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| Philip Beasley-Harling, STAC Fellow.
Fellowship awarded in 2014 for key contributions to research programs involving STAC-M3 (benchmarks for tick database stacks). |
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| Gad Benram, CTO and Founder, TensorOps.
Gad Benram has been working in the field of ML and AI since 2014 and has led successful AI projects across different industries, including ride-hailing and cloud computing. Over the past two years, he founded an AI consulting firm, TensorOps, focusing on bringing AI to production by combining technology and business aspects. Gad is recognized as a Google Developer Expert in AI and an AWS Black Belt.+ |
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| Tom Coombs, Vice President of Sales, Orthogone.
As an experienced and accomplished global executive, technologist, and business developer, Tom has over 25 years of experience driving growth and expansion for both large-scale organizations and emerging startups. His strong business acumen, advanced technical mindset, and growth-oriented spirit have enabled him to lead teams in developing and delivering world-class strategies and high-value solutions. He is an expert in revenue generation, product design, project management, and various technologies, which allows him to provide valuable insights to his peers, partners, and customers. |
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| 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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| Liz Corrigan, Chief Product Officer, Myrtle.ai.
Liz has been running teams to create FPGA based products and systems for over 15 years. She has developed state of the art mobile telecommunications equipment, shipped defense systems into theatre and led verification activities for security critical applications. Liz is a Chartered Engineer with a technical background in RTL design, verification and electronic systems design. |
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| John Courtney, Fintech Marketing Manager, AMD.
John is experienced in the application of FPGA technology to complex high performance systems and currently is focused on solutions that enhance the capabilities of low-latency trading applications. John has wide experience in innovative product design for the SmartNIC and fintech industries. He has performed a variety of roles including product management, system architecture and product implementation for both large companies and start-ups. |
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| Olivier Cousin, Director, FPGA Solutions, Exegy.
Olivier, Director of FPGA product development at Exegy, encompassing wireless distribution, IPs, and integrated trading platforms. His journey includes roles as Systems Architect at AMD, shaping fintech solutions, and pioneering FPGA Financial libraries at Intel. He also accelerated trading platforms at RBS as a front-office quantitative developer. With a master's in Digital Electronics and Parallel Processing Systems, Olivier combines his technical expertise with a Certificate of Quantitative Finance from the FitLearning Institute. His career is a testament to his commitment to innovation and excellence in the dynamic world of financial technology. |
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| Richard Croucher, STAC Fellow, ex-Barclays.
Fellowship awarded in 2014 for key contributions to the research programs relating to network I/O and to STAC-N1 (benchmarks for network stacks). |
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| Matt Dangerfield, Adviser, Telesoft Technologies.
Chief Technology Officer (CTO), garnered acclaim in financial technology for his innovative prowess, earning recognition from The Financial News in 2013. With 19+ years of experience spanning traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralised finance (DeFi), Matt excelled as CTO, driving technological vision and fostering partnerships with Tier one clients. Notable achievements include pioneering ultra-low latency solutions, such as the world's first nanosecond trading engine and groundbreaking FPGA-based technology. His expertise extends to designing front-office outsourced trading platforms, notably for a leading financial institution. A sought-after speaker and advisor, Matt influences global financial technology discourse, engaging with regulators and policymakers worldwide. |
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| Zerrin Diren, Head of Sales Engineering for Financial Services Industry, Google Cloud, UK and Ireland, Google.
Zerrin brings over 20 years of experience in driving business outcomes as a customer and a supplier of technology for global enterprises. Zerrin leads a team of architects and customer engineers focusing on delivering innovative business solutions that pave the way for the new era of financial services value chains through Google Cloud’s engineering acumen and innovative technology built in the cloud. Prior to joining Google Cloud, Zerrin was an SVP at the Bank of America, responsible for Storage and Data Protection Services for EMEA. Before joining Bank of America, Zerrin held multiple leadership roles at NetApp, Virtana, EMC, and SAP. |
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| Seth Friedman, CEO, Liquid-Markets-Holdings.
As CEO of LMS, Seth is responsible for product vision. He has been an active leader at the forefront of electronic trading for over 23 years, with deep sales-trading, technology, and consulting experience. His history of technology vision includes the invention of a multi-patented FPGA order processing technology proven in the field since 2010. Seth headed Program Trading at Morgan Stanley Japan before establishing the Electronic Trading Services business, which he expanded throughout Asia. At Nomura, Seth established the Quantitative Prime Services business, played a key role in the post-acquisition integration of Lehman Brothers, and was responsible for Electronic Product Management across Asia. |
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Jack Gidding, CEO, Strategic Technology Analysis Center.
Jack has over 30 years of experience in development and business management of financial technology. As CEO of STAC, Jack leads the expansion of the STAC community and the value that STAC delivers to that community. Prior to this, Jack was Head of FX Technology at London Stock Exchange Group, Global Head of Trading Technology at Refinitiv, Global Head of Wealth Management Technology at Refinitiv, Head of Elektron Real-Time Platform at Thomson Reuters. Earlier in his career, Jack was second in command at STAC, helping build it from the ground up in its first seven years. Jack has a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and a MS in Financial Markets and Trading from Illinois Institute of Technology Stuart School of Business.
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| Simon Haywood, Field CTO, EMEA, Dell Technologies.
Simon is the EMEA Field CTO for the Unstructured Data Solutions team at Dell Technologies. Data is everything - and Simon works with customers and partners to help capture, store, gain insights, and generate value from the mountains of data that each of us generate and consume. |
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| Peter Hodgson, Senior Engineer, Options Technology.
Peter has over 15 years of experience working on the engineering side of market data. He started as a C++ Developer with ACTIV Financial in 2008 and has worked on market data systems at most layers of the ticker plant. He now runs the Market Data Tools Team at Options Technology, responsible for developing and maintaining the internal tooling that surrounds and supports their market data offering. |
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| Nicolas Hourcard, Co-founder & CEO, QuestDB.
Nic is the co-founder and CEO of QuestDB, an open-source time-series database focused on performance and usability. He co-founded QuestDB in 2019 alongside Vlad Ilyushchenko, who spent decades building low-latency FX trading systems at large banks and trading firms. Nic previously worked in financial services, focusing on data and analytics at Nasdaq and Rothschild. |
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| Michael Hu, Director, Product Management, cPacket Networks.
Michael has over 25 years of experience in networking, telecommunications, and consumer electronics. He recently joined cPacket with responsibility for the network appliance portfolio addressing the constantly evolving need for network observability in enterprise network and security operations. Michael holds a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from University of California at Berkeley. |
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| Steve Keogh, AVP Systems Engineering, EMEA Strategics Field Tech, Pure Storage.
Steve's technology career spans more than 30 years, most of which has been spent in Solutioning and Enterprise Architecture roles for large Global Systems Integrators (GSI’s) like HPE/DXC and Capgemini. Steve has spent the last 5 years with Pure Storage, A Gartner MQ Primary Storage leader for 10 consecutive years, and leads the EMEA and LATAM Strategic Accounts team covering large FSI, Pharma and Automotive Industry customers. |
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| Chris Lacey, Principle Architect HPC&AI, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Chris is a seasoned industry veteran with experience in both the customer and vendor landscapes. Over the last decade or so he has focused on providing technical solutions and consultancy for some of the most challenging and diverse workloads imaginable, from Fintech to F1 and everything in-between. His outside interests frequently involve machines of some kind, and you'll often find him spending his limited free time on fixing and enjoying cars and motorbikes. |
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| Louis Liu, CEO, Shengli Technologies.
Louis is a serial entrepreneur who has founded multiple successful technology companies. At Shengli, he led an engineering team to build the first pure FPGA hardware-based trading system for China’s financial markets. Prior to Shengli, Louis was co-founder and co-CEO of Sonic Trading in New York, a pioneering trading technology firm. Louis designed Sonic’s core system from scratch and evolved it from a professional trading system to an institutional platform. After Sonic’s acquisition by Bank of New York, Louis served as Managing Director responsible for equity trading systems. Louis received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Columbia University in operation research. |
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| Mark Lucas, Director Presales Systems Engineer EMEA, Hammerspace.
Mark is a visionary technical leader for Hammerspace's EMEA region. He has broad experience in building AI, HPC, Financial, and Media solutions, helping clients design private, hybrid, and cloud solutions. |
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| Christopher Marsh-Bourdon, VP of Engineering, Oracle.
Christopher is the Vice President of Engineering for Sovereign Cloud and Global Financial Markets within n OCI. He owns the product vision, business strategy, and product roadmap for our next generation Sovereign Clouds and Financial Markets Services. He is a member of the P&I leadership team and the UK Country Leadership Team. Christopher brings over 35 plus years of experience in the IT and Financial sectors. Most recently, as the CIO of Cloud & Engineering at Wells Fargo, where he was responsible for delivering and operating both the Public and Private Cloud, including Virtualization and Infrastructure-as-Code. |
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| Marcus Vinicius Martinez, Industry Advisor, EMEA FSI, Microsoft.
Marcus, a business advisor with over 20 years in financial services, has been instrumental in revolutionizing digital ecosystems and driving innovation. His contributions to tier 1 financial institutions have shaped their strategies to adapt to the evolving landscape. Marcus' expertise extends to cloud computing and AI adoption, enabling institutions to leverage these technologies. His passion for positive change, holistic approach, and strategic thinking have earned him recognition as a trusted advisor and catalyst for success. |
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| Michael O'Sullivan, Engineering Director, Cadence.
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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| Philipp Reisner, CEO, LINBIT.
Philipp is one of LINBIT's founders. He holds a Dipl.-Ing. (comparable to MSc) degree in computer science from Technical University in Vienna. His professional career has been dominated by developing DRBD, a storage replication software for Linux. While this was writing kernel code in the early years (2001), today, he leads a company of 35 employees with locations in Austria and the USA. LINBIT is an Open-Source company offering enterprise-level support subscriptions for its Open-Source technologies. |
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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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| Mike Schonberg, Director, Market Data Technology, Quincy Data.
Mike is a seasoned engineer with over 25 years of experience in the technology industry. He shows great enthusiasm for finding cutting edge and elegant solutions to difficult problems. For the past 19 years he focused on providing low latency, high performance solutions for hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, and large financial institutions. He currently co-runs the technology group at Quincy Data and McKay Brothers. Mike has been instrumental in the design and implementation of Quincy's market data distribution platforms. He currently oversees a variety of technology projects including market data distribution and custom low latency network endpoint devices. |
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| Prasad Shinde, Solutions Architect / Lead Specialist, KX.
Prasad Shinde is KX's lead specialist in London covering KX suit of products such as kdb+, kdb insights, PyKX, and KDB.AI for a global client base spanning the US, EMEA and Africa. With over 12 years in banking and capital markets, he is specialized in vector databases & trading analytics. In the past, he has worked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Barclays in London. |
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| Ed Silantyev, Java Engineer, Adaptive.
Ed leverages his engineering expertise at Adaptive to design and deliver custom, high-performance trading systems. Ed also contributes to the development of Aeron, a low-latency, fault-tolerant messaging framework, and Aeron-based accelerators, pushing the boundaries of trading technology performance. Previously Ed held roles at LMAX, Revolut and BNP Paribas. He has a deep interest in exploring the intricacies of JVM internals, CPU architecture, and the potential of FPGAs. |
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| Diana Stanescu, Director Finance and Capital Markets, Keysight.
Based in London, Diana has over 15 years of experience in network testing and monitoring. Starting her career as a QA engineer with a background in electronics and telecommunications, she has progressed to managing Keysight Professional service teams across EMEA, but also worked for a major bank in UK delivering complex projects around cyber security and fraud. Diana is a member of Keysight's specialized team that creates tailored solutions for exchanges, investment banks, and the wider finance industry. Her outside work interests include day trading, as well as running where she is training to become a running coach. |
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| Sapna Swaly, Business Development, EMEA, NovaSparks.
Sapna boasts nearly two decades of experience within the dynamic realm of trading. With her recent appointment at Novasparks, she brings a blend of technical expertise and strategic acumen to the table. Sapna's extensive journey spans across diverse technological landscapes from FPGA and software, and business as Head of Sales EMEA. Her unique perspective enables Sapna to adopt a consultative stance when engaging with clients and partners, catering to entities ranging from boutique trading firms to institutional banks. |
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| Dr Stephen Warr, Quantitative Technology Director, Qube Research & Technologies.
Steve has been designing and building low-latency trading systems for over 16 years. He has held senior leadership positions in a number of proprietary trading firms and thrives on the challenge of getting the best performance out of complex distributed systems and from the development teams working on them. He has recently joined QRT to help them develop a best-in-class HFT platform. |
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| Dave Weber, Director and CTO, Global Financial Services Industry, Lenovo.
Leads Lenovo's global financial services industry technology initiatives. Dave is focused on low latency, high performance and emerging technologies, as well as on-prem/hybrid cloud, AI, sustainability, and automation initiatives. He works with financial markets clients to provide advanced solutions, and with partners to build out the ecosystem, as well as with Lenovo Research and Development to influence future products and drive innovation. Dave also leads the Lenovo relationship with STAC®️. Dave is based near New York City. |
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| Euan Wielewski, Machine Learning Lead, NatWest.
Euan leads the Applied AI team, a talented group of data scientists, machine learning engineers, and AI specialists that research, design, develop, and deploy AI solutions in NatWest. Before NatWest, Euan was CEO and cofounder of Anomalous, an AI startup in the manufacturing sector. Euan has a PhD in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford and was previously an Assistant Professor at the University of Glasgow. Euan lives with his family in the north east highlands of Scotland. In his spare time he is an enthusiast (albeit not very good) golfer and enjoys spending time out on the golf course. |
