Speaker Biographies – AI STAC

William Beaudin, Senior Director of Solutions Engineering, DDN.

Mike Beller, Chief Scientist, Ustreet.ai.
Mike Beller is Chief Scientist at UStreet.ai, where he applies Quantitative Finance, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence technologies toward UStreet’s mission of making comprehensive personal financial advice accessible to everyone. Before joining UStreet, Mike served as CEO of the innovative capital markets fintech Thesys Technologies, and as CTO of the quantitative hedge fund Tradeworx, Inc. During over two decades in finance, Mike built and ran low-latency trading platforms that executed 3% of the US equities markets daily, and pioneered ground-breaking regulatory technologies such as the MIDAS system, used by the SEC to help ensure safer and fairer markets.

Gary Bhattacharjee, VP AI and Data Strategy, Infosys.

Mike Bloom, AI Solution Architect, WEKA.
Mike Bloom has worked closely with television, telecom, healthcare and advertising industries since the early 1990’s, largely involving the operation and development of infrastructure, data analytics and data management. Mike’s position with past storage vendors and his current position at Weka as an AI Solution Architect provide him with opportunities to inspect a diverse range of workflows within Deep Learning and Generative AI.

Bishop Brock, Head of Research, Strategic Technology Analysis Center.
Bishop ensures that STAC’s research, benchmark standards, and software tools meet the needs of STAC’s community. He has over 30 years of experience, including research roles at State Street, IBM Research, and Computational Logic, Inc. in diverse areas including machine learning, automated reasoning, formal verification, embedded systems, and computer energy management. Before joining STAC, he contributed to new STAC benchmarks and developed STAC Benchmark implementations on multiple platforms. Bishop is an IBM Master Inventor, Senior Member of the IEEE, has passed the CFA Exam Level III, and holds a BS in Chemistry and BA and MS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Roger Burkhardt, CTO, LTX Trading.

Malcolm deMayo, Global Vice President - Financial Services Industry, NVIDIA.
Malcolm is Global Vice President, Financial Services Industry. Malcolm is responsible for creating and driving the Global FSI strategy with product and geography leaders. He is responsible for building a robust opportunity pipeline and establish long term business relationships and strategic relevance with selected high revenue FSI customers. Malcolm also leads a virtual team of technical, business, and sales, and marketing resources across NVIDIA and partners to achieve mutual success. Previously, Malcolm oversaw Strategic FSI Clients at Oracle where he led strategic partnership with G-SIBs to modernize Finance, Core and Investment Banking with Modern SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS solutions.

David Eis, Engineering Manager of the ML Platform team, AI Engineering Group, Bloomberg.
David is the Engineering Manager of the ML Platform team in Bloomberg’s AI Engineering Group. He leads the efforts to build and support the infrastructure used to build and maintain AI-driven applications at Bloomberg. Over the past nine years, David has worked on AI applications in news and, most recently, the building out of Bloomberg’s ML infrastructure. Prior to joining Bloomberg, David earned a Ph.D. at Princeton in electrical engineering, and a Bachelor’s of Engineering degree in electrical engineering from The Cooper Union.

Bob Gaines, HPC/ AI Technical Solutions Architect, Intel Corporation.
Bob has spent more than a decade helping firms leverage HPC and AI technologies to discover patterns and anomalies in data to drive measurable business outcomes from trading strategy development to treasury and risk optimization while minimizing compliance exposures. Bob has a deep history in HPC architecture, analytics, and AI. Bob has led the financial services solutions practice for many industry leaders, including DDN, Seagate, Cray, and IBM, before joining the Intel HPC +AI technical solutions team.

Allen Holmes Jr., AI Business Lead, NA, Lenovo.
Allen is the AI Business Lead for North America at Lenovo. His central focus is to drive the adoption of AI by closely consulting with clients to deliver AI solutions at scale by leveraging the Lenovo AI Innovator ecosystem. Allen leads our enablement and channel growth strategy for AI. He also champions go to market efforts for strategic alliance partners focused on the acceleration of AI workloads. Prior to his work at Lenovo, Allen has worked in the IT industry for nearly a decade for a Solution Integrator and currently has a patent pending that leverages machine learning to drive advance analytics.

Robert Magno, Solution Architect, Run:ai.
Robert is a Solutions Architect at Run:AI with a background in virtualization, networking, Docker and Kubernetes. He enjoys the challenge of architecting complex AI/ML environments that ensure data scientists have the necessary tools and underlying hardware resources to drive business results for enterprises.

Michael McGuirk, Sr. Manager, AMD.
Michael leads the Data Center technical marketing team within the Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group (AECG) at AMD. In his role, Michael defines new products and solutions based on customer input and ensures they are easy to use and successful across the data center market. Michael has over 20 years of experience at Xilinx, now AMD, and has extensive FPGA and Embedded systems experience. In his current role he is working to define how FPGA’s can leverage AI to better serve the Financial Technology market.

Scott McKenzie, Global Head of Engineering, Optiver.
Scott McKenzie is Optiver’s Global Head of Engineering, based in Austin, Texas. With 17 years of experience in the design and implementation of algorithmic trading systems, Scott has led engineering teams for Optiver across the US, Europe and Asia Pacific, with a specific focus on creating safe, performant and capable algorithms for trading on leading exchanges. Scott has a background in software engineering and was CTO of Optiver APAC from 2019-2023.

Ania Musial, Product Team Lead for Machine Learning Platforms, Office of the CTO, Bloomberg.
Ania is a Product Team Lead for Machine Learning Platforms in Bloomberg’s CTO Office. Her group defines the strategic technical direction of the company’s AI and ML infrastructure platforms necessary for the data-driven organization’s robust machine learning model development life cycle (MDLC). In her 14 years at Bloomberg, she has built recommendation systems infrastructure, developed real-time news applications, and advocated for engineers’ needs as co-chair of the firm’s ML Guild for three years. She earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematical science and linguistics from the University of Michigan, and has given talks at KubeCon, Open FinTech Forum, and FastPath.

Peter Nabicht, President, Strategic Technology Analysis Center.
Peter has spent nearly 20 years driving change at the intersection of technology and complex business problems. At STAC, Peter's mission is to leverage this experience to guide the continued rapid growth of the STAC community. His key roles prior to STAC include: CTO of Allston Trading, developing and supporting multi-asset, low latency trading systems; Co-founder of 12Sided Technology, which developed high-throughput network data capture and analytics; and Head of Electronic Markets Strategy and Development at Dealerweb. Peter has a BA in English and a MS in Computer Science from Loyola University Chicago.

Victor Alberto Olmedo, Global Staff FSA, Pure Storage.
Victor Alberto Olmedo is currently Global Field Solution Architect for Pure Storage, where he partners with Global Finance leaders. By mapping his deep understanding of the business of finance with technology. He has helped customers create agile stacks that achieve frictionless iteration and discovery that realize novel business value out of their Analytics, AI, ML, and DL pursuits.

Keith Pijanowski, Subject Matter Expert AI/ML, MinIO.
Keith is MinIO’s subject matter expert for all things AI/ML where he researches and writes about storage requirements for AI and ML workloads. Keith has extensive experience in the software space, most recently as an Enterprise Architect on BNY Mellon’s Distribution Analytics team building data pipelines and analytics solutions. Prior to BNY Mellon, Keith spent more than a decade at Microsoft where he served in a number of different developer evangelism and business roles. He was one of the first members of Microsoft’s Evangelism team when the .NET Framework was first released.

Fredy Rabih, VP Products, NeuReality.
Fredy leads the product strategy and management at NeuReality and has extensive experience in product definition and system architecture. With more than 25 years of experience in semiconductors. Prior to NeuReality Fredy served as Corporate VP of Product Management at DSP Group, Managing its entire product portfolio. He also served in multiple product and program management roles at Texas instruments in both the Wireless and Broadband divisions.

David Rukshin, Chief Technology Officer, WorldQuant.
David oversees WorldQuant’s technology and operations function. Prior to joining the firm in 2014, he held numerous positions at D. E. Shaw group, including Global Head of IT Infrastructure Engineering and Operations. Before that he worked at Chase Manhattan Bank, supporting Equities, FX and Fixed Income trading desks, and began his career as a systems programmer at AT&T Labs Research. David holds an MS in Technology Management from Columbia University and a BS in Management Science and Information Systems from Rutgers University.

Balaji Srinivasan, Global Business Development Director, Intel Corporation.
Balaji is a 31-year veteran of the compute industry with 19 at Intel Corporation. Currently he drives AI messaging, training, and team go to market activities across Intel products to grow Intel and Partner AI business. Before Intel, Balaji led product marketing and management at a startup division in networking and telecommunications. He has garnered a patent from his development career and efforts in Telecom Class 5ESS for aliasing bandpass filters deployed in telephony networks. Balaji loves motorcycling, sourdough baking, and MS flight sim. As a First NC Board member, he champions STEM initiatives in his home state of North Carolina.

Ambika Sukla, Co-Founder and CEO, NLMatics.
Ambika is Co-founder and CEO of NLMatics, a LLM/Generative AI based search, data extraction and summarization platform ideal for financial services, legal services, and life sciences. Prior to this, Ambika established Morgan Stanley’s AI Center of Excellence (COE) and headed the AI research and advisory team from Fall 2015 to Spring 2019. Ambika built up a top AI research team to work on some of the most challenging problems in finance. His team helped transform core business processes in the area of sales & trading, research, investment management, wealth management and risk. Ambika's background is in signal processing and information theory and he holds a Masters degree in Telecommunication Engineering from NJIT.

Ugur Tigli, CTO, MinIO.
In his current role, Ugur oversees enterprise strategy and interfaces with MinIO’s enterprise client base. He helps them architect and deploy API-driven, cloud native and scalable enterprise-grade data infrastructure using MinIO. Ugur has almost two decades of experience building high performance data infrastructure for global financial institutions. Prior to MinIO, he was a technology leader at Bank of America, where he served as the Senior Vice President, Global Head of Hardware Engineering. Ugur joined BofA through the acquisition of Merrill Lynch where he was the Vice President for Storage Engineering. Ugur has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College.

Conor Twomey, Head of Customer Success, KX.
Conor has spent 12 years solving the most demanding data problems for leading corporations around the world. He was shortlisted by GradIreland as "Graduate of the Year" in Ireland 2011 and appeared in Sunday Independent’s "30-under-30 Who Will Shape the Future of Ireland." Conor has also previously represented Ireland at the World Economic Forum Under 30 community and was a recipient of the Irish Echo’s 40-under-40 Award in New York. Conor holds a BSc. in Financial, Mathematical and Actuarial Sciences from University College Cork and a Msc. in Computational Finance from the University of Limerick.

Dave Weber, Director, Global FSI CTO, Lenovo.
Leads Lenovo's global financial services industry technology initiatives. Dave is focused on low latency, high performance and emerging technologies, as well as on-prem/hybrid cloud, generative AI, and automation initiatives. He works with financial markets clients to provide advanced solutions, and with partners to build out the ecosystem, as well as with Lenovo Research and Development to influence future products and drive innovation. Dave also leads the Lenovo relationship with STAC®. Dave is based near New York City.

Felix Winterstein, CEO, Xelera.
Felix Winterstein is the managing director and co-founder of Xelera Technologies GmbH. Prior to this, he was a research associate at Imperial College London. From 2010 to 2015, Felix has worked as a system engineer at the European Space Agency. He holds a master’s degree from RWTH Aachen University and a PhD degree from Imperial College London. His interests are high performance computing and SmartNIC technology.