Speaker Biographies – Feature Sessions - New York

Patrick Angeles, Chief Architect for Financial Services, Cloudera.
Patrick has over six years of experience as a Hadoop architect, and has presided over several large-scale Hadoop rollouts in financial services and other industries. Prior to Cloudera, Patrick was the chief architect at Simulmedia, where he built a scale-out log processing and analytic engine for audience measurement using Hadoop. In his 20 year career, Patrick has held various technical management and leadership roles in the areas of big data, e-commerce, web analytics, security and cryptography. Patrick holds a BA in English and Computer Science from Oberlin College.

Kris Applegate, Cloud and Big Data Solution Architect, Dell.
Kris has been with Dell since 2003. Based out of Dell’s Round Rock, Texas Customer Solution Centers, he regularly delivers briefings, workshops, and POCs in all areas of Private Cloud and Big Data. His principal solution expertise is the Dell Cloudera Hadoop Solution(s) and Dell Openstack Solutions. He has authored or co-authored several works including: Dell Hortonworks Reference Configuration, Dell Cassandra Reference Configuration, Dell MongoDB Reference Configuration, Virtualized Hadoop, Hadoop on Dell PowerEdge FX, and How to Execute a Successful Proof of Concept.

Olivier Baetz, COO, NovaSparks.
Olivier joined NovaSparks in April 2011, bringing over ten years of experience selling and implementing low latency technology solutions for the financial industry. In 2000, Olivier was part of the original team at Radianz, the first global Extranet for the financial industry. At Radianz, Olivier successfully designed the solution for the original “proof of concept” customer which established the value of the Radianz community model. He also ran the North American Sales Engineering team for five years and was instrumental in the creation of the Radianz ULTRA service which provides ultra-low latency exchange con-nectivity to high-frequency trading firms. In 2009 and 2010, Olivier built and led the global technical convergence project team to integrate the Radianz platform into the global BT Network. Olivier started his career in telecoms, designing and selling managed network solutions for large multinational firms. Olivier holds a MS in Telecom Engineering from ENST Paris and an MBA from Wharton with a major in Finance. When he is not working, Olivier enjoys sailing, surfing, skiing and all good wines from around the world.

Tony Bussieres, SVP Development, Ticksmith.
Solutions architect and passionate developer with over 13 years of experience developing and designing cutting-edge solutions in financial institutions. Tony is applying his knowledge and expertise to TickSmith, a company that builds powerful and flexible Hadoop-based financial data management platforms and uses the latest big data technology to provide out-of-the box solutions to participants of the brokerage ecosystem.

Michel Debiche, Financial Services Practice Lead, ThinkBig Analytics.
Michel earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Geophysics from Stanford and Princeton Universities. He has been involved in all aspects of quantitative trading since 1991. He worked in proprietary trading groups at Credit Suisse and Daiwa Securities America before creating the Global Equity Statistical Arbitrage desk at CIBC World Markets in New York. In 2002, Michel formed Quantia Capital, an investment advisor that has been involved in building several systematic trading operations. He has also consulted to financial services firms as well as their vendors in the areas of quantitative analysis, algorithmic trading, high-performance systems development, Complex Event Processing systems and enterprise risk management platforms. After a stint as Head of Quantitative Technology at First New York, a proprietary trading shop. Michel joined Think Big Analytics in 2013. Michel sees the rise of the Big Data ecosystem as a golden opportunity to apply the lessons learned in quantitative trading, a quintessential data driven business, to help large enterprises move towards driving greater business value from their growing data streams.

Arnaud Derasse, CEO, Enyx.
Arnaud spent several years in the development of IT solutions for the medical industry and interventions through research projects for French CNRS. Arnaud then decided to focus on the world of digital electronics. Following his degree at ESIEE Paris, he began a one year program at HEC Startup Institute targeted on entrepreneurship with innovative technologies. Upon the completion of this program, he joined an emerging start-up, was responsible for the recruitment of the majority of the technical team and worked with company grow and development. Arnaud is now a co-founder and CEO of Enyx.

Evgeny Fiksman, Staff Engineer, Intel.
After joining Intel in 2006 during and working on optimization of video enhancement algorithms for x86 platforms, Evgeny acquired expertise in multi-threading and low level programing. For the last 5 years Evgeny was leading engineer and architected for the implementation of OpenCL runtime for Intel CPUs (Core, Xeon & Atom) and Xeon PHI co-processors. Recently, Evgeny’ve joined a software enabling team, which is focused on financial applications. Prior joining Intel Evgeny lead development of a naval team training simulator. Evgeny’s holding B.Sc and M.Sc in Electrical Engineering from the Technion – Israel institute of Technology, Haifa, Isreal.

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.

Yadu Kalia, Worldwide Industry Solution Architect, Financial Services, IBM Systems.
Yadu is the Worldwide Industry Architect for Financial Service Solutions at IBM. Yadu worked in Global Banking and Financial Markets for over 15 years; most recently in New York as Vice President, Product Manager for the CTO Domain Engineering group at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Yadu has extensive experience architecting, designing and managing multi-tenant distributed risk management and pricing platforms. Yadu studied information technology, and received his Bachelor of Science from the University of Westminster in London, UK.

Diego Klabjan, Professor, Northwestern University.
Diego is a professor at Northwestern University, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences. He is also Founding Director, Master of Science in Analytics. His expertise is focused on data science with concentration in finance, web, transportation, and healthcare. Professor Klabjan has led projects with large companies such as CME, Allstate, FedEx Express, GM and many others, and he is also assisting numerous start-ups with their analytics needs. He is on the advisory board of Alpine Data Labs and Agentis, a member of the technical advisory board of AT Kearney, serves as the subject matter expert for IRI Big Data, and is a member of the advisory board for Midwest Big Data Hub. He is also a founder of Opex Analytics.

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.

John Lockwood, CEO, Algo-Logic.
John is the founder and CEO at Algo-Logic Systems. Algo-Logic's hardware-accelerated logic circuits enable networks to achieve ultra-low latency processing while carrying large volumes of data. From 2006 to 2009, John managed the NetFPGA program as a Consulting Associate Professor at Stanford University. At Stanford, John grew the worldwide deployment of NetFPGA hardware from 10 to 1,021 units. Prior to joining Stanford in January of 2007, John led the Reconfigurable Network Group, which was a part of the Applied Research Laboratory at Washington University in Saint Louis. There he was a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. John and his research group developed the Field programmable Port Extender (FPX) to enable rapid prototype of extensible network modules in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology. Over the past 20 years, John has published over 100 papers and has 7 patents related to FPGA systems and networking systems. John earned his MS, BS, and PhD degrees from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois.

Sergey Maidanov, Software Engineering Manager, Intel.
Sergey Maidanov leads the team of software engineers working on the optimized Intel® Distribution for Python*. He’s 15+ years of experience in numerical analysis with a range of contributions to Intel software products such as Intel MKL, Intel IPP, Intel compilers, and others. Among his recently completed projects was the Intel® Data Analytics Acceleration Library. Sergey received a master’s degree in Mathematics from the State University of Nizhny Novgorod with specializations in number theory, random number generation, and its application in financial math. He was a staff member of the International Center of Studies in Financial Institutions at the State University of Nizhny Novgorod.

Christopher Nicholson, Founder & CEO, Skymind.
Chris Nicholson co-founded Skymind and Deeplearning4j, the most popular deep-learning framework on the JVM. He previously led communications and recruiting for the Sequoia-backed YCombinator startup FutureAdvisor, which was acquired by BlackRock this year. Chris spent a decade reporting on tech and finance for The New York Times, Businessweek and Bloomberg News, among others. He attended Deep Springs College and holds a degree in economics.

Art Sedighi, Head of Cloud Architecture, TD Bank.
Art has about 20 years of experience designing and implementing large-scale infrastructure for financial services and other sectors of the industry. He has held senior technology executive positions at Bank of America, TD Bank, Morgan Stanley, and others. Art holds a Masters from Johns Hopkins in Biotechnology/Bioinformatics, and a Masters from Rensselaer polytechnic institute in Computer Science.

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.

Pete Smith, Account Executive, DDN.
Pete leads sales to the financial services sector for DDN Storage in New York. For the last 20 years, Pete has focused on data-intensive systems within financial services with an emphasis on developing and bringing to market emerging technologies that create competitive advantage for early adopters. Pete left Teradata in 1996 where he ran a consulting division that he created to reengineer failed enterprise data warehouse initiatives to join a series of start-ups in the areas of: machine learning, real time cloud-based analytics, trading system virtualization, wire-speed messaging and parallel storage systems.

David Snowdon, Co-Founder & CTO, Metamako.
David is a Founder and co-CTO at Metamako, with his core role comprising product and technology strategy at the company. His role liasing with customers about their needs gives him a unique view into the challenges faced by such firms. Prior to founding Metamako, David gained a wealth of experience working in and for HFT firms, optimising their network structures, network performance, and building performance hardware, gateware and software. He has a PhD in Operating Systems, looking at and taking advantage of the effect of frequency scaling on power and energy usage. Energy efficiency has long been an interest, with ten years spent designing, building and racing high performance solar powered cars in international events. David’s team formerly held the Guiness record for the world’s fastest solar powered vehicle.