Speaker Biographies – Feature Sessions - London

Victor Arriola, Vice President, Goldman Sachs.

Simon Butcher, Timing Solutions Architect, Microsemi.
Simon has 20 years of precise timing expertise with extensive knowledge in PTP transport and deployments in LANs and WANs. He is an expert in time management/monitoring systems for large scale telecommunications networks having engineered PTP networks worldwide for over 10 years.

Nigel Cannings, CTO, Intelligent Voice.
Nigel became a lawyer because his father told him to go out and get a proper job, for which he is now eternally grateful. He qualified as a solicitor in 1993, and has worked for some of the world’s largest law firms and software companies. Nigel has been the CTO of Intelligent Voice, Speech Recognition Expert, for the last 7 years. As a keen technologist, Nigel is always on the lookout for new challenges, and so is often seen finding new ways of stretching existing techniques and technology. This has led to interesting commissions such as recovering data from an “unbreakable” portable recording device. He has also gained UK government recognition for high tech research in the form of a large grant to explore leading edge problems in speech research, such as ultra-high speed GPU accelerated speech recognition, and emotional analysis of telephone calls. Nigel contributes regularly to a number of publications, including the Huffington Post, and the Global Legal Post, and well as blogging on the Intelligent Voice website. He has featured in a number of newspaper articles, including the front page of the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ also made a video looking at the advanced techniques used by Intelligent Voice to track trader wrongdoing.

Matthew Chapman, CTO, Exablaze.
Matthew enjoys pulling things apart and seeing how they work. In this sense, he hasn't progressed much in the last few decades, though fortunately he is now better at putting things back together. Matthew enjoys attacking problems from first principles and building clean systems that address particular problems as efficiently as possible. Recently this has often involved FPGA technology as it lends itself to rapidly developing such solutions, but he believes in using the right tool for each job. Before Exablaze, he worked for high frequency trading firm Zomojo and for Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and a BE in Computer Engineering from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Robert Geva, Principal Engineer, Intel.
Robert is a principal engineer at Intel’s software and services group. His current role is the manager of the financial services engineering group, where he leads a team of SW engineers working with customers in FSI. Robert joined Intel in 1991 and has since developed an expertise in compilers and performance analysis and tuning for microarchitectures. Robert has worked on compiler optimizations for a variety of Intel microprocessor based systems, including the 80486, the Pentium Processor, the Pentium Pro Processor, Itanium, the Pentium 4 and Pentium M and core II Duo. Most recently, Robert was an architect in the development products division responsible for driving language extensions and programming models for parallel and heterogeneous programming. Robert has been involved with the development of Intel Cilk™ Plus and the offloading model for Intel® Xeon® Phi™. Robert has BA and MSc from the Technion, Israel institute of technology.

Neil Horlock, Director, Credit Suisse
Neil joined Credit Suisse (then known as CSFB) in 1998, from Financial Times Information where he became a core part of Credit Suisse's Market Connectivity development team and was central to the design and implementation of their in-house European Direct Market Data solutions. Neil rapidly became an SME in European exchanges, protocols and networks and helped grow the products beyond Europe to Asia and from Equities into other asset classes. In 2005, Neil designed and led the implementation of a (significantly) sub millisecond order routing solution for use within the proprietary trading business, a product that still forms the basis of the bank's high performance ultra-low latency trading platform. In recent years, Neil has represented the bank in a number of technology based consortia including projects such as BOAT and Turquoise and is currently part of the Nanostreams research project led by Queen's University, Belfast. Neil is a Director in the Trade Execution Technologies group at Credit Suisse and his responsibilities include oversight of the European Market Connectivity operation, Global Architecture for Market Connectivity, pre-trade risk and Regulatory Reporting functions, he is alleged SME for topics such as C++, market connectivity and the broad spectrum of low latency solutions, is an all-purpose trouble shooter and general-purpose busy body.

Matthew Knight, Technical Marketing Director, Financial Services, Solarflare.
Before joining Solarflare in January 2014, Matthew was the Company President of Accensus, a company building an ultra-low-latency hybrid software/FPGA trading platform. Prior to that he worked at DRW Trading in Chicago in the role of Head of Labs focused on ultra-low-latency technology and before that he worked at STAC in its early days, following almost a decade at Reuters.

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.

Leon Lobo, Strategic Business Development Manager for Time & Frequency, National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
Dr Leon Lobo is Strategic Business Development Manager for Time and Quantum at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), the UK's National Measurement Institute. He previously was Group Leader for the Time & Frequency group, working with the team managing the UK’s timescale and developing quantum frequency standards.

Mark Skalabrin, CEO, Redline Trading Solutions
Throughout his career, Mark Skalabrin has built engineering-centered businesses that combine leading-edge technology with application expertise to solve challenging problems. Before he founded Redline, Mark served eight years as General Manager and Corporate Officer at Mercury Computer Systems. He holds a BS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Washington State University.

Benjamin Taieb, Senior Systems Engineer at Solace Systems.
After 12 years delivering trading and market data systems at BNP Paribas and Nomura, Benjamin went to the dark side (the vendor!) when he joined Solace in 2011. Since then he's been working with customers across all aspects of capital markets on their data distribution architectures, and is Solace's market data subject matter expert in Europe.

Thomas Trenner, VP, Quantitative Analyst, Citi.
Thomas is a senior quant in the Foreign Exchange and Local Markets group at Citi. He focuses on high-performance implementations of option-pricing models. Thomas has a PhD in mathematics from Cambridge University.

Stephane Tyc, Co-Founder, McKay Brothers.
Stéphane received a PhD in Physics from Harvard University. He continued his fundamental research at Thales Group. He earned multiple patents on power transistors for microwave radios and superconducting logic devices. Stephane enjoyed a 17-year career at BNP Paribas. He directed Equity Derivative Quantitative R&D, Global Business Management, and Post Trade Services. His responsibilities included low latency arbitrage research, high performance computing, and market risk. He also served on the DTCC Warehouse Trust Company Board of Directors for two years.

Tamas Visegrady, IBM Research Zurich.
Tomas received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of New Hampshire, specializing in design automation for microelectronics. After working as a support engineer for high-performance computing, security engineering, and then hardware development at IBM Poughkeepsie, Dr. Visegrady joined IBM Research in Zurich in 2003. His current work involves architecture design for cryptographic coprocessors, and operating system security infrastructure for IBM server platforms.

Glenn Wright, Systems Architect, DataDirect Networks.
Glenn has 20+ years of technical experience in the High Performance Computing industry, working on both server, networking and storage elements of extreme performance solutions. Glenn has been with DataDirect NetworksTM (DDN) for the last 3 years, during which time he has helped clients across HPC industries solve the new "big data" high performance/low latency problems. Glenn has recently focused on technical infrastructure solutions in high capacity analytics for environments with the need for extreme levels of I/O between the storage and server components of the solution. Prior to DDN, Glenn was a senior architect at QLogic (Infiniband group) and also held many varied/international roles at Sun Microsystems.