Speaker Biographies – Feature Sessions - London

Anand Bisen, Principal Solutions Architect, EMC DSSD.
Anand has been architecting large-scale IO intensive computational environments for last 10 years. At EMC DSSD his focus is on developing solutions for Big Data & Advanced Analytics. Prior to joining DSSD Anand was at SAS Institute. He was awarded MS in Computer Science in 2004 from Purdue University where the focus of his research was in High Performance Scientific Tools.

James Coomer, Technical Director, DDN.
James’ career has been spent entirely in High Performance Computing. James began with a PhD in Theoretical Physics working on the fastest machines in Europe performing large scale atomic simulations. Subsequently James has occupied the breadth of technical roles in HPC including back line support, installation, consultancy, training, and latterly pre-sales and design in organisations including Sun Microsystems, Streamline Computing and Dell. James enjoys daily direct contact with customers across all sectors in HPC and presents widely on HPC topics.

Evgeny Fiksman, Staff Engineer, Intel.
After joining Intel in 2006 during and working on optimization of video enhancement algorithms for x86 platforms, Evgeny acquired expertise in multi-threading and low level programing. For the last 5 years Evgeny was leading engineer and architected for the implementation of OpenCL runtime for Intel CPUs (Core, Xeon & Atom) and Xeon PHI co-processors. Recently, Evgeny’ve joined a software enabling team, which is focused on financial applications. Prior joining Intel Evgeny lead development of a naval team training simulator. Evgeny’s holding B.Sc and M.Sc in Electrical Engineering from the Technion – Israel institute of Technology, Haifa, Isreal.

Ingrid Funie, Imperial College London.
Andreea-Ingrid Funie graduated with a First Class Honours MEng in Artificial Intelligence from Imperial College London in 2013. She worked in Goldman Sachs as a Technical Analyst gaining insights in two different parts of the business: prime-brokerage as well as asset management. She is now a 3 rd year PhD candidate in the Custom Computing research group at Imperial College London, focusing on applying machine learning and other mathematical optimisation techniques in an attempt to identify advanced trading strategies.

Peter Lankford, Founder & Director, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Peter leads STAC®, which provides hands-on technology research and testing tools to the finance industry and facilitates the STAC Benchmark Council™, a group of leading financial institutions and vendors that engages in technical dialog and specifies standard ways to assess technologies used in finance. Prior to STAC, Peter was SVP of the $240M market data technology business at Reuters. Prior to Reuters, Peter held management positions at Citibank, First Chicago Corp., and operating-system maker IGC. Peter has an MBA, Masters in International Relations, and Bachelors in Chemistry from the University of Chicago.

Dr David Snowdon, CTO, Metamako.
David is CTO at Metamako, with his core role comprising product and technology strategy at the company. His role liasing with customers about their needs gives him a unique view into the challenges faced by such firms. Prior to founding Metamako, David gained a wealth of experience working in and for HFT firms, optimising their network structures, network performance, and building performance hardware, gateware and software. He has a PhD in Operating Systems, looking at and taking advantage of the effect of frequency scaling on power and energy usage. Energy efficiency has long been an interest, with ten years spent designing, building and racing high performance solar powered cars in international events. David’s team formerly held the Guiness record for the world’s fastest solar powered vehicle.

Stephen Weston, Principal Engineer and Hardware Libraries Architect, Intel, and Visiting Professor, Imperial College London.
Stephen works at the intersection of quantitative analytics and advanced computing architectures. At Intel, he is responsible for the design and implementation of mathematical and statistical libraries for reconfigurable hardware. Prior to Intel, he was Chief Development Officer at Maxeler Technologies, where he did product and business development for a bespoke hardware platform. Before joining Maxeler, Stephen was a Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase, where he headed up the Applied Analytics Group.

Bernie Wu, Chief Business Development Officer, Levyx
Bernie is passionate about using innovative software to unlock the value and performance of new processor and storage technologies with respect to Big Data. Previously, Bernie was at 2 Silicon Valley startups as President of PDS Inc, focused on Software-defined storage and as VP of Business Development for Pi-Coral, focused on Flash/Object storage. Bernie was also a founder/EVP for FalconStor - a leader in disk and tape virtualization and heterogeneous data replication. Prior to that, he was SVP at Trend Micro where he pioneered deploying virus protection onto email internet relays thru partnerships with major Telcos. He has BS/MS Eng. degrees from UC Berkeley and an MBA from UCLA.

James Wylie, Director of Technical Product Marketing, Corvil.
As Director of Technical Product Marketing, James works closely with industry analysts, sales teams and prospects, articulating Corvil’s value and technical benefits. Prior to his current role, James spent 8 years as a senior member of Corvil's Sales Engineering team helping the worlds leading stock exchanges and financial institutions gain a deep understanding into the performance of their complex IT and business systems. James has a background in Network Consultancy, holds an Honours Degree in Electronic Engineering and is a frequent blogger and public speaker.