Speaker Biographies – New York, Fall 2019

Edouard Alligand, CEO, QuasarDB.
With a background in mathematics and computer science, Edouard started his career in software security with a focus on C++, kernel programming, and system programming, topics on which he contributed articles and books. In 2008, Edouard shifted his career towards financial markets, building trading systems for equity derivatives firms. He is the founder and CEO of quasarDB since 2014.

Boni Bruno, CISSP, CISM, CGEIT, Chief Solutions Architect, Dell EMC.
Boni leads the solution architecture team for Dell EMC’s Storage Division. He is an evangelist for Big Data Analytics and Digital Transformation and has over 25 years deploying high-speed distributed systems with massive storage capacity. He has given numerous presentations and has authored many papers on HPC, Analytics, Stream Processing, Machine Learning, Data Security, AI, and IoT and has actively worked with numerous financial firms in the deployment of algorithmic trading platforms and infrastructure. Boni holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology. He also specializes in security architecture and penetration testing, his CISSP, CISM, and CGEIT certifications have been active since 2001 and continues to mentor and sponsored numerous security professionals across various vertical industries.

Mark Coleman, VP Product & Marketing, Dotscience.
Prior to Dotscience, Mark was Founder and CEO of the technical marketing agency, Implicit-Explicit. A sought-after leader in the Cloud Native space, Mark frequently sits on panels and speaks at prominent industry conferences including GOTO Conference, DockerCon and KubeCon. He co-founded the innovative conference series, Software Circus, and is currently chairperson of the CNCF marketing committee. He also served as an in-demand DevOps Consultant and Technical Leader for many years. Mark studied at the University of Durham where he received his Bachelors of Science in Computer Science.

Laurent de Barry, Founder & Managing Director, Enyx.
Laurent co-founded Enyx in 2011 at the age of 23 and holds 10 years of experience developing ultra low latency technology. As Managing Director of Enyx’s trading solutions, Laurent leads product and technology strategy, while overseeing the development of the next generation FPGA-enabled trading solutions. An electrical and computer science engineer by training, Laurent is passionate about high performance computing and bringing cutting-edge technology to market. Prior to co-founding Enyx, he worked on critical hardware components for the aeronautical and military industries.

Dr Michel Debiche, Director of Analytics Research, STAC.
Michel is both quant and technologist, whose passion is making data science actually work for financial firms. He is currently leading the expansion of the STAC community to include more buyside firms looking to leapfrog to the best technologies and Analytics Ops processes for quant/quantamental investing. Prior to STAC, Michel re-engineered strategy development and implementation at numerous firms, first as a quant, then as a consultant. Employers include CSFB, Daiwa, First New York, CIBC, and Think Big Analytics, where he led the financial services practice. Michel has BS, MS, and PhD degrees in geophysics from Stanford and Princeton Universities.

Jeff Denworth, VP, Products and Marketing, VAST Data
Jeff Denworth is the VP of Products and Marketing and a co-founder of VAST Data, bringing to VAST nearly two decades of experience with big data, HPC and cloud storage technologies. Prior to CTERA, Jeff served as VP of Marketing at DDN Storage where he oversaw marketing, business and corporate development during a time of rapid sales growth. Previous to DDN, Jeff served as director of sales for Cluster File Systems, the company that gave birth to the popular open-source Lustre File System.

Britt Ewen, Director, Lord, Abbett & Co.
Britt Ewen has 25 years of data architecture and engineering experience in finance at buy and sell side firms. Throughout his career, Britt has supported data feeds, pipelines and quantitative analytics backed by a wide range of relational and non-relational platforms. He currently co-heads the platform and infrastructure team at Lord Abbett where he has led the design and implementation of a data platform serving the firm's distribution and marketing channels. Prior to Lord Abbett, Britt led the data team at PDT Partners and was a Technology Fellow at Goldman Sachs.

Pierre Gardrat, VP Engineering, NovaSparks.
Pierre joined NovaSparks in 2010 as Hardware VP Engineering. Prior to joining NovaSparks, Pierre worked in the FPGA development industry for seven years, starting his career in the French Department of Homeland Security and then serving as firmware developer and application engineer at EVE, a leader of FPGA-based emulation acquired in 2012 by Synopsys. Pierre graduated from Telecom Paristech (ENST Paris) and holds an MSc from University of Pierre & Marie Curie, Paris.

Dr Matthew Grosvenor, Senior Vice President Technology, Exablaze.
Matthew is Senior VP of Technology at Exablaze. He's been working with the Exablaze family of companies for over 8 years. In that time, he has been involved in trading strategy development, market data acquisition, FPGA acceleration, systems optimisation, and measurement and analytics. Matthew holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. His research work focused on techniques for managing and mitigating latency variance in hyper-scale datacenter networks. He continues to publish widely in the fields of big-data, hyperscale datacenters, networks, latency and network measurement.

Rajiv Jain, Director – Data Center Group, Xilinx.
Rajiv is leading Financial Services Industry vertical at Xilinx. He brings 20 years of Financial services industry experience working at companies such as Citigroup, BNY Mellon, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch and other large banks leading a range complex technology projects in Trading, Risk and Infrastructure He started his career as hardware product engineer at IBM working on board development, ASICs and DSPs. Rajiv holds B.S. and M.S in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and attended Computational Finance program at Carnegie Mellon University.

Gary Kazantsev, Head of Quant Technology Strategy, Bloomberg
Prior to this strategy role, he created and headed the Machine Learning Engineering group, leading projects at the intersection of computational linguistics, machine learning and finance, such as sentiment analysis, market impact indicators, social media analytics, question answering, and predictive modeling of financial markets. Prior to joining Bloomberg Gary had earned degrees in physics, mathematics, and computer science from Boston University. Gary is a member of the KDD DS + Journalism workshop program committee, the advisory board for the AI & Data Science in Trading conference, and a co-organizer of the annual Machine Learning in Finance conference at Columbia University.

Ciaran Kennedy, Global CSO, Arista.
Ciaran is the Chief Sales Officer at Arista, leading the global expansion and business development efforts of the low-latency, FPGA-enabled network equipment provider. After studying Software Engineering at Ulster University, Ciaran joined Kainos Software as an engineer. He then spent ten years working at Wombat Financial Software where he held several key roles. Post-acquisition by NYSE, Ciaran took on the role of VP of Global Solutions Delivery and later became COO of the Wombat division looking after the day-to-day business operations. During his 15 years in financial technology, he has gained immense exposure to the latest low-latency trading systems and financial exchange architectures.

Björn Kolbeck, Co-founder/CEO, Quobyte.
Before taking over the helm at Quobyte, Björn spent time at Google as tech lead for the hotel finder project (2011–2013). Prior to Google, he was the lead developer for the open-source file system XtreemFS (2006–2011). Björn’s PhD thesis was on fault-tolerant replication.

Peter Lankford, Founder & Executive 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.

Frederic Leens, CEO, Exostiv Labs.
Frederic is an expert of the semiconductor and microelectronics industries. At Exostiv Labs, Frederic focuses on EDA (electronic design automation) tools for FPGA. Exostiv Labs’ tools provide superior visibility into FPGA to speed up design and improve the quality of FPGA-based systems used to prototype ASIC and SoC or deployed in the field. Prior to founding Exostiv Labs, he has worked for companies such as Barco, NXP, Philips, Atos and ASML – building up an experience in many vertical industries using semiconductors, ranging from finance and medical imaging to avionics. Outside his work Frederic is insatiable traveler, an avid reader - and a loving father.

Matt Meinel, SVP Solutions Engineering, Sales and Business Development, Levyx.
Matt is a veteran innovator / entrepreneur in Capital Markets financial technology. He has been a key player at several successful, innovative financial technology firms including:Co-founder at startup 29West (low latency messaging technology) which exited to Informatica; RedHat CIO during transition period to the now popular subscription business model; Principal at O’Connor & Associates (bought by Swiss Bank which was acquired by UBS Investment Bank). At Swiss Bank he served as co-CIO and later at UBS Investment bank was Global Head of IT for the Fixed Income & Treasury Division.

Brett Miller, Sr Solutions Architect, MemVerge.
Brett has recently joined MemVerge from his previous role as Field CTO for Violin Systems. Brett has a unique combination of a technology background in distributive technologies and financial services experience. Brett is bringing MemVerge’s Memory Converge Infrastructure to solve the challenges around making big data fast data. MCI Based on Storage Class Memory will bring new possibilities in the data center.

Josh Pantony, CEO, Boosted AI
Josh was a Co-Founder and CTO at Maluuba a deep learning NLP company which powered 50 million devices before being acquired by Microsoft. He spent four years as a Principle Machine Learning engineer at Bloomberg. He helped start and build numerous critical Machine Learning initiatives including Ranking, Recommendation, Question and Answering, and Knowledge Graphs. Josh is currently the Co-Founder and CEO of Boosted AI a Machine Learning company that helps investment firms augment idea generation and portfolio construction. Based on customer specific inputs and alternative data, Boosted learns from and identifies patterns that generate additional opportunities in your portfolio.

Lior Paster, Director, Business Development and Sales, Mellanox.
Lior is a seasoned executive, managing technical sales and business development at Mellanox NYC since 2015. Lior is a datacenter technology expert. Before Mellanox, he’s been assisting end-users in making the right choices and building high performance infrastructure with companies such as Hyve Solutions, Synnex, SGI, and Rackable Systems.

J.D. Patel, Systems Performance Architect, Intel.
J.D. has over 25 years of experience working on complex heterogeneous systems architectures, development, and performance-tuning. As a technology evangelist, J.D. enjoys delivering trainings on various Intel technologies and spends time working with customers to optimize their HPC workloads using Intel software tools.

Mutema Pittman, Director of Enterprise Business Division, Programmable Solutions Group, Intel.
Mutema is responsible for the Enterprise business segment in the Intel Programmable Solutions Group (PSG) business division. Mutema’s responsibilities include creating and executing strategies and business plans to drive success with end customers in the enterprise market, and strong collaboration with internal and external groups focusing on Programmable Acceleration Cards, solution workloads, and channels to reach enterprise customers. Mutema joined PSG (formerly Altera) in 2010 via the acquisition of Avalon Microelectronics. He has held previous roles in engineering design and management during that time.

Dr Balaji Prabhakar, Co-Founder, Tick Tock Networks.
Balaji’s research interests are in computer networks; notably, data centers and cloud computing. His group at Stanford University is currently working on "Self-Programming Networks," developing systems and algorithms for enabling networks to sense, monitor, program and control themselves. He co-invented the QCN (Quantized Congestion Notification) algorithm and DCTCP algorithm. Balaji has received the CAREER award from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Erlang Prize from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society, the Rollo Davidson Prize from the University of Cambridge, and delivered the Lanteren Lectures. He is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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.

VR Satish, Co-Founder and CTO, Pavilion Data Systems.
More than 20 years of experience in enterprise storage software products. Prior to joining Pavilion Data, he was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Artiman Ventures. Satish was an early employee of Veritas and later served as the Vice President and the Chief Technology Officer for the Information & Availability Group at Symantec Corporation prior to joining Artiman. His current areas of interest include distributed computing, information-centric storage architectures and virtualization. Satish holds multiple patents in storage management, and earned his Master’s degree in computer science from the University of Florida.

Jeff Smith, Senior Engineering Manager, Facebook AI.
Jeff is an experienced AI leader, having built AI technologies and teams across San Francisco, Hong Kong, and New York. His writings include Machine Learning Systems and Exploring Deep Learning for Language, both published by Manning. He’s currently focused on the development of open source AI technologies centered around PyTorch and its larger ecosystem.

Misha Tselman, Executive Director, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Michael (Misha) is an Executive Director at J.P. Morgan Chase where he leads a team focused on building a Data Science and Machine Learning environment on an established Python-based platform. Misha has over 20 years of experience building technology solutions for Wall Street institutions. He began his industry career in the 90s at a supercomputing pioneer Thinking Machines Corporation and later worked at a startup building accelerators and software for special effects. He holds an MS in Mathematics and has completed doctoral research in High-Performance Computing. He enjoys solving real-world problems (once) and has a minimalist approach to coding.

Jason White, Vice President - Product Management, Exegy
Jason has over 15 years of experience leading engineering and managed services efforts at Exegy. He currently leads Exegy’s product management team, responsible for product strategy, architecture, and roadmap planning. Jason is an original member of Exegy’s engineering team and is an inventor on many United States and international patents. Previously, he has also served in key roles leading Exegy’s Managed Service Operations and Managed Services Engineering teams.

Glenn Wright, Systems Architect, Kx Systems
Glenn has over 30 years of technical experience in the high-performance computing industry, working on server, networking and storage elements of extreme performance solutions. At Kx, Glenn is a senior systems architect, where he advises kdb+ customers on new offerings from system vendors and public cloud vendors. Renown for high performance data analytics, Kx continues to promote technology helping with higher performance or availability metrics for kdb+ based market data solutions. Glenn has led the Kx Systems relationship with STAC for the past 4 years, during which time Kx have continued to innovate on new systems technology, resulting in many STAC benchmark improvements for kdb+, over that period.

Victor Yodaiken, CEO, FSMTime by FSMLabs
Victor is the CEO of FSMLabs. He is a named inventor on fourteen US patents and has worked in clock synchronization, real-time systems and operating systems for more than twenty years. He is a former New Yorker, now in Austin Texas.