association of privacy professionals.

Hughes is an experienced attorney in privacy, technology and marketing law. He has provided testimony before the U.S. Congress Commerce Committee, the Senate Commerce Committee, the Federal Trade Commission, the Home Affairs Committee of the British Parliament and the EU Parliament on issues of privacy, surveillance, spam and privacy-sensitive technologies. He is a member of the first class of Certified Information Privacy Professionals (CIPP) and recently completed, with co-author Reed Freeman, Privacy Law in Marketing, published by CCH.

Hughes has previously served as the executive director of the Network Advertising Initiative, a leading online privacy... Read More.

Noah Iliinsky is the technical editor of, and a contributor to, Beautiful Visualization, published By O’Reilly Media.

He has spent the last several years thinking, writing, and speaking about best practices for designing information visualizations. He also works in interface and interaction design, all from a functional and user-centered perspective. Before becoming a designer he was a programmer for several years.

He has a master’s in Technical Communication from the University of Washington, and a bachelor’s in Physics from Reed College.

Steve has a broad range of industry experience. He has held positions with a large computer manufacturer, a startup application software company, an ERP provider and currently is employed by Thomson Reuters, the leader in providing intelligent information for businesses and professionals. He has spent most of his career implementing database solutions for interesting problems. He graduated magna cum laude with a degree in Quantitative Methods and Computer Science from Augsburg College.

Jon Jenkins is a research scientist for the SETI Institute (www.seti.org ) at NASA Ames Research Center where he conducts research on data processing and detection algorithms for discovering transiting extrasolar planets. He is the Co-Investigator for Data Analysis for NASA Discovery Program’s Kepler Mission (http://www.kepler.nasa.gov ). As the Kepler Mission Analysis Lead, Dr. Jenkins is responsible for developing algorithms for the Kepler Science Operations Center science pipeline and leads the team of scientific programmers who are implementing the software for the science pipeline. In 2010 Dr. Jenkins received NASA’s Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal for his numerous technical achievements throughout development, commissioning and operational phases, which have been critical to the success of Kepler.

Flip is the Founder and CTO of Infochimps, a data marketplace to find any data-set in the world. He holds a B.S. in Physics and Computer Science from Cornell University and attended graduate school in Physics at the University of Texas at Austin. Flip enjoys riding his bicycle around Austin, eating homemade soup, and playing extreme Scrabble. The idea for Infochimps was inspired by Flip’s abhorrence of redundancy and desire to make the world a happier place for data lovers of all kinds.

Randy S. Lea is vice president for the Aster Data Center of Innovation within Teradata Corporation. In this role, Randy is responsible for the sales and execution of big data analytics projects for Teradata in North America. This includes setting strategy, field-based innovation, and overall integration of the Aster Data field organization.

Randy was previously vice president of Product Marketing & Management for Teradata, responsible for marketing Teradata products (database, platform, and utilities), Teradata services (professional and customer services), and setting product customer requirements, plus technical field sales support teams.

Randy has 29 years of experience with NCR Corporation and Teradata Corporation. Since moving into the Teradata organization in 1995 he has held positions as director of product management for retail data warehouse applications,... Read More.

John Lucker, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP, leads Deloitte’s Advanced Analytics & Modeling practice, one of the leading analytics groups in the professional services industry. He has vast experience in the areas of advanced analytics, predictive modeling, data mining, scoring and rules engines, and numerous other advanced analytics business solution approaches.

John serves clients across multiple industries including insurance, health care, banking and financial services, retail, consumer products, telecomm, media and hospitality, where he provides end-to-end business, operational and technical consulting services.

John has developed unique advanced analytic business solutions and methods as well as the technical implementation tools to help realize the value of advanced analytics. He speaks and writes often on these topics at numerous trade and professional organizations and in... Read More.

Alex Lundry is Vice President and Director of Research at TargetPoint Consulting where he works as a political pollster, microtargeter, data-miner and data-visualizer. As a pollster, he has conducted surveys and moderated focus groups on subjects spanning the race for the White House all the way to big budget Hollywood movies. He is one of the country’s leading experts on electoral targeting, voter analytics and political data-mining, responsible for the microtargeting programs of presidential candidates, national membership and advocacy organizations, and Fortune 10 companies. Alex is also a creator, connoisseur and critic of political data visualizations and infographics, and his work in this field has been featured by Wired Magazine, Fast Company, and the Washington Post. In 2009, Politics Magazine named him a “Rising Star”... Read More.

Mark spent the past two decades working on analysis and decision support projects in many industries. He is the founder of Third Nature, a research and consulting firm focused on emerging technology and practices in analytics, BI and information management. Mark is also an award-winning former CTO and consultant who frequently speaks at US and European conferences.

I focus on two types of work: using data to make decisions and manage organizations, and building data technology infrastructure. I’ve spent the past two decades working on analysis, performance management and decision support projects. A big part of making decisions and using data in a corporate setting is ensuring that the right data capture and data delivery infrastructure is in place to manage the business. As... Read More.

Roger Magoulas is the director of market research at O’Reilly Media. Magoulas runs a team that is building an open source analysis infrastucture and provides analysis services, including technology trend analysis, to business decision-makers at O’Reilly and beyond. In previous incarnations, Magoulas designed and implemented data warehouse projects for organizations ranging from the San Francisco Opera to the Alberta Motor Club.

Betsy Masiello is a Policy Manager on Google’s public policy team. As part of her work at Google she is one of the leads for Google’s privacy efforts and for analyzing Google’s and the Internet’s impact on the economy. Prior to joining Google she was a consultant at McKinsey & Company, where she served global telecommunications companies on new business strategies around emerging technology. Masiello holds a BA in Computer Science from Wellesley College, a MSc in Economics from Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and an SM from MIT’s Technology & Policy Program.

Hilary Mason is the Chief Scientist at bit.ly, where she finds sense in vast data sets. Her work involves both pure research and development of product-focused features.

She’s also a co-founder of HackNY, a non-profit organization that connects talented student hackers from around the world with startups in NYC.

Hilary recently started the data science blog Dataists and is a member of hacker collective NYC Resistor.

She has discovered two new species, loves to bake cookies, and asks way too many questions.

Richard McDougall is the Application Infrastructure CTO and Principal Engineer in the Office of the CTO at VMware. He is responsible for driving advanced development and strategy for VMware’s application platform architecture – including the performance and integration of applications, runtimes, middleware, and application encapsulation technologies.

Richard’s is known as an expert in the areas of performance measurement and optimization, and in application deployment architectures.

Before the CTO office, as the Chief Performance architect Richard drove the performance strategy and initiatives to enable virtualization of high-end mission critical applications on VMware products.

Prior to joining VMware, Richard was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. During his 14 years at Sun, he was responsible for driving high performance and scalability initiatives for Solaris... Read More.

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.

Dwight is CEO and co-founder of 10gen, and one of the original authors of MongoDB. In 1995, Dwight co-founded DoubleClick and served as its CTO for ten years. Dwight was the architect of the DoubleClick ad serving infrastructure, DART, which serves tens of billions of ads per day. Dwight is co-founder, Chairman, and the original architect of Panther Express (now part of CDNetworks), a content distribution network (CDN) technology which serves hundreds of thousands of objects per second. Dwight is also a co-founder and investor in BusinessInsider.com and Gilt Groupe.

Before joining foursquare, Justin worked at a hedge fund as a quantitative analyst, building custom portfolios for their asset management division and doing modeling and analysis for their risk team, specializing in high-frequency, derivatives, and commodities trading. Prior to that, he worked for Bear Stearns as a vice president in their fixed income analyst group, building applications and models to help value agency pass-thru securities and building loan-level pricing applications and models. Justin holds a BS in computer science with a minor in mathematics from the University of Rochester and has studied graduate-level math and computer science at Columbia University. He enjoys finding ways to take large sets of data and making interesting things happen with it.

Tim is Founder and CEO at Acunu, where he works to close the gap between the demands of the data deluge and the opportunity afforded by modern hardware. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University, where he worked on distributed storage systems as part of the project that created Xen, the virtualisation platform, as part of an early cloud blueprint. Previously, Tim ran a consultancy delivering data analytics for air traffic control and was a senior member of the technical team at Tideway (now BMC), where he led the creation of solutions for managing data centres at Fortune 500 clients.

A computational linguist specializing in humanitarian applications.

Scott Nicholson is Chief Data Scientist at Accretive Health and has a PhD in Economics from Stanford. His team works to find innovative uses of data to help doctors make better decisions about care and to help people be more proactive about their own care. Before moving into the health care industry Scott was a Team Lead, Senior Data Scientist and Economist at LinkedIn where his work focused on using econometric techniques to increase user engagement and identify economically relevant insights from the rich LinkedIn data. Before LinkedIn Scott built real-time bidding and ad selection algorithms at an online advertising startup.

Nuala was named senior counsel, information governance and privacy in 2008 and joined GE as chief privacy leader in 2005. In her current role, Nuala leads GE’s Information Governance and Privacy practice groups and facilitate the team of business privacy leaders and data protection subject matter experts across the company. Nuala’s role includes championing the development and implementation of the Company’s policies and practices in the internal and external information environment and throughout the data life cycle, including creation, protection and disposal of information.

Prior to joining GE, Nuala served as chief privacy officer (CPO) of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Before DHS, Nuala served as chief privacy officer for the U.S. Department of Commerce, where she also served as chief counsel for... Read More.

Dane is a designer at Adaptive Path’s San Francisco studio, where he has helped craft digital experiences for companies like SK Telecom, Capital Group, CEB, Aol and Smart.fm. From obsessing over typographic grid layouts to wrestling with abstract theories of interpretation, Dane risks intellectual whiplash every day so that he can create more meaningful interactions for people.

Leo is a software engineer at Factual where he works on data cleaning tools and entity resolution. Prior to Factual, Leo was a software engineer at Google and an early engineer at LinkedIn.

Jake Porway is a machine learning and technology enthusiast who loves nothing more than seeing good values in data. He is the founder and executive director of DataKind, an organization that brings together leading data scientists with high impact social organizations to better collect, analyze, and visualize data in the service of humanity. Jake was most recently the data scientist in the New York Times R&D lab and remains an active member of the data science community, bringing his technical experience from his past work with groups like NASA, DARPA, Google, and Bell Labs to bear on the social sector. Jake’s work has been featured in leading academic journals and conferences (PAMI, ICCV), the Guardian, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and he has... Read More.

John has been extracting value from large datasets for over 15 years at companies ranging from hedge funds to small data-driven startups to amazon.com. He has deep experience in machine learning, data visualization, website performance and real-time fault analysis. An empiricist at heart, John’s optimism and can-do attitude make “Just do the experiment!” his favorite call to arms.

Naomi B. Robbins is the author of Creating More Effective Graphs, published by John Wiley (2005). She is a consultant, keynote speaker, and seminar leader who specializes in the graphical display of data. She trains employees of corporations and organizations on the effective presentation of data with customized programs. She also reviews documents and presentations for clients, suggesting improvements or alternative presentations as appropriate. Naomi received her Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Columbia University, M.A. from Cornell University, and A.B. from Bryn Mawr College. She had a long career at Bell Laboratories before forming NBR, her consulting practice.

Mark Rodgers is Senior Director of Product Development at LexisNexis. Prior to LexisNexis, Rodgers worked in Sales Engineering at Brio and as a Sales Consultant at SQRibe Technologies. Rodgers has a degree in computer science from the University of Cincinnati.

Monica Rogati is one of the founding members of the LinkedIn product data science team. She leads a team of data scientists and turns data into products, actionable insights and (news) stories.

Monica obtained her PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon, where she focused on text mining and applied machine learning. At LinkedIn, she pioneered data driven products with multi-million dollar business impact.

When she doesn’t build recommender systems, Monica finds stories in the LinkedIn data about the most overused buzzwords, trending job titles, entrepreneur DNA, promotion cycles for Millennials and first names that tend to succeed. Her stories appeared in thousands of media outlets – from the Wall Street Journal & The Economist to NPR & CNN all the way... Read More.

Irene Ros is an engineer and artist from Cambridge, MA. Her work focuses on designing and building engaging visualizations and user interfaces using web technologies. Her artwork focuses on the intersection of humanity and technology. Recently her work has been written about in the New York Times and the New York Times Open Blog, as well as Fast Company.

Irene is the creator of NYTWrites, a visualization tool that explores The New York Times authorship. She is also the co-creators of Many Bills, a visualization of congressional legislation aimed at lowering the barrier between the U.S legislative process and citizens. Many Bills combines Visualization techniques with Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval to offer varying amounts of detail to users.... Read More.

Evan Sandhaus works as the Semantic Technologist in The New York Times Research and Development Labs. He is spearheading The New York Times Linked Open Data Strategy and overseeing the release of 1.8 million documents to the computer science research community. Previously, Evan helped to put The New York Times on Google Earth, collaborated with New York University to explore new directions in News Search, and worked to bring The New York Times to Facebook.

Chris is a Developer Advocate at Google who engages the cloud development communities with both Google App Engine and other Google cloud technologies. Chris joined Google in 2007 and has worked on various Google technologies including OpenSocial, Maps and AJAX Apis. Prior to Google, Chris was a Principal Product Manager at Oracle in the development tools group as well as co-author of “JavaServer Faces: The Complete Reference”. Chris is a private pilot and also enjoys building and flying RC airplanes. When not flying, he also plays trumpet in various San Francisco Bay Area symphonies. Chris speaks Spanish, and a little French and German.

Bill Schmarzo Global Competency Lead, Enterprise Information Management Practice EMC Consulting

Bill Schmarzo has more than two decades of experience in data warehousing, BI and analytic applications. Bill authored the Business Benefits Analysis methodology that links an organization’s strategic business initiatives with their supporting data and analytic requirements, and co-authored with Ralph Kimball a series of articles on analytic applications. Bill has served on The Data Warehouse Institute’s faculty as the head of the analytic applications curriculum.

Previously, Bill was the vice president of Analytics at Yahoo where he was responsible for the development of Yahoo’s Advertiser and Website analytics products, including the delivery of “actionable insights” through a holistic user experience. Before that, Bill oversaw the Analytic Applications business unit at Business Objects,... Read More.

Dr. Abdul Shaikh is a Program Director in NCI’s Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch, where he leads Division-wide efforts in behavioral informatics, cyberinfrastructure and population health. Dr. Shaikh led the first NIH implementation of open innovation competitions tied to the America COMPETES Act (http://bit.ly/nPCOrw), and is an active participant in cross-agency initiatives in data harmonization, advanced computation, and cyber-enabled research. With a diverse background in public health research and practice, Dr. Shaikh also oversees extra-mural grants and contracts, and helps coordinate the Division’s Small Business Innovations Research (SBIR) portfolio with the NCI SBIR Development Center.

Dr. Shaikh received his Doctorate in Health Behavior and Health Education from the University of Michigan School of Public Health, and his Master of Health... Read More.

Peter Sirota is the General Manager of Amazon Elastic MapReduce, a managed Hadoop web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. Before starting Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Peter served as Sr. Manager of Software Development at Amazon Web Services leading billing, authentication, and portal teams and was responsible for launching the Amazon DevPay service. Peter holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Northeastern University.

Jeannie A. Stamberger, Ph.D. is the Associate Director of the Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley Disaster Management Initiative, and a CMUSV Adjunct Faculty. Jeannie received her Ph.D. Biological Sciences from Stanford University in 2006, and her undergraduate degree from Illinois Wesleyan University. During her doctorate, she worked with the Stanford Computer Science Department “InfoLab” group on software to assist field biologists in on the BioACT project. She has also worked on technical risk assessments at URS Corporation (Oakland, CA) for California Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta levees. She develops award winning technology driven by data-driven development, accurate analysis, graceful failure, low hanging fruit, and practical implementation. She brings a unique perspective to disaster management, by integrating her experience developing technology for extreme environments and analytical... Read More.

Rachel Sterne is Chief Digital Officer for the City of New York, where she focuses on improving the way that City government engages New Yorkers through technology. Her first task in the role was the development of a “Road Map for the Digital City,” a comprehensive plan to realize New York City’s digital potential through enhanced Access, Open Government, Engagement, and Industry. Prior to this role, Rachel was Founder and CEO of GroundReport, a citizen journalism platform that empowers reporters to publish original, intelligent reporting to an international audience. She founded GroundReport in 2006 with the mission to democratize the media and help the world share its stories. Rachel is also an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School, and previously worked as a digital... Read More.

Jer Thorp is an artist and educator from Vancouver, Canada, currently living in New York. A former geneticist, his digital art practice explores the many-folded boundaries between science and art. Recently, his work has been featured by The New York Times, The Guardian, BusinessWeek and the CBC.

Thorp’s award-winning software-based work has been exhibited in Europe, Asia, North America, South America, and Australia and all over the web.

Jer has over a decade of teaching experience, in Langara College’s Electronic Media Design Program, at the Vancouver Film school, and as an artist-in-residence at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Most recently, he has presented at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Art, at Eyebeam in New York City, and at IBM’s Center for... Read More.

Amaresh Tripathy is a Partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ Advisory business. Amaresh has helped Fortune 500 companies in multiple industries to use bottoms-up data analytics in strategic decision making. His work has focused on developing growth strategies, defining market entry plans, understanding customer behavior to increase profitability, improve marketing efficiency, developing operations strategy and streamlining distribution. Amaresh founded the firm’s Information and Analytics practice which he helps to manage. He frequently contributes to company’s blog on information analytics (www.theinformationadvantage.com) and has written on data analytics, marketing segmentation and behavioral economics. Amaresh holds a Masters degree in Transportation Systems Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin

I am a Principal Data Scientist at LinkedIn. I’ve also worked at Google on local search quality, and I was a founding employee of faceted search pioneer Endeca, where I spent ten years as Chief Scientist.

I am a leading industry advocate of human-computer information retrieval (HCIR). I established the HCIR workshop, which has taken place annually since 2007. More generally, I’ve worked to bring together researchers and practitioners in this area, organizing academic and industry events related to search and social media. I wrote the first book on faceted search as part of the Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Lectures.

I hold degrees in math and computer science from MIT and a PhD in computer science from CMU, where I worked on... Read More.

Vineet heads Innovation labs, the R&D & Consulting Division of Impetus Technologies. He is a well-known speaker at International conferences on Big Data Solutions, Agile Methodologies and a certified Scrum Master). A regular speaker and participant at BarCamps and technology conferences, he also has plans to author books on emerging technology concepts.

At Impetus, he is responsible for working on new technology, product development, managing innovation and creating IPs. At Impetus, Vineet has been involved in various client facing assignments, from managing complex deliveries to creating product prototypes and application POCs. He has been instrumental in steering the company’s technology and R&D road map, and has been involved in various new technology initiatives, including those on Open social, Hadoop, Cloud computing, Ruby on Rails, Web... Read More.

Chris van der Walt is the design lead for the United Nations Global Pulse project which is developing real-time technologies to identify vulnerable populations in crises. He has also worked extensively on communications strategy and design at the UN for the last 5 years. Previously, he worked as a freelance web development consultant for a variety of corporate and NGO clients. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Anne Wright is Co-principal Investigator and Director of Operations for the BodyTrack project in the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. She received B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. After leaving MIT, she co-founded Newton Research Labs, a successful robotics and computer vision company, then joined the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA Ames Research Center where she served as Lead Systems Engineer for Prototype Mars Rovers. While at Ames, Anne became interested in how to harness sensing and data visualization technologies and techniques originally developed for the rovers to help people “debug” diffuse environmentally related conditions such as allergies, food sensitivities, asthma and migraine triggers, etc. She... Read More.

Jane Yakowitz joined the faculty of Brooklyn Law School as a Visiting Assistant Professor for a two-year term beginning in the fall of 2010. Her research interests include privacy law, the legal profession, and empirical legal studies. She previously served as the Director of Project SEAPHE (Scale and Effects of Admissions Preferences in Higher Education) at UCLA School of Law, which investigates the effects that admissions preferences based on factors such as race, socioeconomic status, and athletics have on their intended beneficiaries. Professor Yakowitz is also an accomplished artist and musician. She has recorded several albums and has performed at Carnegie Hall and other venues across the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

Wlodek Zadrozny is an IBM Researcher working on natural language applications. Most recently he worked on text sources for Watson (IBM’s Jeopardy chamption) and applying related DeepQA technology to business problems. His previous work ranged from language processing research to product development and technical planning; in particular, he lead the development of interactions systems that used speech, natural language and focused search. Wlodek Zadrozny received a Ph.D. in Mathematics, from the Polish Academy of Science.