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Kwasi Ankomah, AI Customer Engineer, SambaNova Systems.
Kwasi is an experienced data science and analytics department manager focused on a deep learning, data-led approach to complex problem solving, with a record of accomplishment for delivering innovative products. He has over 13 year's experience in the Financial Services and Consulting sector, helping organizations to build out their advanced analytics capabilities. His goal is to help organizations leverage their data assets through deep learning solutions that will generate a competitive advantage.
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Jon Axon, Managing Director, Packets2Disk.
Jon founded Packets2Disk in 2009. Originally a software engineer, he has a strong understanding of current technologies and monitoring requirements in the Network, Trading and Market Data fields. Packets2Disk’s focus is on developing packet capture and analytics software for finance clients, which is high performance and cost effective, and which allows open data flow between P2D software and other analytics tools. Prior to founding Packets2Disk, Jon held senior positions in several Network Equipment Manufacturers and Network Management companies. Jon has a degree in English Literature from Oxford University.
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Bishop Brock, Head of Research, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Bishop ensures that STAC’s research, benchmark standards, and software tools meet the needs of STAC’s community. He has over 30 years of experience, including research roles at State Street, IBM Research, and Computational Logic, Inc. in diverse areas including machine learning, automated reasoning, formal verification, embedded systems, and computer energy management. Before joining STAC, he contributed to new STAC benchmarks and developed STAC Benchmark implementations on multiple platforms. Bishop is an IBM Master Inventor, Senior Member of the IEEE, has passed the CFA Exam Level III, and holds a BS in Chemistry and BA and MS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.
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Daniel Brown, Technical Solutions Architect, Ultra Low Latency, Cisco Systems.
Daniel Brown is an experienced Ultra-Low Latency Architect and has almost a decade of experience in Capital Markets. He has designed and built large-scale market data distribution networks and trading systems for Banks, Quants and HFT's. Daniel is now focused on building the Next-Generation of ULL technologies at Cisco where he is a Technical Solutions Architect, responsible for the Nexus 3548, 3550 and SmartNIC.
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David Camre, Director of Engineering, EMEA, Tower Research Capital.
With a masters in computer science from the University of Copenhagen, David started his career optimizing transfer of data used in search and research for the Danish Navy via AIS (low band wireless used in ship to ship comms). David now manages the engineering group within Tower Research Capital Europe, as well as directing global technology initiatives across the organization.
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Dr. James Coomer, Sr. Vice President Products, DDN.
James is responsible for the technology direction, roadmap and performance analysis of DDN solutions. One of his main tasks is engaging with, and understanding the issues of organizations that are exploring the extremes of IO performance across the range of industries from Life Sciences through to Finance with use cases from Cloud, Enterprise Big Data though to HPC. James’ career started with a PhD in Theoretical Physics followed by over 10 years at Sun Microsystems and Dell, in a wide range of roles from L3 support through consultancy, training, installation and pre-sales. James turned to focus on IO and storage in a move to DDN in 2011.
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Richard Croucher, Distinguished Engineer and Global Head of Engineering for Specialised Infrastructure, Barclays.
Richard’s group is responsible for the High Frequency Trading Platform and increasingly other performance demanding systems across the Bank. Richard has been with Barclays for nearly 8 years and has also worked for several other large financial firms. He was previously a Chief Architect at Sun Microsystems and a Principle Architect at Microsoft Live (now Azure). Richard was the first Fellow announced at STAC Research as a consequence of his work on STAC-N1. He is also a Fellow of the British Computer Society and has degrees from Brunel University, the University of Berkshire and the University of East London.
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Nicola Danese, Head of European Fixed Income, Tradeweb.
Nicola Danese is Head of European Fixed Income at Tradeweb, focused on helping drive product growth and development across the firm’s fixed income business in Europe. Nicola has a rare combination of in-depth knowledge of fixed income, money markets, and Central Bank operations and a detailed understanding of accounting, regulatory, operational, legal, credit and risk management aspects of the securities business. Before Tradeweb, Nicola worked at J.P. Morgan for over 24 years; most recently heading the EMEA Fixed Income Financing business and a member of the European Management Committee. Nicola holds a degree in Business and Economics from Università Cattolica in Milan.
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Jens de Smit, Infrastructure Special Projects Engineer, Optiver.
With Optiver since 2014, Jens de Smit started out as a developer of monitoring systems, from whence he transitioned to large scale data processing for system and market microstructure analysis. Moving down the OSI stack over the years, he currently is one of the company’s experts on L1 low latency networking, high volume network capture and time synchronization.
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Pete Goddard, CEO, Deephaven Data Labs.
Pete’s a 27-year industry veteran and the founding CEO of two companies. An Aero Engineer, he managed derivatives trading and tech groups at banks and trading shops. In 2005, he founded Walleye, an options market-maker, later diversifying it toward other algo trading. Today it’s a quant fund managing $4 billion. Pete spun out proprietary data software in 2017 and stopped running risk. The system became Deephaven, a general-purpose, real-time-and-batch data framework used by a range of personas for app-dev, AI, analytics, monitoring. Recently, Pete led his engineers to further modularize Deephaven software and deliver it to the open-source community.
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Steven Hamilton, Global Head of Financial Derivatives, ICE.
Steven joined ICE in July 2019 as Global Head of Financial Derivatives, responsible for the rates and equity derivatives product lines. Prior to joining ICE, Steve was at the digital assets MTF Archax, and COO at CurveGlobal, a listed rates derivatives start up at the London Stock Exchange sponsored by a group of dealer banks. Steve worked at the London office of DRW for eight years after joining from the FCA. Steve began his career at LIFFE in 2002.
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Jason Hammons, Head of Field Engineering, EMEA & APJ, VAST Data.
Jason has spent 20 years as a technical leader in Enterprise storage with experience from Dell HPC, EMC and Pure storage all flash systems, Isilon and FlashBlade scale out systems, Cloud native and Enterprise systems in Finance, Public sector, Life Sciences, and Government. Over the last year, Jason has led a talented team of pre-sales engineers who are building the next generation data centre for AI, HPC, and Big Data using the VAST cost/performance advantage at scale.
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Costa Hasapopoulos, Chief Field Technology Officer & World Wide VP Business Development, Pavilion Data Systems.
Costa has over 35 years of experience in IT hardware, software, and solutions, including over 20 years in the storage industry. His experience is focused on understanding customer needs and “solving real world problems with technologies.” Costa has held many executive leadership roles and sold and designed storage solutions for some of the largest enterprises, financial institutions, and health insurance providers. His career in the storage industry started when shared storage solutions were just coming to market, so he knows the market and its evolutionary changes. Costa has also served as an advisor to several VCs and Private Equity-backed companies.
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Peter Lankford, Founder and Executive Chairman, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Peter led the creation of STAC in 2006 to reduce the enormous time and effort the finance industry invests in evaluating high technology. As Executive Chairman, Peter focuses on key growth initiatives and ensures that STAC continues to strengthen the principles and practices that the community values. Peter has over 30 years of experience in technology and financial services, including SVP of the $240M market data technology business at Reuters and management positions at Citibank, First Chicago, and operating-system maker IGC. Peter has an MBA, Master’s in International Relations, and Bachelor’s in Chemistry from the University of Chicago.
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Jeff Lumish, Director of Digital Design, Silicon Creations.
Jeff leads the digital design group at Silicon Creations (2006), an industry leading IP provider for ASIC connectivity. In his time at Silicon Creations, he has been involved with the development of numerous analog and digital IP products, including Silicon Creations’ ultra low-latency SerDes IP. His interest areas include SerDes architecture, serial interfaces, and digital design and verification techniques. He holds the BSEE and MSEE degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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Kieran Mansley, Engineer – Data Centre Architecture Group, AMD.
20+ years working on designing and engineering low latency networking products, with a particular interest in how the complete vertical slice of device, host hardware, operating system, and application software can be best combined to get the lowest latency.
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Luke Markham, Machine Learning Engineer, Graphcore.
Luke is a Machine Learning Engineer at Graphcore, a start-up building supercomputers to enable next-generation ML, where he works with financial services customers to maximise the performance of their HPC and ML models. He has worked on a variety of data-related problems with investment banks, hedge funds, dark pool providers and real-time trade analytics platforms. After studying Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, he worked as a data science consultant for 3 years at Tessella UK. Interested to discuss all forms of computationally tricky workloads, applications of ML in financial services, and how we can increase trust in statistics and ML.
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Jonathan Martin, President, WEKA.
Jonathan joined WEKA in August 2021, and is responsible for WEKA’s Global GTM functions. With over 25 years infrastructure and cloud experience, Jonathan brings significant global product, marketing, GTM, and general management experience to WEKA. Jonathan previously served as Chief Marketing Officer at Hitachi, Pure Storage (through IPO), and EMC (acquired by Dell), and has held senior executive roles at HP Software, Salesforce.com, and VERITAS Software.
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Peter Nabicht, President, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Peter has spent nearly 20 years driving change at the intersection of technology and complex business problems. At STAC, Peter's mission is to leverage this experience to guide the continued rapid growth of the STAC community. His key roles prior to STAC include: CTO of Allston Trading, developing and supporting multi-asset, low latency trading systems; Co-founder of 12Sided Technology, which developed high-throughput network data capture and analytics; and Head of Electronic Markets Strategy and Development at Dealerweb. Peter has a BA in English and a MS in Computer Science from Loyola University Chicago.
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Andrea Nardon, Chief Quant Officer, Black Alpha Capital.
Andrea has over 20 years as experience as a Quant Portfolio Manager and Researcher. He started his career in Frankfurt as a Quant Researcher and PM for Commerzbank and Deka Investment and then moved to London to lead the quant offering at Sarasin & Partners. Andrea is now Chief Quant Officer for Black Alpha Capital, a London based hedge fund. Andrea’s research interests include the application of machine learning models to financial time series and portfolio construction. He and his team are currently pursuing several projects on market anomalies and mid-frequency trading signals for global macro portfolios. Andrea graduated in Economics and spent a year at the Department of Mathematics in the University of Venice.
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Michael O’Sullivan, Engineering Director, Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
Michael is an engineering director at Cadence with a focus on verification and is based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Michael has been with Cadence for over 24 years with various roles in sales, marketing and design services. Prior to Cadence he was a design Engineer at the S3 Group in Dublin, Ireland and at Philips in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Michael has an M.Eng. Sc from the National University of Ireland.
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Joel Rudman, Director, Finance and Capital Markets, Keysight Technologies.
Joel is part of Keysight Technologies Finance and Capital Markets team responsible for working closely with Exchanges, Investment Banks, and Buy-Side/Hedge Funds in developing solutions for complex monitoring of real-time trading infrastructure. Joel is based in London and over the last 15 years has worked in a number of sales engineering and solution architect roles focused on the financial markets. He is Keysight’s European specialist on its real-time market data feed and latency measurement solution – TradeVision and In-service timing accuracy monitoring and alerting solution - TimeKeeper.
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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.
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Dr. David Snowdon, Director of Engineering, Arista.
David was co-founder and CTO at Metamako, which was 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.
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Alex Stepney, Head of Customer Engineering - Financial Services Industry, Google Cloud.
Alex (he/him) heads up the Financial Service Industry Customer Engineering at Google Cloud in the UK. The team works closely with customers who are looking to transform the way their business operates as they pivot to cloud. Before joining Google, Alex spent a number of years working in The City of London, and has held positions at HSBC and RBC Capital Markets as a senior manager, architect and engineer. Outside of work - when he’s not spending time with his family - Alex can be found running, riding bicycles, motorcycles, and attempting to play guitar.
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Dave Weber, Director, Global FSI CTO, Lenovo.
Dave is the director of Lenovo's financial services industry technology initiatives and global FSI CTO. Dave is based in NYC and focused on low latency, high performance and emerging technologies, as well as on-prem cloud and AI/ML initiatives. He works with financial markets clients to provide solutions, and with partners to build an ecosystem, as well as 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.
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Tim Wood, Sr. Solution Architect FSI-EMEA, NVIDIA.
With an academic background in computer systems architecture and computational finance, Tim spent ten years working in financial markets in banking implementing NVIDIA accelerated computing technologies. Now at NVIDIA, he helps other financial institutions do the same.
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