Speaker Biographies – New York, Spring 2019

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.

Michael Beal, CEO, Data Capital Management.
Data Capital Management is an Asset Management & Advisory Firm that specializes in machine learning, advanced technologies, and novel data sources to generate differentiated and uncorrelated returns for clients. Prior to DCM, Michael co-founded the Big Data and Advanced Analytics group for JP Morgan Chase and was an investor with TPG Capital and Morgan Stanley. Michael is passionate about investing, the onset of the “Data Economy”, and the new technologies required to bring the next Industrial Revolution to fruition. He earned a BA from Harvard College with honors in Economics and an MBA from Harvard Business School with distinction.

Trevor Bertrand, Senior Inside Sales, Orolia.
Trevor is a Senior Sales Representative for Orolia’s Commercial Timing markets. Trevor has over a decade of technology sales experience working with a wide array of Commercial clients, including many of the world’s leading financial institutions. He specializes in helping clients solve unique network timing challenges and develop network timing architectures that meet strict MiFID and FINRA regulations Trevor holds a BS in Marketing from the State University of New York College at Brockport.

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.

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.

Robert Cooke, CTO, 3Forge.
Founder of 3Forge with 20 years of experience in IT management. Head of infrastructure and post trade processing at Liquidnet. Lead developer for Middle Office for JPMC. Managed regulatory compliance and electronic trading teams at Bear Stearns.

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.

Arnaud Derasse, Co-founder & CEO, Enyx.
Arnaud holds over a decade of experience in the startup arena with a focus on technology, in product-oriented companies. Arnaud began his career developing IT solutions for the medical industry and interventions through research projects for French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Following this experience, Arnaud transitioned to the world of digital electronics. After receiving a MSc degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from ESIEE Paris, he began a one year program at HEC School of Business focused on entrepreneurship with innovative technologies. Upon completion, he joined a fintech start-up where he led hardware and software development, eventually becoming the Head of Operations for the EMEA region.

Alok Dutt, Head of Equity Analytics, Citi.
Alok has architectural and managerial responsibility for advanced projects in data analytics, trading algorithms, and automation across multiple business lines and asset classes at Citi. He works to streamline the full lifecycle of automated data-driven business processes including data curation, analysis, modeling, simulation and visualization. Before Citi, Alok developed the trading models and algorithms for a new automated options market making group at Morgan Stanley that was the subject of a HBS case study on disruptive innovation. Prior to that, Alok established the first multi-asset hybrid trading desk at Bank of America. Alok has a PhD in Computer Science from Yale University and a BA in Mathematics from Cambridge University.

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.

Roop Ganguly, Chief Solutions Architect, Bigstream.
Bishwa Roop Ganguly is Chief Solutions Architect at Bigstream Solutions. He has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and an MS and BS in Computer Science from University of Illinois and University of California at Berkeley, respectively. He has published extensively in the field of parallel processing and computer networks. He also has 5 years experience as a Data Scientist using Hadoop, Spark and SQL. He currently manages all customer engagements at Bigstream.

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.

Dr Matthew Grosvenor, VP Technology, Exablaze.
Matthew is 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.

David Hiatt, Global Director, Business Development and Strategic Alliances, WekaIO.
David is the Director of Strategic Alliances and Business Development at WekaIO, where he is responsible for identifying new business opportunities and expanding the partner ecosystem. Previously, David led market development activities in healthcare and life sciences at WDC’s Data Center Solutions Business Unit and Violin Memory. He has been a featured speaker on data storage related topics at numerous industry events and workshops. David earned an MBA from the Booth School of Management at the University of Chicago and a BSBA from the University of Central Florida.

William Hill, Lead Data Scientist, ViON (speaking for Axellio).
William has amassed 17 years of experience as Statistical Software Engineer and Data Scientist for companies such as; Red Hat, SAS Institute, IBM, and 2 startup companies. He is a US Veteran and holds a BS and MS in Computer Science. William specializes in GPU-based Artificial Intelligence and High-Performance Computing applied to Big Data, finance, and military intelligence. Some of his most notable achievements include; Presenting to Congress the need for Cyber Security, leading to the eventual creation of US Cyber Command, and his Neural Network research at SAS Institute developing dynamic activation function based Neural Networks.

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.

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.

Andreas Lohr, Senior Expert, Derivatives and Cash Trading IT, Deutsche Boerse.
Andreas has a degree in computer science from University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt. He started in trading technology for financial markets in 1994 and continues doing so since. Andreas has worked in a startup for trading software and two major investment banks in Frankfurt and London. Before joining Deutsche Boerse in 2016, he spent many years in Amsterdam where he worked for a prop trading company.

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.

Brett Miller, Field Chief Technology Office, Violin Systems.
Senior Exec with extensive experience spearheading implementation and support of mission-critical programs that support Fortune 100 clients. Proficient at delivering strategic and tactical solutions to support the business. Excels at streamlining support processes to optimize response times and subject matter experts’ productivity. Adept at mentoring high-performance teams; passionate about undertaking and achieving difficult challenges. Strong facilitator; develops corporate-wide team collaboration by actively supporting tactical/strategic initiatives.

Sebastian Neusuess, Head of Trading System Analytics, Deutsche Boerse.
Having joined Deutsche Boerse in 1999, Sebastian co-authored the messaging system that drives T7 and designed the latency monitoring for T7. Besides heading the trading system analytics team, his work includes real time application monitoring for the T7 platform, time sync (PTP, white rabbit), market microstructure analysis, data analysis and chasing nanoseconds. Sebastian is a C/C++ expert and recently dropped perl for python. He has a diploma in Theoretical Physics from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.

Feargal O’Sullivan, CEO, USAM Group (speaking for QuasarDB).
Feargal is a proven business leader with the rare ability to blend business acumen and deep technical knowledge. With over 20-years of experience at BlackRock, Reuters, and NYSE, Feargal easily bridges communications between product development teams and business users.

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 Raymond Russell, CTO, Corvil.
Raymond is one of Corvil’s founders and co-inventor of its core technology. Since joining Corvil in 2000 as Chief Technology Officer, Raymond has played an instrumental role in building a strong product suite around the core Corvil technology. As CTO, Raymond is focused on driving continued advancement and fulfillment of Corvil’s innovations with a focus on applications and infrastructure in capital markets.

Ananth Sankaranarayanan, Senior Director, AI Products Group, Intel.
Ananth serves as Senior Director in the AI Products Group at Intel, responsible for enabling customers and partners worldwide to build, accelerate, scale and deploy AI applications on Intel platforms. Previously, Ananth led Cloud and Big Data Analytics Solutions team and the creation of Intel’s first production High Performance Computing capability (top-500) for silicon design and manufacturing. He has been with Intel since 2001 in various engineering leadership roles. Ananth received Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science and MBA in Technology Management. He holds two patents, has authored numerous technical publications and a book chapter in “Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Networks” proceeds of which go to Black Girls code non-profit.

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.

Theo Schlossnagle, CTO, Circonus.
Theo founded Circonus in 2010, and continues to be its principal architect. Theo earned both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins University in computer science. He founded OmniTI, the go-to source for organizations facing today's challenging scalability, performance and security problems. A respected industry thought leader, Theo is the author of Scalable Internet Architectures (Sams) and a frequent speaker at worldwide IT conferences. Theo resides in Maryland with his wife and three daughters.

Christian Smith, Vice President, Product, Igneous.
Prior to Igneous, Christian spent 15 years running field engineering organizations at EMC, Isilon, and NetApp.

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.

Ambika Sukla, CEO, FactFindr.AI.
Ambika is Co-founder and CEO of FactFindr.AI, a company focused on deep understanding of complex documents in finance, regulatory, compliance and legal space using latest advancements in Natural Language Processing. 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 worked with CIOs and heads of different business units to set organization wide AI strategy and championed AI innovation in finance. Ambika's research focus is on combining newer deep learning models with traditional econometrics, and constructing novel unsupervised /semi-supervised models to extract meaning from vast amounts of unlabeled text. Ambika's background is in signal processing and information theory and he holds a Masters degree in Telecommunication Engineering from NJIT.

Jag Tamvada, Director, Product Management, Cisco.
Jag manages Cisco’s low latency and merchant-silicon based switching portfolios. He has over 10 years of experience in building data center switches specially catered for financial trading and cloud workloads. He is passionate about understanding customer’s unique requirements and coming up with solutions to address their business and technical challenges. Prior to Product Management, Jag worked as a Software Engineer and Network Design Consultant. He has an MBA in Marketing & Entrepreneurship from Santa Clara University and MS in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati.

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.

Rajesh Vadlamudi, Solutions Manager, Paperspace.
Raj is a technology enthusiast who enjoys working with data scientists and ML engineers to implement new solutions to optimize and scale their models. Prior to joining Paperspace, Raj spent several years at IBM, where he helped enterprises deploy IBM Analytics software products that enabled customers to launch high-performance machine learning, data virtualization, and data modeling applications on various infrastructure platforms. Raj received dual bachelor of science degrees in Economics and Marketing from Penn State University.

Steve Wallo, CTO, Vcinity.
Steve currently serves as Vcinity’s CTO, overseeing resources related to the insertion of advanced technologies and strategies into customer architectures and future IT decision methodologies. He is responsible for bridging future IT trends into the companies exisiting portfolio capabilities and future offerings. Prior to Vcinity, Steve was CTO at Brocade Federal, responsible for articulating Brocade’s innovations, strategies and architectures in the rapidly evolving federal IT space for mission success. Steve has served the U.S Government, as the Chief Architect for the NAVAIR Air Combat Test and Evaluation Facility High Performance Computing Center.

Dave Weber, Wall Street CTO & Director, Lenovo.
Dave Weber is the director of Lenovo's global financial services industry initiatives and Wall Street CTO. Dave is focused on server-based low latency, high performance, analytics and cloud technologies, and works with financial markets clients to provide solutions, with partners to build an ecosystem, and with Lenovo Research and Development to influence future products. Dave also leads the Lenovo relationship with STAC®, where Lenovo has worked closely with our partners to publish numerous world record benchmark results.

Darrell Westbury, Director of High Performance Hosting Services, Credit Suisse.
Darrell currently leads High Performance Hosting Services for Credit-Suisse. This encompasses the firm’s Low Latency Electronic Trading Infrastructure, which enables CS to function as a respected broker-dealer. Darrell is also responsible for High Performance Compute “Grid” services, providing a globally distributed supercomputer to execute Monte Carlo simulations and calibrate risk and pricing. Other areas of responsibility include an IT Operational Analytics team, which is building bespoken visual instrumentation on top of IT Systems and Application data. This is enabling service and support teams to predict service issues and avoid downtime, as well as to quickly hunt down and identify the key root causes of problems.

Dan Zheng, CEO, Tick Tock Networks.
Dan is a technologist passionate about building products to improve lives of millions of people. As an early employee at Google, he held senior engineering and business roles He was recognized for his contributions on search appliance, advertising, and Android. After leaving Google in 2010, he held leadership positions at various startups, from mobile commerce to mapping and location analytics. Just prior to Tick Tock Networks, Dan was a senior research scientist at Stanford University working with a team of faculty and PhD students on the topic of Self-Programming Networks. Dan received his computer science degree from Princeton University.