Speaker Biographies–Global STAC Live, Fall 2021

John Ashley, General Manager, Financial Services and Technology, NVIDIA.
John leads the Global Financial Services and Technology team at NVIDIA. His team focuses on global trends and directions in accelerated compute and AI for the entire sector – from hedge funds, fintech and banking to insurance. NVIDIA supports customers and partners in their adoption of accelerated computing and AI/ML techniques to improve time to insight, enable expanded analytics around risk and fraud, and dive deep into customer data to address key business problems. He also started and led the Professional Services Deep Learning Practice for NVIDIA and the NVIDIA Deep Learning Professional Services Partner program.

Dan Biederman, Senior ASIC & FPGA Design Architect, Intel Corporation.
Dan designs and architects networking and storage ASICs and FPGAs. For the last 25 years, he has worked at both large companies, as well as startups. He has been working with Precise Time Synchronization technologies since 2006. At Cisco, he helped develop their first industrial precise time switch, the IE3000. At Ericsson he continued to help with synchronization in cellular networks. For the last five years, he has worked on Intel’s Infrastructure Processing Unit, continuing to promote precise time technologies. He has a BSEE and an MSEE from Tennessee Technological University. He has been granted over 30 patents.

Dr. Ahmad Byagowi, Research Scientist, Facebook.
Ahmad is a Research Scientist focused on Time and Frequency Synchronization in Hyper Scale Networks. Ahmad received his first Ph.D. from Vienna University of Technology (TUWIEN) in 2010, working on distributed control systems. He received his second Ph.D., from work on game engines and virtual reality systems, from the University of Manitoba in 2016. Working with Prof. Ramesh Raskar from the MIT Media Labs on haptic systems led him to Facebook as a visiting scholar. Impressed by the research there, he decided to join Facebook in 2017. Ahmad still holds an Adjunct Professor title with the University of Manitoba.

Dean Cafora, Senior Director of Sales, Achronix Semiconductor Corp.
Dean is a technology professional with over 25 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. Before joining Achronix Dean worked for Intel Corporation, Marvell Semiconductor and Quantenna Communications. Dean began his career as a design engineer responsible for detailed hardware designs and real-time software development. Over the years Dean’s experience expanded to include Field Applications Engineering, Marketing Management, Business Development, Regional Direction, and he is now running Eastern North America for Achronix as their Senior Director of Sales. Dean holds a BSEE and MBA from the University of Bridgeport as well as a Professional Engineering license.

David Cohen, Senior Principal Engineer, Intel Corporation.
Dave is a Senior Principal 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.

Dr. James Coomer, Sr. Vice President Products, DDN Storage.
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.

Kshitij Doshi, Senior Principal Engineer, Intel Corporation.
Kshitij works in Intel’s Data Center and AI group focusing on optimizations in cloud systems. Prior to Intel he worked in AT&T Unix Systems Laboratories and Novell’s Advanced Development Group across Unix, Java, Security, and Web caching. He has a B. Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Mumbai, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from Rice University.

Peter Durkan, CEO, Lucera.
Peter is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Lucera®. He formerly held senior technology and trading roles at First Derivatives and Cantor Fitzgerald as Director of Technology for HFT. During his career he has architected and built many large scale trading and analysis platforms and continues to be actively involved in system architecture and implementation.

Bob Gaines, Managing Director Financial Services, SambaNova.
Having begun his career in information architecture with StorageTek and HPC with Sun Microsystems, DDN, and Cray, Bob most recently led IBM’s Data & AI practice for the Americas around software-defined HPDA. A leader in machine learning, Bob’s specialties include big data, high-performance data analytics, and helping customers accelerate digital transformation by simplifying quantitative workflows with AI. He has spent the last 10 years helping financial firms build smarter algorithmic trading models for quantitative research, algo-trading strategy development, risk, and compliance. Bob holds an MBA from Loyola and an advanced data science certificate from MIT, School of Engineering.

Mike Galime, Software Engineering Manager, Keysight Technologies.
Mike is the NY based operational manager responsible for the development of SecureStack - a transparent decryption application - for Keysight Technologies. Mike was responsible for the development of TradeView, the first multicast gap detection packet broker in the world, and enjoys putting the garnered financial markets expertise to use in the role of resident engineer for Keysight’s FinTech solutions working group. Mike, who previously worked as an Air Force contractor in the field of Bayesian and causal analysis, has a background in music and entertainment to fill his time outside the technology community.

Andrew Gardiner, Vice President, KX.
Andrew joined KX in 2005. He has spent the majority of that time developing and running kdb+ to better support trading, market data, and analytics systems for Tier 1 banks. In the last year, his focus has shifted from consultancy to R&D where he is bringing that experience to inform the KX Insights roadmap

Francisco Girela López, Americas Tech Responsible, Seven Solutions.
Francisco holds a Ph.D. in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Granada. After some time in the private sector, Francisco joined the Timing Keepers group at the same university 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. At the moment, he leads the expansion of Seven Solutions in the North American market and in the finance sector. His latest work involves the deployment of very long distance WR links and the integration of the HATI core in third party FPGA based devices.

Luke Hoersten, Founder & CEO, Bitnomial.
Luke founded Bitnomial in 2014 to create a marketplace connecting native digital asset hedgers with institutional traders. Prior to Bitnomial, Luke was a Managing Partner at Allston Trading.

Daryl Inniss, Director, OFS Fitel, LLC.
Daryl has been in the telecom industry for over 30 years. He was Components Practice Leader at market research firm Ovum and RHK and co-authored Silicon Photonics (Morgan Kaufmann, 2016). He was Technical Manager at JDSU where he was responsible for high-power optical amplifiers, and Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories—where he was responsible for optical fiber test and measurement. Daryl started his career at AT&T Bell Labs researching optical fiber strength and developing fiber lasers and high-power amplifiers. He holds a PhD in Chemistry from UCLA and an AB from Princeton University.

Joe Jakubowski, Principal Engineer and Performance Architect, Lenovo.
Joe has worked in the Lenovo ISG Performance Laboratory in Morrisville, NC since 2014. Previously, he spent 30 years at IBM. He has spent the past 27 years in the x86 server performance organization focusing primarily on database, virtualization and new technology performance. His current role includes all aspects of Intel and AMD x86 server architecture and performance. Joe holds Bachelor of Science degrees with Distinction in Electrical Engineering and Engineering Operations from North Carolina State University and a Master of Science degree in Telecommunications from Pace University.

Sebastian Jug, Performance Engineer, Red Hat.

Gary Kazantsev, Head of Quant Technology Strategy, Bloomberg.
Prior to this strategy role, he created and headed the Machine Learning Engineering group, leading projects at the intersection of computational linguistics, machine learning and finance, such as sentiment analysis, market impact indicators, social media analytics, question answering, and predictive modeling of financial markets. Prior to joining Bloomberg Gary had earned degrees in physics, mathematics, and computer science from Boston University. Gary is a member of the KDD DS + Journalism workshop program committee, the advisory board for the AI & Data Science in Trading conference, and a co-organizer of the annual Machine Learning in Finance conference at Columbia University.

Jinyoung Kim, Head of Development, Analytics Platform, Morningstar.
Jin leads a team at Morningstar that is building a suite of tools to help quantitative analysts do research and share and productionize their insights. He has been building websites and web applications since before books about HTML were sold in bookstores. He feels fortunate to be able to leverage his experience to marry the elastic compute resources and the open-source ML tools now available with the incredibly varied and deep financial data available at Morningstar to ultimately bring insights to investors faster.

Peter Lankford, Founder and Executive Chairman, 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.

Markus Löning, Data Scientist and sktime contributor.
Markus is a data scientist who has recently completed his PhD at UCL. His research focuses on machine learning and software engineering. He is the lead developer of sktime. He has worked on applied problems in collaboration with different industry partners (Shell, BMW, AstraZeneca) and third-sector organisations (Great Ormond St Hospital, Rothamsted Research).

Gareth Mason, Senior Innovation and Engineering Lead, Options Technology.
Gareth is Options’ Senior Innovation and Engineering lead. He joined Options in 2014, following a three-year stint at NYSE Euronext, where Gareth worked as a Technical Analyst, then Production Engineer. Throughout his time in Options, Gareth has been instrumental in the development of Options’ platform, providing clients with a managed environment for direct market data, order entry, servers and colocation both as a managed service and as a series of individual component services. Gareth’s recent work with Packets2Disk has propelled the company’s Hi-fidelity Trading Analytics As A Service offering to an industry-leading level.

Peter Nabicht, President, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Peter has spent his career implementing technological solutions to complex business problems. At STAC, Peter's mission is to leverage his market and technology experience to guide the continued growth of the STAC community. Prior to STAC, Peter spent 10 years at Allston Trading, developing multi-asset class, low latency trading systems. His roles included Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Business Development. Peter co-founded 12Sided Technology, which developed high throughput network capture and analytics. Most recently, he was Head of Electronic Markets Strategy and Development at Dealerweb. Peter has a MS in Computer Science from Loyola University Chicago.

Raghu Nambiar, Corporate Vice President, Datacenter Ecosystems and Solutions, AMD.
Raghu was previously the CTO of the Cisco UCS business and played an instrumental role in accelerating the growth of the Cisco UCS to a top data center compute platform. He has spent his entire career working on software and hardware ecosystems for data centers, both in business and research.

Ron Nevo, CTO, cPacket Networks.
Ron is the, CTO of cPacket Networks, Ron brings more than 20 years of experience leading engineering teams thorough the creation and development of complex networking. Ron holds B.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Technion in Israel and holds more than 15 granted US patents.

Ben Newton, Associate Partner, Citihub Digital, a Synechron Company.
Ben is a Management Consultant and digital native born into low latency trading. With more than 20 years on the street and experience of working as a consultant for most of the major Investment Banks, Ben speaks with experience on what works and what doesn’t, be that in Equities, FX or Fixed Income. From Developer and Data Scientist, to Architect and Cloud Evangelist, Ben lives and breathes technology ever advocating its potential.

Sean O’Dowd, Financial Services Solutions & Strategy Managing Director, Nutanix.
A senior Financial Services leader focused on developing cloud, data, and application solutions expressly for banking and capital markets segments. Sean joined Nutanix after leading global Financial Services strategy and solution development at Proofpoint, MapR (HPE), and Teradata. He previously worked within capital markets and the asset management industry in portfolio management, equity research, and securities trading at IDC, State Street and a number of alternative investment funds. With over 20 years of experience in Financial Services, Sean is a quoted source in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Bloomberg.

Fintan Quill, Head of Sales Engineering, Shakti Software.
Fintan is an expert in complex database analytics. He joined Shakti in 2019 and has worked over the past 16 years at a number of Wall Street investment banks, hedge funds, and trading shops, building critical infrastructure for trading analytics and other purposes. Fintan is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin with a specialization in Computing and Microelectronic Engineering. He is a frequent speaker on database topics, including at Seattle Data Day, Austin Data Day, Strata+Hadoop World, the Irish Network USA and various Big Data Meetups around North America and Europe.

Ulku Rowe, Technical Director, Financial Services, Google Cloud.
At the forefront of Google’s cloud and machine learning capabilities, Ulke enables the financial services industry to take advantage of Google’s technology to fuel their digital transformation. Before joining Google, Ulku was a Managing Director of Technology at J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America. During her financial services career, she built technology platforms for trading & analytics, middle & back-office, risk management, and finance. Driving business transformation through technical innovation and leadership has always been her focus. MS degree, Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; BS degree, Computer Engineering, Bogazici University, Istanbul. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Fulbright Association.

Adam Sherer, Verification Technology Executive, Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
Adam drives verification software and hardware sales in Eastern North America with 31 years of experience in verification and software engineering. He is also secretary of the Accellera IP Security Assurance standard working group and often presents on security verification. Adam received his MS EE from the University of Rochester, with research published in the IEEE Transactions on CAD. His BS EE and BA CS were received from SUNY Buffalo. He also holds a 2017 patent in verification technology.

Inderdeep Singh, Sr. Director Architecture & Product Management, CME Group.
Inderdeep heads the Emerging Technology function at the CME Group, running multiple programs that support continuous improvement and innovation through R&D activities. His other projects investigate the external technology landscape and use cutting-edge concepts to solve business problems. As a member of the Architecture & Product Management group, he focuses on developing and shepherding product roadmaps that deliver on the business's vision. Before his nine years at the CME, he spent nine years on the buy side, delivering algorithmic futures trading platforms for banks, prop shops, and hedge funds. CME Group is the world's leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace.

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.

Alex Stein, Global Head Business Development, Liquid-Markets-Holdings.
Alex is a serial entrepreneur having cofounded and led four startups including FarSight Financial Services, the first Internet brokerage and Gomez, Inc, the leading Internet Performance Management company. Alex was a Managing Director at Two Sigma; while he was there he built the firm’s global Alpha Capture program, which applies quantitative research to identify and extract investment signals in real time from a global network of investment professionals. He also co-led the Client Solutions platform, Venn, and explored emerging technologies, including blockchain and distributed ledger systems. Earlier in his career, he worked at Digital Equipment's VLSI facility in the Advanced Development group. Stein received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (1991) and both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Dartmouth College.

Stefan Zohren, Faculty Member, Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance.
Stefan is a Faculty Member at the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance, an Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, and a Mentor in the FinTech stream at the Creative Destruction Lab at Said Business School. He is also a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and a member of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems. Outside of academia, Stefan works as a Scientific Advisor at Man Group. He has extensive consulting experience in leading machine learning projects in application domains such as finance and healthcare with clients ranging from listed companies to SMEs and startups.