Speaker Biographies – London, Spring 2019

Dr. Alex Allan, CTO & Co-founder, Kortical.
Alex did a BSc in Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics and won a PhD scholarship in Data Science through being the only 3rd year student to get an international conference paper published. Alex has started several AI related Companies on the way to founding Kortical and developing the Kortical Platform. Alex has a wealth of experience applying modern AI techniques to business and uses this to ensure project success. He is responsible for the R&D roadmap at Kortical, ensuring the platform uses the latest cutting edge techniques.

Dr John Ashley, Director, Global Financial Services Strategy, NVIDIA.
John currently leads the Global Financial Services Industry Strategy team at NVIDIA. Previously at NVIDIA, he started and led the Professional Services Deep Learning Practice and the Deep Learning Professional Services Partner program. He has managed the relationship with IBM’s Software and Cognitive groups, was a Senior Solutions Architect covering Financial Services based in New York and then London, and supported NVIDIA’s work with the Square Kilometer Array radio astronomy programs. He holds a doctorate in Computational Sciences and Informatics, and both BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering. He holds a US Patent in predictive analytics for home mortgage valuation.

James Barrett, Senior Director EMEA Sales, Endace.

Derek Burke, Regional Sales Manager, Weka.IO.
Derek has over sixteen years' experience in scale-out computing and introducing new technologies across Europe. Derek has held senior sales and marketing positions at Seagate, Panasas, Silicon Graphics, Pure Storage and currently leads the sales team in Northern Europe for WekaIO. He has also held the title of VP for Industry at ETP4HPC, a public/private partnership advising the European Commission on its high-performance computing strategy.

Yves Charles, VP Business Development, NovaSparks.
Yves is in charge the Business Development of Novaparks, where he has been involved since 2010. Prior to Novasparks, Yves has founded and managed two companies in the IT industry, one in France and the second in the USA. Yves holds a master degree at the Engineering school of SUPELEC in France.

Jean-Arnold Chenilleau, Senior Applications Engineer, Orolia.
As a Program Manager, Jean-Arnold helps Orolia's customers design timing-related low-latency networks especially for the finance and trading industries. Prior to Orolia, Jean-Arnold worked in pre-sales and product development for various security and aeronautics companies. He holds an engineering degree in electronics and is a keen sailor.

Richard Croucher, Distinguished Engineer and Global Head of Engineering for Specialised Infrastructure, Barclays.
Richard’s group is responsible for the High Frequency Trading Platform and increasingly other performance demanding systems across the Bank. Richard has been with Barclays for nearly 8 years and has also worked for several other large financial firms. He was previously a Chief Architect at Sun Microsystems and a Principle Architect at Microsoft Live (now Azure). Richard was the first Fellow announced at STAC Research as a consequence of his work on STAC-N1. He is also a Fellow of the British Computer Society and has degrees from Brunel University, the University of Berkshire and the University of East London.

Matt Davey, Director of Product Management, Corvil.
Matt is Director of Product Management at Corvil, with over 15 years' experience in the high-performance electronic trading and data analytics space. Working with customers, sales and development teams, and other electronic trading community members, Matt has been a long-time contributor and innovator of Corvil technology and is a co-inventor on several Corvil patents. Matt has particular interest and expertise in time synchronization, latency measurement and streaming data analytics. Prior to Corvil, Matt worked in cryptography and information security consulting. Matt holds a Ph.D. in Information Theory from the University of Cambridge, and a M.Sc. in Mathematics from Trinity College in Dublin.

Laurent de Barry, Founder & Managing Director, Enyx.
Laurent co-founded Enyx in 2011 at the age of 23 and holds 10 years of experience developing ultra low latency technology. As Managing Director of Enyx’s trading solutions, Laurent leads product and technology strategy, while overseeing the development of the next generation FPGA-enabled trading solutions. An electrical and computer science engineer by training, Laurent is passionate about high performance computing and bringing cutting-edge technology to market. Prior to co-founding Enyx, he worked on critical hardware components for the aeronautical and military industries.

Dr Michel Debiche, Director of Analytics Research, STAC.
Michel is both quant and technologist, whose passion is making data science actually work for financial firms. He is currently leading the expansion of the STAC community to include more buyside firms looking to leapfrog to the best technologies and Analytics Ops processes for quant/quantamental investing. Prior to STAC, Michel re-engineered strategy development and implementation at numerous firms, first as a quant, then as a consultant. Employers include CSFB, Daiwa, First New York, CIBC, and Think Big Analytics, where he led the financial services practice. Michel has BS, MS, and PhD degrees in geophysics from Stanford and Princeton Universities.

Roop Ganguly, Chief Solutions Architect, Bigstream.
Bishwa Roop Ganguly is Chief Solutions Architect at Bigstream Solutions. He has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and an MS and BS in Computer Science from University of Illinois and University of California at Berkeley, respectively. He has published extensively in the field of parallel processing and computer networks. He also has 5 years experience as a Data Scientist using Hadoop, Spark and SQL. He currently manages all customer engagements at Bigstream.

Dr Matthew Grosvenor, VP Technology, Exablaze.
Matthew is VP of Technology at Exablaze. He's been working with the Exablaze family of companies for over 8 years. In that time, he has been involved in trading strategy development, market data acquisition, FPGA acceleration, systems optimisation, and measurement and analytics. Matthew holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. His research work focused on techniques for managing and mitigating latency variance in hyper-scale datacenter networks. He continues to publish widely in the fields of big-data, hyperscale datacenters, networks, latency and network measurement.

Andrew Jones, Vice-President HPC Consulting & Services, NAG.
Over 20 years of HPC experience, including as a user, software developer, service provider/manager, procurement, strategy, etc. Now providing impartial consulting, with rare exposure to state-of-practice in wide range of HPC services/facilities across industry, government and academia around the world. High profile in the HPC community, recognized as the de facto international leader in training/tutorials on business aspects of HPC, and active on twitter as @hpcnotes. In the kind words of one customer recommending Andrew to another customer: "The HPC community's trusted impartial knowledgeable voice on HPC business & technology".

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.

Kristie Mann, Director of Product Management, Intel.
Kristie is an experienced leader with a background in engineering, business strategy, and sales. She is currently the Director of Marketing for Intel’s Optane DC Persistent Memory business in the Data Center Group. She is responsible for product management, planning, and technical marketing. Also while at Intel, she has managed systems hardware development in both CCG and DCG. Prior to joining Intel in 2015, Kristie spent 20 years at Hewlett Packard Company. She started as a design engineer in the workstation division and held positions engineering management and program management. Kristie has a BS Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, and an MBA from Duke University.

Dr. Darko Matovski, CEO, causaLens.
Dr. Darko Matovski is the CEO of causaLens. The company builds a machine that predicts the global economy in real-time and serves prominent organisations including hedge funds and asset managers. Darko has also worked for cutting edge hedge funds and research institutions. For example, the National Physical Laboratory in London (where Alan Turing worked) and Man Group in London. Darko has a PhD in Machine Learning and an MBA.

Matt Meinel, SVP Sales, Bus Dev & Solutions Architecture, Levyx.
Matt is a veteran innovator / entrepreneur in Capital Markets financial technology. He has been a key player at several successful, innovative financial technology firms including:Co-founder at startup 29West (low latency messaging technology) which exited to Informatica; RedHat CIO during transition period to the now popular subscription business model; Principal at O’Connor & Associates (bought by Swiss Bank which was acquired by UBS Investment Bank). At Swiss Bank he served as co-CIO and later at UBS Investment bank was Global Head of IT for the Fixed Income & Treasury Division.

Tim O’Callaghan, UDS EMEA Advisory Sales Engineer, Dell EMC.
Pre Sales engineer specializing in Scale Out NAS systems. Linked In profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-ocallaghan-83a8677

Rob Otter, Managing Director – Data Science Centre of Enablement, Barclaycard.
Rob’s career history to date has been within the Investment Banking Technology sector. He has held various senior positions working either for centralized IT organizations or directly for key business lines. He has held fellowship titles at his last two employers, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs. During his career he has acquired deep technical knowledge and expertise on areas ranging from performance development methods in software or hardware, more recently his focus has turned to big data technologies and their application within the Investment Banking arena, specifically artificial intelligence and scientific computing.

Simon Ponsford, CTO, YellowDog.
To Simon, technology related business problems are like a juicy bone to get his teeth into. He has 18 years of experience in high growth start-up environments working in CIO, CTO and Technical Architect roles in the UK, Europe, Middle East and North America, with nearly 20 cloud computing related patents to his name. He is passionate about delivering ‘green’ technology and is best known for designing the world’s lowest powered Windows PC in 2008. He is also responsible for KumoWatt, the leading training programme for IT professionals interested in reducing the carbon impact of what they do.

Cesar Prados, CTO/Managing Director, Seven Solutions.
Cesar has started his Engineer career 13 years ago at I.D.S Space Laboratory, Italy, developing numerical methods and in parallel he continued working on research projects at the University. Cesar, won the first prize of the Innovative Entrepreneurial Projects Contest and founded an spin-off in 2007. In 2009 he started working at GSI particle accelerator, as a Technical Project Manager of the Control & Timing System. He has designed and developed HW/SW for the new accelerator critical network for the control and timing system. Since February 2018 Cesar is the managing director of Seven Solutions Germany.

David Riddoch, Chief Architect, Solarflare.
David co-founded Level 5 Networks in July 2002 and joined Solarflare when it merged with Level 5 in April 2006. David is the architect and lead developer of Solarflare's market leading OpenOnload network acceleration middleware. David's mission is to deliver absolutely the best possible performance without asking users to abandon the standard network stack: Sockets, TCP, UDP and Ethernet.

Nick Rogers, CEO, BlackCore.

Gurpreet Singh, CEO, Pavilion Data Systems.
Gurpreet has over 20 years of broad cross-functional leadership experience in the technology industry in roles ranging from strategic business planning, business development, product development, and marketing. Gurpreet was the first Product Manager at Pure Storage. From start-up to IPO, he developed and oversaw all product management and technical marketing functions and was responsible for product strategy, strategic business planning, and go-to-market Programs. Prior to that he served in various capacities at Riverbed, Brocade, Microsoft and Cisco. Gurpreet holds an MBA from Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley and an MSEE from UCLA

Dr David Snowdon, Director of Engineering, Arista.
David was co-founder and CTO at Metamako, which got 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.

Jean-Claude Tagger, COO, quasarDB.
Jean Claude with over 35 years' experience in the High-Tech industry has been Managing Director of Dell France, President of NEC Computers for EMEA and held several positions of responsibility at Xerox, Philips, ZDs and Cabletron. Since 2009, he has supported several software companies in their growth especially at the international level, before devoting himself entirely to quasardb since 2015. He graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and holds a MSc from UC Berkeley.

Jag Tamvada, Director, Product Management, Cisco.
Jag manages Cisco’s low latency and merchant-silicon based switching portfolios. He has over 10 years of experience in building data center switches specially catered for financial trading and cloud workloads. He is passionate about understanding customer’s unique requirements and coming up with solutions to address their business and technical challenges. Prior to Product Management, Jag worked as a Software Engineer and Network Design Consultant. He has an MBA in Marketing & Entrepreneurship from Santa Clara University and MS in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati.

David Taylor, Chief Technology Officer, Exegy.
David oversees product strategy, architecture, research and development, and also leads the pre-sales engineering, product management and marketing efforts at Exegy. He is an inventor on 37 United States and 29 international patents and patents-pending. Prior to joining Exegy, David served on the faculty and researched high-performance computer networks at the Applied Research Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis.

Dr James Tromans, Gardening Leave.
Dr. James Tromans has worked at Citi for the last six years, currently as head of data science for the FX trading business. Before joining Citi, James was a Fintech co-founder, having previously worked as an engineer across different industries. James will join Google in June 2019 as Technical Director focusing on Applied Artificial Intelligence and cloud computing. James holds a DPhil in the Computational Neuroscience of Vision from the University of Oxford.

Steve Wallo, CTO, Vcinity.
Steve currently serves as Vcinity’s CTO, overseeing resources related to the insertion of advanced technologies and strategies into customer architectures and future IT decision methodologies. He is responsible for bridging future IT trends into the companies exisiting portfolio capabilities and future offerings. Prior to Vcinity, Steve was CTO at Brocade Federal, responsible for articulating Brocade’s innovations, strategies and architectures in the rapidly evolving federal IT space for mission success. Steve has served the U.S Government, as the Chief Architect for the NAVAIR Air Combat Test and Evaluation Facility High Performance Computing Center.

Dr Stephen Warr, Head of Technology, XR Trading Europe.
Steve has been leading the technology team in XR Trading’s London office for the past 4 years. Prior to that he spent 7 years at KCG Holdings (formerly GETCO) where he held roles including Head of European cash & derivatives equity trading technology and a 2 year stint as European CEO. Steve has a PhD in Optical Systems from the University of Cambridge and a BA in Engineering from Christ's College Cambridge.

Dave Weber, Wall Street CTO & Director, Lenovo.
Dave Weber is the director of Lenovo's global financial services industry initiatives and Wall Street CTO. Dave is focused on server-based low latency, high performance, analytics and cloud technologies, and works with financial markets clients to provide solutions, with partners to build an ecosystem, and with Lenovo Research and Development to influence future products. Dave also leads the Lenovo relationship with STAC®, where Lenovo has worked closely with our partners to publish numerous world record benchmark results.

Dr Stephen Weston, Numerical Libraries Architect, Intel.
Stephen is a Principal Engineer and Numerical Libraries Architect at Intel Corporation, where he focuses on designing, developing and delivering libraries of hardware-accelerated mathematical functions across multiple computational domains, specialising in finance with an increasing focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. A former front-office quant and market risk specialist, Stephen has also held a variety of positions in risk management and fin-tech as well as representing several investment banks on industry-level committees on regulatory and market risk. Stephen holds a PhD in mathematical finance from Cass Business School and is also a visiting professor in the department of computing at Imperial College, where he focuses on applications of AI to problems in finance.

Nadeem Zahid, VP Product Management, cPacket.
Nadeem serves as Vice President Product Management & Marketing at cPacket. He has spent more than 23 years in the IT/Networking industry strategizing and building hardware/software/cloud products. Nadeem has held several leadership positions with companies like cPacket, LiveAction, tFinery, Extreme, Juniper, Brocade/Foundry, Cisco, and Alcatel-Lucent. Nadeem holds a Master of Science in Technology Management from Boston University, a Bachelor of Electronics Engineering from N.E.D University, and is a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE). Nadeem has also published a book on Product Management along with several other publications and articles.

Dan Zheng, CEO, Tick Tock Networks.
Dan is a technologist passionate about building products to improve lives of millions of people. As an early employee at Google, he held senior engineering and business roles He was recognized for his contributions on search appliance, advertising, and Android. After leaving Google in 2010, he held leadership positions at various startups, from mobile commerce to mapping and location analytics. Just prior to Tick Tock Networks, Dan was a senior research scientist at Stanford University working with a team of faculty and PhD students on the topic of Self-Programming Networks. Dan received his computer science degree from Princeton University.