Speaker Biographies–Global STAC Live, Spring 2020

Areg Alimian, Sr. Director of Product Management, Keysight Technologies.
Areg is a seasoned industry veteran and entrepreneur with over 20 years of leadership experience, recognized for the ability to conceptualize, develop and grow breakthrough products in new markets and technology domains ranging from information security to enterprise cloud migration and network performance management. Areg has a proven track record in creation and accelerated growth of hi-tech businesses through operational excellence, consistent execution and vision with a growth-oriented outlook. He is a frequent speaker and presenter at leading fintech conferences worldwide, and has authored many articles and technical papers on topics on digital transformation, transaction analytics, trading profitability, information security, and network virtualization.

Duncan Ash, Area Vice President, Global Financial Services, Splunk
Duncan has been working at the intersection of technology and financial services for over 20 years. He is passionate about getting into the detail of the problems that the industry is trying to solve, and building technology solutions to address those problems. Challenges have ranged from helping wealth managers build portfolios, to helping insurers fight fraud. At Splunk, Duncan is AVP for the Global Financial Services vertical. In this role, he is accountable for expanding the range of solutions the financial services industry can achieve using Splunk’s expanding range of products. He lives in London, England with his wife, two daughters, and a cat.

John Ashley, General Manager, Financial Services and Technology, 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.

Jon Axon, Managing Director, Packets2Disk.
Jon founded Packets2Disk in 2009. Originally a software engineer, he has a strong understanding of current technologies and monitoring requirements in the Network, Trading and Market Data fields. Packets2Disk’s focus is on developing packet capture and analytics software for finance clients, which is high performance and cost effective, and which allows open data flow between P2D software and other analytics tools. Jon is married, with 3 children. Prior to founding Packets2Disk, Jon held senior positions in several Network Equipment Manufacturers and Network Management companies. Jon has a degree in English Literature from Oxford University.

Rafman Azeez, Solutions and Cloud Architect (Managing Director), BNY Mellon (invited).
Rafman has over 30 years in the financial technology field. Over this time he has worked on platforms ranging from Payments, Trading and Capital Markets to Retail Banking. Rafman is currently leading the Cloud transformation team at BNY Mellon. Previously he led the architecture team for Bank of America’s Retail division and was CTO for Citibank’s Capital Markets and Institutional Payments. Rafman is particularly interested in building high availability and resilient systems ( Online Portals and Payments ) and high speed transaction processing ( Trade Processing ).

Shimon Ben-David, Field CTO, Weka.
As WekaIO’s Field CTO, Shimon actively engages with customers and partners to track emerging trends and to bring actionable feedback to Engineering and Product Management. In his near 7 years at Weka, he has had leadership roles in both Support and Sales Engineering. Prior to joining Weka he ran Support Services for Primary Data, XtremIO, and IBM. Shimon met the leadership team of WekaIO when he managed IT at XIV, acquired by IBM in 2007. Shimon studied Computer Science and Philosophy at Ramat Gan University.

Stanislav Bratanov, Principal Engineer, Intel.
Stanislav is a principal engineer at Intel Corporation, responsible for defining and driving new performance monitoring features into hardware architectures and enabling them in software through Intel® VTune™ Profiler. Joined Intel in 1999, worked in the areas of performance optimization and multithreading of media processing libraries, new hardware architecture research and performance projections, operating system design, virtualization, parallel programming languages, runtimes, and analysis tools. Graduated from Law School of Nizhny Novgorod State University, Russia.

Christin Brown, Global Financial Services Strategy & Solutions Lead, Google Cloud.
Christin is responsible for helping financial services institutions design and implement enterprise-class digital strategies that accelerate business from a cloud-first perspective. Christin brings more than 23 years of experience supporting various customers in their design, implementation, and deployment of applications. Before joining Google Cloud, she served as a Global Architect at Apigee (acquired by Google Cloud). Christin previously spent 17 years at IBM, progressing through various technical and business roles. She was recognized as a Distinguished Engineer by IBM for her ability to drive customer innovation. Christin is a Master Certified Information Technology Architect in Complex Systems Integration.

Jeff Cachat, Sales Director, Enterprise & Performance Group, CIARA Technologies.
Jeff is a Sales Director of Enterprise Group & Performance Group at CIARA Technologies. Jeff joined CIARA in 2011 as a Director of Business Development as an expert in the financial services industry. He participated in the development of CIARA High Performance Computing products and particularly the successful CIARA ORION HF line, world’s fastest x86 Single and Dual Processor Servers dedicated to Low Latency/High Frequency Trading. Before joining CIARA, Jeff spent more than 20 years in management as a Senior Program Manager at Cray Inc. and also as a Consultant at IBM Global Services.

Russ Caldwell, Senior Product Manager, Dell EMC.
As the world of big data has emerged, and continues to explode in both scale and complexity, Russ spent much of his career as an entrepreneur, designing, patenting and deploying AI/ML techniques and solutions for Fortune 100 companies. His focus has always been searching out innovative ways to bring autonomous computing into data analysis. Today, as a Senior Product Manager at Dell EMC, Russ and his team concentrate on the challenge of how to ingest, store and analyze streaming data at scale, as this has become the new battle zone for companies to gain competitive advantage in a fast-moving world.

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

Chris Coward, Garden Leave
Chris has worked at small low-latency prop trading firms in Chicago for fifteen years. Chris entered the industry on the trading operations team at Allston Trading, and since has had the opportunity to manage Trading Operations and DevOps teams, as well as work on every part of the trading stack from risk and compliance to strategy algorithms and order execution.

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.

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.

Jeff Denworth, VP, Products and Marketing, VAST Data.
Jeff is the VP of Products and Marketing and a co-founder of VAST Data. Jeff has over a decade of experience with big data and cloud storage technologies. Prior to CTERA Networks, Jeff served as VP of Marketing at DataDirect Networks (DDN) where he oversaw marketing, business and corporate development during a time of rapid sales growth. Previous to DDN, Jeff held sales roles at Cluster File Systems, Inc and Dataram Corporation.

Dr. Christophe Desmouliers, Chief Technology Officer, Enyx.
Christophe is the Chief Technology Officer at Enyx and has 15 years experience working with FPGA technology. He specializes in ultra-low latency applications and since joining Enyx, built the first FPGA development framework for large enterprises looking to move their software infrastructure to FPGA. Prior to his current role at Enyx, he worked in the video processing field and designed the first HEVC encoder on an Arria10 FPGA encoding up to 4kp30 4:2:2 10b. Christophe holds a PhD in Computer Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology. His research was focused on signal processing applications on FPGAs from ultrasonic data compression to video processing using HLS.

Hendrik Eeckhaut, CTO, Sigasi.
Fresh from his PhD in Computer Science Engineering doing research on artificial intelligence and design methodology, he co-founded Sigasi in 2008. Passion became a profession while start-up spirit became leadership. Now 12 years later, our technology has become the standard in productivity for design and verification engineers, using VHDL, Verilog and SystemVerilog. In his downtime Hendrik enjoys Belgian beers and the outdoors: cycling, running or working on his boulder climbing skills.

Wolfgang Eholzer, CTO, Eurex Frankfurt AG.
Dr. Wolfgang Eholzer became CTO of Eurex Frankfurt AG in January 2019. He is also a member of the Management Board of Eurex Deutschland. Dr. Eholzer is responsible for derivatives trading IT, IT strategy, and the development, technical operations, performance monitoring, and capacity planning of the T7 trading system. He joined Eurex Frankfurt AG in 2007, heading the Eurex Trading Technology Roadmap which delivered high speed trading interfaces for order management and market data. Previously, Dr. Eholzer spent 9 years in Deutsche Börse Group’s IT delivery organization. From 1995 to 1998, he was a research associate at Cambridge University’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. He received his PhD in Mathematical Physics from Universität of Bonn in 1995

Charles Fan, co-founder and CEO, MemVerge.
Charles Fan is co-founder and CEO of MemVerge. Prior to MemVerge, Charles an SVP/GM at VMware, founding the storage business unit that developed the Virtual SAN product. Charles also worked at EMC and was the founder of the EMC China R&D Center. Charles joined EMC via the acquisition of Rainfinity, where he was a co-founder and CTO. Charles received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his B.E. in Electrical Engineering from the Cooper Union.

Tom Fay, Chief Operating Officer, Memx
Tom joined MEMX in June of 2019 and is responsible for execution of the corporate strategy and the day-to-day operation of the business. Tom’s experience spans over thirty years and he has held senior technology positions in a variety of industries including telecommunications, defense and financial services. Prior to joining MEMX, Tom served as Senior Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at Nasdaq and as Chief Technology Officer at Virtu Financial. Before working in financial services, he spent a number of years at AT&T Bell Laboratories engineering software for real-time embedded systems. Tom is a graduate of Stevens Institute of Technology.

Seth Friedman, Co-Founder, President and CEO, Liquid-Markets-Holdings.
Seth has been an active leader at the forefront of electronic trading for over 20 years. Seth has deep sales-trading, technology and consulting experience and a history of technology vision, including invention of a multi-patented order processing technology field proven since 2010. In Morgan Stanley Japan Seth headed Program Trading before establishing the Electronic Trading Services business; later heading that business throughout Asia. At Nomura, Seth established and headed the Quantitative Prime Services business, played a key role in the post-acquisition integration of Lehman Brothers, and was responsible for Electronic Product Management. At Liquid-Markets-Solutions Seth is the CEO and is responsible for product vision.

Stephane Gauther, Product Manager, Silexica.
Steph’s passion for using FPGAs to accelerate compute intensive tasks has led him to be a Product Manager at Silexica. His career spans nearly 30 years in engineering, sales and product management across a variety of markets including Broadcast, Mil/Aero, Machine Vision, EDA and FPGAs. He is currently focused on helping designers maximize productivity and performance when implementing C/C++ algorithms on FPGAs. Steph’s presentation will describe how designers can stay ahead of ever-changing algorithms whilst delivering best-in-class latency and throughput implementations.

Francisco Girela López, Americas Tech Responsible, Seven Solutions.
Francisco obtained his Master on Telecommunications Engineering degree in the University of Granada. Before ending these studies, he started working as a technical consultant in an international company. After some time, he went back to the University where he accepted a job as a researcher. During his research, he specialized in ultra-accurate time transfer systems and the development of the White Rabbit technology. Nowadays he is based in Chicago where he works at Seven Solutions as Americas Tech Responsible. He is about to finish his PhD in telecommunication engineering focusing on precise timestamping in high accuracy synchronization networks.

Gideon Goldman, Principal Product Manager, Informatica.
Since joining the Ultra Messaging (née 29West) team in 2008, Gideon has contributed to development, support, training, field engineering and product management. Gideon studied Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and he now lives in New York and enjoys playing with his one-year-old daughter and helping customers build high-performing, efficient and reliable systems for data distribution.

Dr Matthew Grosvenor, Principal Engineer, Cisco.
Following the acquisition of Exablaze by Cisco, Matthew is now a Principal Engineer at Cisco. Having worked with the Exablaze family of companies for over 11 years, Matt now joins the Intent Based Networking Group where he focuses on bringing together the needs and challenges of financial sector with the capabilities of Cisco broader engineering organization. Matt has demonstrated expertise in high-frequency 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.

Costa Hasapopoulos, Chief Field Technical Officer, Pavilion Data Systems.
With over 35 years of experience in IT, Costa has had many executive leadership roles including President of Equus Compute Solutions, World Wide VP of Storage Sales at IBM, Americas CTO for Hitachi Data System, and World Wide Vice President of Services and Solutions for McData/Computer Network Technologies. He has designed storage solutions for some of the largest enterprises in the world including: Google/YouTube, eBay, PayPal, Allstate Insurance, Walmart to several of the largest financial institutions in the world as well as the largest health insurance provider in the United States.

Caius Howcroft, Head of Infrastructure and Data Platform, Tradeweb.
Dr. Caius Howcroft heads Global Infrastructure, Platform Engineering and Data Technology at Tradeweb. Before Tradeweb, Caius has held positions as Head of Platform Engineering at Citadel Asset Manager and various technology leadership and Quantitate Researcher positions at Bloomberg and Princeton Consultants. Caius received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from University of Cambridge in Physics and was a postdoctoral researcher at California Institute of Technology.

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.

Peter Jeanmonod, Business Engineer, Options.
Peter is a senior professional and executive lead with comprehensive experience in the architecture, deployment and running of complex financial data networks (Enterprise & Service Provider). Peter specialises in lowest latency networking for electronic trading; Multicast financial networks; Global network automation; Network strategy and architecture; Team and operational management and Direction of departmental strategy.

Jonathan Joshua, Development Lead, BGC Partners.
As part of the Fenics UST group, Jonathan is currently leading a team that is evaluating how FPGA technology can be integrated into their low latency trading platform to enhance performance and capabilities. Throughout his career, he has focused on electronic trading development. Most recently, at firms including Dealerweb, Tower Research Capital, and NYSE.

Dr. Christoph Lameter (on Garden Leave).
Formerly Technical Lead of Research and Development at Jump Trading. He led the efforts to use cutting edge technology to create a leading technology infrastructure for trading since 2008 and worked with HPC, FPGA and ASIC technologies to reach that goal. Christoph has been a leader in the Open Source community since the early 90s contributing in various areas and being involved in leadership of key organizations (Debian, Linux International, Linux Foundation, Open Fabrics Alliance). A particular focus has been in the area of High Performance Computing and Christoph was the Principal Engineer for Kernel development at Silicon Graphics where the key kernel components to enable High Performance Technology in Linux were developed.

Dr. Joe Landman, HPC Architect, HPCaaS in HPC|AI business unit, HPE.
Joe has been involved in many aspects of the application of computational tools and techniques to problems across a wide spectrum of disciplines over the past 30 years. He has founded and run several companies including Scalable Informatics, set numerous STAC M3 records with his products in the process. He has had responsibility for architecture of computing infrastructure at a small cloud provider, led efforts at Cray to build support for Cloud based HPC. He is currently with HPE, working in a product management group.

Peter Lankford, Founder & Executive 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.

Benjamin Maron, FPGA Team Lead, Hudson River Trading.
Ben has been designing hardware for over 15 years. Prior to his currently role at HRT, he founded B64M, a startup consultancy developing custom hardware and elegant solutions for hard problems in data analytics, cryptography, finance, and aerospace. This followed 11 years at IBM Research, where he specialized in the design and manufacture of experimental supercomputers, with overall responsibility for chip (ASIC) design and verification across multiple IBM products. Ben has a BS in Computer Science from MIT.

Russell McManus, CTO, Chicago Trading Company.
Russ has been Chicago Trading Company’s chief technology office since 2010. In that time, Russ has helped CTC continuously re-engineer the firm’s trading platform to keep up with a market structure moving towards zero latency and infinite data.

Dr Gareth Morris, Chief Hardware Architect, Liquid Capital Markets.
Dr Gareth Morris graduated from Imperial College in 2006 after concluding his research into high performance arithmetic on FPGAs. As a Senior Engineer at Celoxica he patented and rolled out low latency FPGA products to many well known financial institutions. Then as NovaSparks Technology Director he guided product roadmap as well as moved forward several key FPGA solutions for finance within the company. He is now Chief Hardware Architect at Liquid Capital Markets.

Peter Nabicht, Head of Strategy, STAC.
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 rapid growth of the STAC community. Prior to STAC, Peter spent 10 years at Allston Trading, developing and supporting 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 data capture and analytics. Most recently, he was 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.

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.

Manoj Narang, CEO, Mana Partners.
Manoj has over 27 years of experience in algorithmic trading and financial technology. Prior to MANA, he founded and ran Tradeworx, Inc, where he built the firm’s quant trading and fintech businesses, spearheaded the sale of the MIDAS system to the SEC and architected the firm’s winning bid for CAT. He has advised the US Senate, DARPA, the Fed, Treasury Dep’t, and other policy groups on algorithmic trading, and has been recognized by Institutional Investor for six consecutive years as one of the top 40 global executives in trading technology. He studied Math and Computer Science (and Creative Writing) at MIT.

Dawn Newsome, CEO and President of the Americas, TP ICAP.
Dawn joined TP ICAP as CEO and President of the Americas in September 2019. She is responsible for governance, culture and risk, as well as support and control functions, in the region, ensuring those functions effectively support and enhance the company’s revenue generation. Previously, Dawn was Global CTO for Nomura’s Global Liquid Products. Her responsibilities included technology strategy and delivery for Global Rates, Agency Securitized Products, and Futures and Options Execution, overseeing the electronic product offering, and performance of the Broker/Dealer. Dawn held a number of senior technology positions at RBS (formerly Greenwich Capital), including CTO for USD Rates, and began her career at JP Morgan. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Chemistry at Bucknell University.

Michael Recce, Chief Data Scientist, Neuberger Berman.
Michael, Managing Director and Chief Data Scientist, joined the firm in 2017. Michael is building a new data science team that will leverage large, unstructured, novel data to evaluate the health of business. The primary, initial focus for the data science team is international equities. Prior to joining Neuberger Berman, Michael held a similar role at GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, and at Point72 Asset Management. Before transitioning into the investment industry, Michael was a university professor for over twenty years, and helped set up and manage two successful start-up companies. He holds a PhD in Neuroscience from University College London and a BS in Physics from the University of California in Santa Cruz.

David Rukshin, CTO, WorldQuant.
David is responsible for the Firm's technology infrastructure, and for the operations function. From 1998-2014, David worked at D. E. Shaw group. Most recently, he led a global team responsible for building a global technology infrastructure platform for quantitative trading businesses. From 2007 until 2011, he was global head of their IT infrastructure engineering and operations. He held a variety of management and technical roles with their IT organization from 1998-2007. Before D. E. Shaw, he worked at Chase Manhattan Bank supporting Equities, FX, and Fixed Income trading desks. David started his career in 1996 as a systems programmer at AT&T Labs Research. He holds M.S. in Technology Management from Columbia University, and B.S. in Management Science and Information Systems from Rutgers University.

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.

Mike Schonberg, Director Market Data Technology, Quincy Data.
Michael is a seasoned engineer with over 25 years of experience in the technology industry. He shows great enthusiasm for finding cutting edge and elegant solutions to difficult problems. For the past 19 years he focused on providing low latency, high performance solutions for hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, and large financial institutions. He currently co runs the technology group at Quincy Data and McKay Brothers. Mike has been instrumental in the design and implementation of the QED market data distribution platform. And currently oversees a variety of technology projects including market data distribution, and custom low latency network endpoint devices.

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.

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.

Pawel Szopinski, VP, Specialised Infrastructure Engineering, Barclays.
Pawel is a senior technology management professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience including Barclays Investment Bank, Sequoia Capital and Sequoia Capital Fund Management with responsibility for development and management of high performance trading infrastructure, IT operations and security. Pawel also held a number of senior engineering roles, working for large managed IT infrastructure providers. He holds an MBA in Technology Management from OUBS with hands-on experience and qualifications covering the entire IT stack, specialising in the financial technology supporting trading teams across all asset classes from trade floor to HFT strategies, algorithmic trading and machine learning as well as strategic, project and financial planning, regulatory and business compliance.

Phil Tee, Ph.D, co-founder and CEO, Moogsoft.
Phil is co-founder and CEO of Moogsoft, a leading provider of artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps). Phil has founded and led numerous companies, including Micromuse, RiverSoft (IPO) and Ninjini (acquired by Riverbed). He is a serial entrepreneur, inventor, active physicist and expert in IT service assurance — a category he was instrumental in creating through his invention of Netcool, which was acquired by IBM. Phil has co-authored numerous peer-reviewed journals researching AI, graph theory and network topology, as well as the filing of more than 50 patents in the application of AI.

Seth Thomson, Chief Information Officer, DRW.
Seth is the Chief Information Officer at DRW, a technology-driven principal trading firm headquartered in Chicago. Passionate about developing technical education opportunities for everyone, Seth has been involved in the greater Chicago non-profit community for more than two decades. He provided the initial IT infrastructure for Literature for All of Us in Evanston and served as a founding board member and advisor for Become in Chicago. Seth also initiated DRW’s partnership with Code Platoon, participates as a board member, and has seen its success firsthand. Seth holds a BA in Computers and Management from DePaul University.

Ehsan Totoni, CTO & Co-founder, Bodo.
Ehsan Totoni is CTO and Co-Founder of Bodo.ai, a startup developing a universal workload engine for “Elastic Python Cloud”. Bodo provides automatic parallelization, optimization and distribution capabilities that provide simplicity of Python and scalability of MPI simultaneously. Previously, Ehsan was a Research Scientist at Intel Labs and Researcher in Residence at Carnegie Mellon University, working on programming systems that provide high programmer productivity as well as high performance on modern hardware. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014, conducting research to improve performance and energy efficiency of HPC systems.

Alexander Tsyplikhin, Senior AI Engineer, Graphcore.
Alexander is a Senior AI Engineer at Graphcore. Qualified to PhD level in Speech Biometrics, Alexander has worked in the field of machine learning for 19 years. He is passionate about leveraging technology and innovation to improve lives and generate results for businesses. At Graphcore, Alexander is focused on AI use cases in industry, using his expertise in machine intelligence to help drive customer success.

Dean Wampler, Head of Developer Relations, Anyscale.com.
Dean (@deanwampler) is an expert in streaming data systems, focusing on applications of ML/AI. He is Head of Developer Relations at Anyscale.com, which develops Ray, a system for scaling applications from a laptop to a cluster. Previously, he was an engineering VP at Lightbend, where he led the development of Lightbend CloudFlow, an integrated system for building and running streaming data applications with Akka Streams, Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and Apache Kafka. Dean has written books for O'Reilly and contributed to several open source projects. He is a frequent conference speaker and tutorial teacher, and a co-organizer of several conferences and user groups in Chicago. Dean has a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Washington.

Dave Weber, Wall Street CTO & Director, Lenovo.
Dave is the director of Lenovo's financial services industry technology initiatives and global FSI CTO. Dave is based in NYC and focused on low latency, high performance and emerging technologies, as well as on-prem cloud and AI/ML initiatives. He works with financial markets clients to provide solutions, and with partners to build an ecosystem, as well as 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.

Alain Wilmouth, Founder and Chairman, 2CRSi.
A true geek at heart, Alain has spent his entire career in the IT sector. All started in 2004 when Alain and his brother wanted to develop their own IT approach. 2CRSi is born in their kitchen to provide IT services, quickly evolving into design and manufacture of innovative and eco-friendly servers. Alain is looking forward to breaking the rules of a fast-evolving industry. He is convinced that 2CRSi success comes from its capacity for innovation and agility in developing unique solutions to meet customer needs. On top, Alain’s vision is to reconciliate IT with the planet.

Glenn Wright, Systems Architect, Kx.
Glenn has over 30 years of technical experience in the high-performance computing industry, working on server, networking and storage elements of extreme performance solutions. At Kx, Glenn is a senior systems architect, where he advises kdb+ customers on new offerings from system vendors and public cloud vendors. Renown for high performance data analytics, Kx continues to promote technology helping with higher performance or availability metrics for kdb+ based market data solutions. Glenn has led the Kx Systems relationship with STAC for the past 4 years, during which time Kx have continued to innovate on new systems technology, resulting in many STAC benchmark improvements for kdb+, over that period.