Speaker Biographies – Feature Sessions - Chicago

Olivier Baetz, COO, NovaSparks.
Olivier joined NovaSparks in April 2011, bringing over ten years of experience selling and implementing low latency technology solutions for the financial industry. In 2000, Olivier was part of the original team at Radianz, the first global Extranet for the financial industry. At Radianz, Olivier successfully designed the solution for the original “proof of concept” customer which established the value of the Radianz community model. He also ran the North American Sales Engineering team for five years and was instrumental in the creation of the Radianz ULTRA service which provides ultra-low latency exchange con-nectivity to high-frequency trading firms. In 2009 and 2010, Olivier built and led the global technical convergence project team to integrate the Radianz platform into the global BT Network. Olivier started his career in telecoms, designing and selling managed network solutions for large multinational firms. Olivier holds a MS in Telecom Engineering from ENST Paris and an MBA from Wharton with a major in Finance. When he is not working, Olivier enjoys sailing, surfing, skiing and all good wines from around the world.

Mike Beller, CEO, Thesys Technologies and Tradeworx, Inc.
In addition to heading up Tradeworx, Mike serves as a Managing Partner of it’s technology subsidiary, Thesys Technologies, LLC. Prior to becoming CEO in 2015, he served as Tradeworx’s CTO since the firm’s inception in 1999, architecting it’s industry-leading low-latency trading and big data analytics platforms. Mr. Beller has 25+ years’ experience in finance, telecom and information technology industries. Prior to Tradeworx, he co-founded PenVision, a mobile field force automation company. Before this, he was a research engineer in the areas of wireless communications and cryptography at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore). Mr. Beller received his BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University ('86), and his MS in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University ('88).

David Cohen, Senior Principal Engineer, Intel.
Dave is a Senior Principle Engineer and Storage Solutions CTO for the Data Center Solutions Group (DSG), a unit within Intel’s Data Center Group. He focuses on designing solutions that exploit Intel’s 3D-Xpoint Memory technology to its fullest while taking advantage of centrally-managed software in order to operate large-scale, distributed systems. Prior to Intel, David was a Director in the Office of the CTO at EMC where he lead efforts related to integrating storage systems with network virtualization. David also has a long-history of working on building distributed systems in industry, most recently working for the investment banks: Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. An experienced practitioner, Dave's active connections to commercial and academic research and development labs insure Intel’s Storage Solutions are both well-grounded and cutting-edge. An acknowledged industry expert in system architecture and development, Dave is a sought after speaker and published author.

Mike Dini, President, Dini Group.
Mike Dini is President of DINI Group. He has been a specialist in the design and application of FPGAs for the last 30 years.

Matthew Knight, VP of Technical Marketing, Metamako.
Matthew has been working in the field of ultra-low-latency technology for over ten years. Before Metamako, Matthew spent three years as Technical Marketing Director, Financial Services at Solarflare Communications. Prior to that, he was President of Accensus LLC which produced a hybrid CPU/FPGA solution, Head of Labs at DRW Holdings, pushing the limits of low-latency as applied to electronic trading systems and measuring them. Before that, he spent two years at STAC Research where he worked on developing testing methodologies and tools to for benchmarking low-latency systems and running benchmarks.

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.

Brian Peterson, Partner, DV Trading.
Brian Peterson is a Partner and the Head Trader for Automated Trading at DV Trading in Chicago. He is also a senior lecturer at the University of Washington's Computational Finance and Risk Management department where he teaches quantitative trading systems development. At DV, Brian runs a quantitative trading team that is a top-25 market maker in multiple Interest Rate and Energy markets, and a registered market maker in many of them. In addition to Interest Rate and Energy products, Brian's team also trades FX, Equity Indices, and other Commodities.

Thomas Rodgers, Member of ISO C++ Committee's SG1 and SG14 study groups.
Thomas has over 20 years' experience in software development. Prior to this, he served in numerous development and development management roles at firms like Neurensic, KCG, DRW, Matlock Capital, UBS, and Bear Stearns.

Vahan Sardaryan, Co-Founder and CEO, LDA Technologies.
Vahan is a Co-Founder and the CEO at LDA Technologies, a known provider of leading high-performance FPGA-based networking products. Vahan’s experience in software design goes back 20 years and encompasses various fields such as high-performance networking, information security, realtime systems and such. He has been involved in electronic trading industry for over 12 years, 8 years of which was dedicated to HFT companies’ needs. Vahan holds a PhD degree equivalent in Applied Mathematics and is an avid chess player.