Speaker Biographies – London, Fall 2023

Bishop Brock, Head of Research, Strategic 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.

César Carpinteiro, Team Lead FPGA, Flow Traders.
Electronics Engineer with proven experience in RTL design for FPGA and embedded software development. Highly independent and driven engineer used to work in multidisciplinary teams to bring projects from concept to delivery. Currently developing data processing systems optimized for low latency in the financial industry.

Dave Clack, Chief Product Officer, Adaptive.
Dave is Chief Product Officer at Adaptive which he joined in 2015 as a non-executive board advisor. He has a wealth of experience in software consulting, PMO leadership, process optimization, software methodologies, and successful orchestration of substantial development projects. Previous roles include leadership positions at Quantum, the data services company, and LMAX where he was Head of Technology Delivery. Most recently, Clack led CatDV, a media management business, steering its revenue growth until its acquisition.

Liz Corrigan, Head of Engineering, Myrtle.ai.
Liz runs Myrtle.ai’s engineering operations. 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 defence 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.

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.

Matthew Cretney, Head of Product Management, Beeks Group.
An experienced technologist with two decades of working in FinTech, infrastructure and network analytics, with most of those years spent with Reuters/Refinitiv. At Thomson Reuters he was the technical product lead for Refinitiv’s SaaS multi-tenant white-labelled FX eTrading capability and oversaw the development of Refinitiv’s FX Spot and Forwards Matching services. At Beeks, Matt heads up Product Management where the focus is on bringing cloud agility to the financial markets and improving business visibility of their underlying infrastructure performance.

Robert DeWitt, Director Product Marketing, AMD.
Robert leads product marketing for Fintech in the Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group (AECG) at AMD. In his role, Robert oversees marketing, product development and strategy. Prior to his current role, Robert was at Cisco where he was senior leader in the Cloud Infrastructure and Software Group (CISG), a technical sales specialist group, focused entirely on Ultra Low Latency networking. Upon Cisco’s acquisition of Exablaze, Robert lead the global Technical Solution Architect team wherein he influenced product roadmaps of switches, SmartNICs, and software/firmware. Robert spent a total of 18 years with Cisco. Prior to Cisco, Robert held global sales/engineering leadership roles at Exablaze (a provider of FPGA based SmartNICs and switches), Tradebot (High Frequency Trading firm) and Arista Networks.

Dipin Divakaran, eTrading Infrastructure Lead, Standard Chartered Bank.
Dipin is a low-latency trading infrastructure engineer with deep knowledge of design and implementation. He specializes in compute, CPU, NIC, Linux, low-latency network appliances, Storage, colocation hosting, connectivity to markets, packet capture solutions, and time infrastructure. Currently, Dipin manages low-latency, high-frequency trading infrastructure for Standard Chartered Bank ensuring that it meets the expanding and evolving needs of algorithmic trading applications.

Aaron Foo, CEO, FMAD Engineering.
FPGA Engineer, Software Engineer & Entrepreneur, Aaron Foo leads FMADIO, a company with a packet capture appliance which does so much more than just recording data. In a previous life Aaron worked on FPGA pre-trade risk solutions. In a previous, previous life he was a key engineer for the Playstation console. In a previous, previous, previous life he squeezed the maximum performance from GPUs when they first arrived in the form of Nvidia RIVA128 (1997). He also collects cacti.

Seth Friedman, CEO, Liquid-Markets-Solutions.
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.

Simon Haywood, Field CTO for Unstructured Data, EMEA, Dell Technologies.
With a career that started in broadcast engineering and production, Simon became an expert in unstructured data before realising that there was any other kind! Today, all of our lives are driven and shaped by the data that we generate, capture and consume – and Simon helps individuals and organisations understand the possibilities, challenges and responsibilities of working with data from the terabyte to the petabyte scale and beyond.

Iain Kenney, Sr. Director & Head of Product Management, cPacket Networks.
Iain leads Product Management at cPacket Networks. His current role allows Iain to partner with the highly experienced engineering team at cPacket based in San Jose and Portland and the product management team to drive the product direction across the suite of cPackets industry leading products. Iain holds a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from Dundee University.

Joel Kaufman, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, WEKA.
For the last 25+ years Joel has worked in tech including several startups, then SGI, HP and then 20+ years with NetApp focused on performance, application integration, manageability, and virtualization/containerization of applications. For the last several years at WEKA, Joel has been focused on how we can integrate with customer environments to bring value into their high-performance data pipelines and processes.

Evgueny Khartchenko, Intel Optimization and Software Enabling Engineer, Intel Corporation.
Evgueny started his career at Intel in 1999 as a First Line Manager in VTune Performance Analyzer development team. In 2005 he moved to Application Engineer position working on Software enabling of HPC applications and in 2006 he established Intel’s FasterLab in the UK focusing on FSI enabling. Since then he has worked with about a hundred clients including many top banks, exchanges and ISVs and supported numerous deals where Intel’s hardware was involved.

Adam Lister, FAE, Supermicro.
Adam has a wealth of experience working with clients and vendors in the design and deployment of mission critical high-performance infrastructure, amongst major automated trading, machine learning, HPC & AI clients.

James Lupton, CTO, Blackcore Technologies.
Based in Bristol, UK at Blackcore Technologies HQ; and regularly spending time in New Jersey at the US Blackcore facility. James’ knowledge and experience have been essential in propelling Blackcore Technologies into the global market. James’ passion for technology, engineering, and innovation began at a young age. Building PCs, working on software projects, and then starting his first job at his father's technology company. James is devoted to designing innovative servers built for electronic trading and other performance-demanding industries. James has spent considerable time building out various departmental teams and working closely with clients to improve features and service sets.

Denis Luzan, SVP, High Performance Architectures, Citi.
Denis is a technical lead with over 20 years of experience in designing and building high performance, ultra-low latency systems, initially in telecom and then in finance. In his decade and a half in financial services Denis worked and led work on a few generations of software and FPGA based electronic and algorithmic trading platforms.

Cliff Maddox, Director of Business Development, NovaSparks.
Cliff has over 30 years’ experience in the trading industry. He joined NovaSparks in 2017 as a U.S. Sales Manager and now leads the sales team. Prior to joining NovaSparks, Cliff worked at Activ Financial Systems for eight years, holding various positions in the business and sales organization. Prior to that, Cliff spent 20 years developing his capital market expertise by leading numerous software development projects for wide variety of major banks and trading firms.

Peter Nabicht, President, Strategic 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.

Jordan Nanos, Machine Learning Architect, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Jordan is a Machine Learning Architect who works as a Master Technologist in HPE’s Global Sales Technology Office. He spends his time helping customers design and implement high performance platforms for data-driven applications at any scale: from edge to cloud, sensor to tensor.

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.

Richard Parks, Head of Critical Solutions, Telesoft Technologies.
Richard has nearly 20 years of experience using FPGAs for very high throughput applications, from HDD testing to satellite broadcast and carrier scale cyber security. Much of his professional career has been spent processing very high-rate network traffic for unsampled flow analytics, anything from several hundred Gbps and above. He has also optimised, and hardware accelerated computationally intensive calculations, including signature matching and cryptography algorithms. Richard is a Chartered Engineer, has an MEng in electronic engineering from the University of Southampton, and is a Certified Ethical Hacker.

Charles Reindorf, Head of Global Markets Data Management, Bank of America.
Charles joined Merrill Lynch in 2007 in FX Options Technology and transferred to the Quantitative Services Group in 2011 after the merger with Bank of America, where he continued to work in the FX Options space and then into role managing a team of cross-asset Strats. Charles became the head of Architecture and Platform in the Data and Innovations Group in 2018 and was appointed Data Management Executive for Global Markets in 2021. The Global Markets Data Management Executive function was transferred into the Chief of Staff Organisation in 2022, providing tighter integration with the planning and execution of Global Markets strategic initiatives.

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.

Hamid Reza Salehi, Director Product Marketing, AMD.
Hamid leads the data center product marketing team at Adaptable and Embedded Compute Group (AECG) at AMD. In his role, Hamid oversees marketing, product development and strategy. Prior to his current role, Hamid founded a startup in the IOT space, and worked at Marvell Semiconductor, Broadcom, T-Mobile, and Radio Frequency Systems (Alcatel-Lucent) in various roles, including product management, business development, analytics, and finance. Hamid received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of waterloo and an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.

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.

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.

Diana Stanescu, Director Finance and Capital Markets, Keysight Technologies.
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.

Sergej Teverovski, Head of Section, Eurex.
Sergej is in charge of the T7 development team and drives the future development with respect to technology forward. Additionally, he takes care of the T7 analytics and monitoring topics in order to ensure a level playing field in an environment where every nanosecond counts. Sergej spent a major part of his time at Deutsche Börse as a software developer working on the T7 Matching Engine.

Paul Wallace, Director of Product Marketing, DDN.
Paul is Product Marketing Director at DDN, working with customers and partners on high-performance storage solutions and data management for AI systems. Prior to DDN, Paul was responsible for product marketing and sales enablement for application acceleration and security solutions at Brocade and Riverbed. Paul has also held senior sales and business development roles at Oracle and Sun Microsystems, working with enterprise customers such as British Telecom and Reuters; and led partner development programs in the Telco & Media sector, working with major Telco OEMs such as Ericsson, Nokia and Alcatel on embedded systems and software design.

David Weber, Director, Global FSI CTO, 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, generative AI, 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.

Fercan Yalinkilic, Product Manager, Low Latency, Refinitiv, an LSEG Business.
Fercan has over 20 years of experience of working in finance and financial data analysis covering EMEA, US, and European markets. He’s a computer engineer and has juggled between different roles in quantitative analysis, product management, front desk as well as the technological aspects of finance. Outside of work, he’s a motorsport racing fan and a dedicated do-it-yourself addict with his daughter.