Speaker Biographies – Chicago, Spring 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.

Dr John Ashley, Director, Global Financial Services Strategy, NVIDIA.
John currently leads the Global Financial Services Industry Strategy team at NVIDIA. Previously at NVIDIA, he started and led the Professional Services Deep Learning Practice and the Deep Learning Professional Services Partner program. He has managed the relationship with IBM’s Software and Cognitive groups, was a Senior Solutions Architect covering Financial Services based in New York and then London, and supported NVIDIA’s work with the Square Kilometer Array radio astronomy programs. He holds a doctorate in Computational Sciences and Informatics, and both BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering. He holds a US Patent in predictive analytics for home mortgage valuation.

Shimon Ben-David, Director of Sales Engineering & Support, WekaIO.
A seasoned technical leader, experienced in planning and building organizations to answer the needs of startups or corporates. with over 20 years of experience in various industries with a focus on storage and networking. In the past lead the XIV world wide support organization which was purchased by IBM and grew to more than $500M in revenues, Following that lead support and professional services for XtremIO which was purchased by EMC, and currently leading the Support and Sales Engineering for WekaIO. Based in the Bay area.

David Clements, Director, Solutions Architect, Igneous.
David is the Director of solutions architect at Igneous. A career technologist with demonstrated success in leadership, cost containment, operations, strategic planning and project management, he brings more than 25 years of experience in information technology to the growing team at Igneous.

Matt Davey, Director of Product Management, Corvil.
Matt is Director of Product Management at Corvil, with over 15 years' experience in the high-performance electronic trading and data analytics space. Working with customers, sales and development teams, and other electronic trading community members, Matt has been a long-time contributor and innovator of Corvil technology and is a co-inventor on several Corvil patents. Matt has particular interest and expertise in time synchronization, latency measurement and streaming data analytics. Prior to Corvil, Matt worked in cryptography and information security consulting. Matt holds a Ph.D. in Information Theory from the University of Cambridge, and a M.Sc. in Mathematics from Trinity College in Dublin.

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.

Robert DeWitt, VP Systems Engineering, Exablaze.

Charles Fan, Co-Founder and CEO, MemVerge.
Charles is co-founder and CEO of MemVerge. Prior to MemVerge, Charles was the CTO of Cheetah Mobile leading its global technology teams, and an SVP/GM at VMware, founding the storage business unit that developed the Virtual SAN product. Charles also worked at EMC and was the founder of the EMC China R&D Center. Charles joined EMC via the acquisition of Rainfinity, where he was a co-founder and CTO. Charles received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his B.E. in Electrical Engineering from the Cooper Union.

Davor Frank, Director, WW Sales Engineering, Solarflare Communications.
Davor Frank is the Director of WW Sales Engineering, Solarflare. Having joined in October of 2011, he brings to Solarflare over a decade of experience in Investment Banking technology. Davor is currently responsible for application and systems consulting, providing architecture guidance to customers looking to implement Solarflare technologies in their infrastructure. Previously, Davor had worked as a systems engineer at Deutsche Bank on the Enterprise UNIX infrastructure, more recently focusing on design, implementation and operational support of ultra-low latency systems.

Ken Gibson, Director of Persistent Memory Software Architecture, Intel.
Ken is Director of Persistent Memory Software Architecture in Intel’s Datacenter Group. Ken led the team that created the persistent memory programming model together with leading software vendors including Microsoft, Red Hat, VMware, and Oracle. His team develops and supports the Persistent Memory Development Kit (PMDK) as the common set of APIs on Linux and Windows enabling application developers to use persistent memory.

Francisco Girela López, Senior FPGA Engineer, Seven Solutions.
Francisco obtained his Master on Telecommunications Engineering degree in the University of Granada. Before ending these studies, he started working as a technical consultant in an international company. After some time, he went back to the University where he accepted a job as a researcher. During his research, he specialized in ultra-accurate time transfer systems and he focused on the development of the White Rabbit technology. Nowadays he is based in Chicago where he works at Seven Solutions as Senior FPGA engineer and technical responsible for business support for North America customers. Simultaneously, he is carrying out his PhD in telecommunication engineering.

John Hagerman, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, Algo-Logic.
In this role, John is responsible for Algo-Logic’s marketing, corporate communications, and business development functions. Prior to joining Algo-Logic, John served as President of BrandGate, a business advisory consulting company where he worked with a number of clients who delivered innovative solutions in storage, networking, Smart Home/IoT, Data Warehousing, and Artificial intelligence markets.Over the course of his career, he has held senior sales, marketing, business development, and management leadership positions at 3Com, Maxtor, NetEffect, Neterion/Exar, and Myricom. John holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Santa Clara University, where he also obtained an MBA.

Scott Henderson, Systems Solutions Engineer, Vcinity.
Scott has over 15 years of experience designing and delivering complex, integrated compute and storage solutions for the enterprise, in diverse roles with large service providers, midsize integrators, and startup OEMs. His focus is solving business problems by aligning people, processes, politics, and technology — ultimately enabling organizations to achieve their strategic goals. Scott lives in the Washington, DC, region with his wife and children, and spends as much time outdoors as possible.

Bhavesh Lad, Business Development & Partner Alliances Manager for Emerging Workloads, Dell EMC.
Dell EMC’s Business Development & Partner Alliances Manager for Emerging Workloads, Bhavesh joined EMC in 2013 where he was the Global Systems Architect for the Walt Disney Company. In 2016 Bhavesh joined the business development team driving ISV relationships within media and entertainment to provide new and comprehensive solutions for customers. Bhavesh’s areas of expertise include virtualization, media workflows, networking, media asset management, content delivery, and content creation. Some of the primary relationships he was responsible for driving include Dalet and Grass Valley. Today Bhavesh is focused on AI for M&E (Graymeta, Veritone, IdenTV), Tick data, Splunk, Intel’s Nauta (AI) Solution, Blockchain, and Retail.

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.

Tom Leahy, Senior Sales Engineer, Endace.
Tom is a Senior Sales Engineer and has been with Endace for more than 10 years. Over more than two decades in the industry, Tom has held range of roles including Network Design Engineer, Solutions Architect, Product Manager, Marketing Manager, and Business Strategist at companies including Level 3 Communications, Telcove, and Marconi Communications.

David Lidrbauch, Product Marketing Manager, Mentor, A Siemens Business.
David focuses his experience in design and verification solutions for ASIC, FPGA, and DSP solutions. Early work on high-speed data interfaces and high-reliability industrial communications, combined with experience in board-level design, emulation, digital synthesis, and HW + SW verification at four silicon and EDA startups rooted a deep appreciation for the real challenges of bringing technology solutions to market problems. David earned his BS in Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics at Case Western Reserve University. In spare hours, he keeps three old stick-shift Saabs roadworthy and is restoring an old sailboat for eventual long-distance ocean cruising.

Cliff Maddox, Director of Sales, NovaSparks.
Cliff has been working in the finance industry for the past 30 years. For the past year he has been focused on helping prop shops, hedge funds and banks upgrade their infrastructure using NovaSparks ultra-low latency market data solutions. Prior to that he spent 8 years at ACTIV Financial where he expanded their presence throughout the trading community. Cliff spent the first 20 years of his career building trading solutions for a wide variety of financial firms.

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.

Sadie Nedo, Sales Manager, Orolia.
Sadie is a Sales Manager for the Commercial Timing markets at Orolia. For nearly a decade, she has specialized in helping customers develop solutions that simplify the integration of precision timing and frequency into enterprise applications and environments. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Jerry Nelligan, CTO, XR Trading.
Over 27 years in trading industry with experience as a network engineer, systems programmer, systems integrator, database administrator, developer, trader, and leader. Fortunate to be a part of excellent teams addressing execution, analysis, latency, research, market data, and compliance in the securities and futures industries.

Brian Peterson, Managing Director, Hehmeyer Trading + Investments.
Brian has more than a decade of experience researching, designing, developing, and deploying production quantitative trading systems. He is the Managing Director for quantitative trading and cryptocurrencies at Hehmeyer Trading + Investments in Chicago, and has held similar roles at other prominent Chicago trading firms for almost 20 years. Brian has deep experience delivering large, technically complex production systems utilizing the latest technologies and techniques, including advanced optimization, machine learning and artificial intelligence, low-latency execution, and algorithm design. In addition, Brian researches, publishes, and teaches. He holds an appointment as a lecturer in quantitative trading systems design in the University of Washington Applied Mathematics, Computational Finance and Risk Management graduate department. Brian is co-author or maintainer of over 10 packages for using the R statistical language in finance, acts as the organization administrator for R's participation in the prestigious annual Google Summer of Code program, and is on the organizing committee of the annual R/Finance conference.

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.

VR Satish, Chief Technology Officer, 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.

Dr David Snowdon, Director of Engineering, Arista.
David was co-founder and CTO at Metamako, which got acquired by Arista in 2018. Prior to founding Metamako, David gained a wealth of experience working in and for electronic trading firms, optimising their network structures, network performance, and building performance hardware, gateware and software. He has a PhD in Operating Systems from the University of NSW, Australia, looking at the effect of frequency scaling on power and energy usage. Outside of work, David spends time designing, building and racing high-performance solar powered cars in international events and formerly held the Guinness record for the world’s fastest solar powered vehicle.

David Taylor, Chief Technology Officer, Exegy.
David oversees product strategy, architecture, research and development, and also leads the pre-sales engineering, product management and marketing efforts at Exegy. He is an inventor on 37 United States and 29 international patents and patents-pending. Prior to joining Exegy, David served on the faculty and researched high-performance computer networks at the Applied Research Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis.

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.

Dr Stephen Weston, Numerical Libraries Architect, Intel.
Stephen is a Principal Engineer and Numerical Libraries Architect at Intel Corporation, where he focuses on designing, developing and delivering libraries of hardware-accelerated mathematical functions across multiple computational domains, specialising in finance with an increasing focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. A former front-office quant and market risk specialist, Stephen has also held a variety of positions in risk management and fin-tech as well as representing several investment banks on industry-level committees on regulatory and market risk. Stephen holds a PhD in mathematical finance from Cass Business School and is also a visiting professor in the department of computing at Imperial College, where he focuses on applications of AI to problems in finance.