Speakers
Amr Awadallah
Chief Technology Officer, Cloudera
Dr. Amr Awadallah is co-founder and CTO of Cloudera, Inc., where he is responsible for all engineering efforts, from product development to release, for both the open source projects and Cloudera’s proprietary management software. Prior to Cloudera, Awadallah served as vice president of engineering at Yahoo! and led a team that used Apache Hadoop extensively for data analysis and business intelligence across many of Yahoo!’s online services. He co-founded the startup VivaSmart at Stanford in 1999; it was acquired by Yahoo! in 2000. Awadallah holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Cairo University and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
Aman Bhandari
Senior Advisor to the Chief Technology Officer, US Dept. of Health and Human Services
Aman Bhandari is currently a senior advisor to the Chief Technology Officer in the Office of the Secretary of US Department of Health and Human Services. Bhandari works on health innovation policy for HHS CTO Todd Park and also the newly formed Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. Previously he worked at the White House reporting directly to the US CTO, Aneesh Chopra, on a variety of health policy issues (including mobile health and open government) and promoted national initiatives at the intersection of technology, innovation, data, and health, engaging the private sector as well as the traditional players. He has a Ph.D. in Health Policy and Management from the University of California, Berkeley and a certificate in bioentrepreneurship from the Haas School of Business. He has worked in a variety of public health roles, from working in a malaria lab to conducting research in an urban HIV/AIDS clinic to writing case studies on one of the only non-profit medical device manufacturing facilities in the world. Bhandari has published in journals ranging from Health Affairs to Innovations in Technology, Governance and Globalization. In the past he has worked at Genentech, the UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies and served as a director of the Knowledge and Social Responsibility Program for the National Conference for Community and Justice.
Justin Borgman
Co-founder and CEO, Hadapt
Justin Borgman is co-founder and CEO of Hadapt. Prior to Hadapt, Borgman led product development for COVECTRA, an anti-counterfeit technology firm. Before that, Borgman founded an online social media company and spent the first six years of his career as a software developer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Raytheon.
Borgman has a B.S. in computer ccience from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar; he attended graduate school at the Yale School of Management.
danah boyd
Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research
Research Assistant Professor, New York University
Dr. danah boyd is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, a Research Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. Her work examines everyday practices involving social media, with specific attention to youth engagement, privacy, and risky behaviors. She recently co-authored Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. She co-directed the Youth and Media Policy Working Group, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. She blogs at http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ and tweets at @zephoria.
Andy Brooks
Ph.D. student, School of Information, UC Berkeley
Andy Brooks is a scholar of information networks: how we interact with these networks, the effects of network design on communication and behavior, and how these networks emerge alongside and interact with existing networks. Before beginning his doctoral studies, Brooks worked with Yahoo! Research's Internet Experiences Group, where he explored how people, businesses, and advertisers use Internet-based information networks.
Kuang Chen
Co-founder, Captricity
The idea for Captricity came from Kuang Chen’s Ph.D. dissertation. His research focused on data-centric approaches to increase the efficiency of low-resource organizations, so they can better serve their disadvantaged clients.
While doing research in Tanzania and Uganda, Chen experienced firsthand the importance and difficulty of transforming data from paper forms to computable formats. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley, a B.S. in computer science and a B.A. in the comparative history of ideas from the University of Washington.
Michael Chui
Senior Fellow, McKinsey Global Institute
Michael Chui is a senior fellow of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), where he leads research on the impact of information technologies on business, the economy, and society. Chui has led McKinsey research in such areas as long-term technology-enabled business trends, Web 2.0 and collaboration technologies, emerging markets innovators, and data-driven management. His research has been cited globally in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fast Company, Forbes, The Times of London, and Les Échos.
As a McKinsey consultant, Chui served clients in the high-tech, media, and telecom industries on strategy, innovation and product development, IT, sales and marketing, M&A, and organization.
Gil Elbaz
CEO & Founder, Factual
Gil Elbaz is an entrepreneur and pioneer of natural language technology. Elbaz co-founded Applied Semantics Inc. (ASI) which developed AdSense contextual advertising products and was later acquired by Google. Prior to founding ASI, Elbaz worked in engineering roles at IBM, Sybase and SGI.
In 2008, Elbaz founded Factual, an open data platform, to maximize data accuracy, transparency, and accessibility. The company is funded by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures. Elbaz is on the board of trustees for the X Prize Foundation and Caltech, and is also an active angel investor. He and his wife manage the Elbaz Family Foundation, supporting environmental and educational causes.
Mike Franklin
Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley
Mike Franklin specializes in large-scale data management infrastructure and applications. His research interests are primarily in the the areas of databases, operating systems, and networking technology. Currently, he directs UC Berkeley’s Algorithms, Machines, and People Lab (AMPLab), an industry-supported collaboration of students, postdocs, and faculty who specialize in data management, cloud computing, statistical machine learning, and other important topics necessary for making sense of vast amounts of heterogeneous and unruly data. Franklin is also a founder and the CTO of Truviso, a high-performance analytics software company in Foster City, California.
Mark Frohardt
Executive Director, Internews Center for Innovation and Learning
Frohardt has worked for years on the rapid delivery of life-saving information to populations after natural disasters and instability. His focus is the gathering and sharing of expertise on humanitarian media – including the use of information tools such as crisis mapping, crowd-sourcing and mobile technologies – to ensure that local media can communicate better with disaster-affected communities.
For twenty years prior to joining Internews, Frohardt's career in humanitarian relief had him working around the world, including: coordinating health services for refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border; working for Doctors Without Borders in Chad and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Sudan and Somalia; assisting with the repatriation of Kurds into northern Iraq after the first Gulf War; consulting in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war; and managing UN human rights field operations in Rwanda following the genocide.
Since joining Internews in 1999, Frohardt has provided important leadership as Vice-President for Africa, and Health and Humanitarian Media, and continues his work promoting and implementing life-saving information systems in areas that are affected by natural disasters, armed conflict and social upheaval.
Adam Ghobarah
Engineering Partner, Google Ventures
Adam Ghobarah guides Google Ventures’ portfolio companies on data & analysis and looks for disruptive startups in the big data and analysis space. Over the past 15 years, Adam has applied statistics, machine learning, and big data to solve problems in public health, engineering, finance, and most recently, online advertising.
Prior to joining Google Ventures in 2012, Ghobarah was at Google for six years, leading a team of statisticians focused on building models for predicting advertiser behavior and on automated model building and validation. Prior to joining Google, Ghobarah worked at Mathsoft, which developed mathematical software tools for mechanical and civil engineers. Ghobarah received his Ph.D. in government statistics from the University of Texas at Austin and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, where he focused on the application of statistics to public health and authored several highly-cited papers.
Jon Golovin
Chairman, CEO, and co-founder, Retail Solutions, Inc.
Before co-founding Retail Solutions, Jon Golovin was the founder and chairman of Consilium Inc., the largest independent manufacturing execution system (MES) company (now Applied Materials). Golovin is considered the father of MES and in 2000 received the SEMI Award for his contributions.
Consilium products were implemented in over 25 countries and 25 industries, including 60% of all semiconductor fabrication plants, and 10 of the top pharmaceutical and healthcare companies in the world. Consilium went public in 1989 and was acquired by Applied Materials in 1998. Consilium was selected as one of the 100 Best Small Companies in America by Business Week and one of the 200 Best Small Companies in America by Forbes. Fortune Magazine named Workstream, Consilium's flagship product, one of the 100 Best Products in America.
Quentin Hardy
Deputy Technology Editor, The New York Times
Quentin Hardy is a Silicon Valley insider with vast global experience drawn from years of high-level business reporting around the globe. Hardy is the Deputy Technology Editor for The New York Times and is a frequent television guest on CNBC’s Kudlow & Company. He recently joined The New York Times after serving as an executive editor for Forbes Media; before that, he spent over eight years writing global business stories for The Wall Street Journal. He has written cover stories on such diverse topics as the internet, Africa, finance, enterprise hardware and software, management, satellites, energy, and even the marijuana Industry.
Hardy began his career as an international publisher and has lived and worked in a dozen countries, including Japan, Singapore and the United Kingdom. A recipient of a Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Business Journalism and an Overseas Press Club award, he also lectures on technology and social change at the UC Berkeley School of Information.
Ping Li
General Partner, Accel Partners
Ping Li has over 16 years of experience as a technology investor and operating executive in helping build market leading technology companies and product lines. At Accel Partners, he focuses on early stage and growth software and digital media investments, with specific interest in cloud computing, big data, storage, mobile, and gaming. He is also responsible for Accel's Big Data Fund.
Prior to Accel, Li worked at Juniper Networks as a senior product line manager for their flagship M-series router products, as well as director of corporate development. He also served as a strategy consultant for McKinsey & Company, advising technology clients in their growth strategies.
Li is on the board of software companies Cloudera, Code 42, Lookout, Nimble Storage, Nimbula, and ScaleXtreme and digital media companies BitTorrent, Blue Jeans Network, Raptr, and YuMe.
Mark Liberman
Professor of Linguistics and Computer & Information Science, University of Pennsylvania
Mark Liberman is professor of linguistics and computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Linguistic Data Consortium. His research interests are in phonetics, phonology, speech technology, and computational linguistics. He is on the editorial boards of Speech Communications, Computer Speech and Language and The International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. Liberman came to Penn after being a member of the technical staff and department head of the Linguistics Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Liberman is also the founder of (and frequent contributor to) Language Log, a blog with a broad cast of dozens of professional linguists. The concept of the eggcorn was first proposed in one of his posts there.
Sam Marwaha
Director, McKinsey & Company
Based in McKinsey & Company's New York office, Sam Marwaha specializes in media and health. He works with Big Data to improve innovation, shape, and improve products and product plans for pharmaceutical companies. Current client projects include developing an approach to connect health and big data/analytics; simplifying back-office functions, driving them to use global business serves; crafting a strategy for a medical products company to position itself as the key supplier of internet-based services to the health care industry; and developing a digital strategy for a large media conglomerate.
Robert Munro
Chief Information Officer, Energy for Opportunity
Graduate Fellow, Stanford University
Robert Munro is a computational linguist working in communication technologies, especially in less-resourced languages. His research covers a broad area of technological and social development, from crowdsourcing and machine-learning for extracting rich information from natural language to the installation of supporting infrastructures. He is a graduate fellow at Stanford University, the Chief Information Officer of Energy for Opportunity, and a consultant to various organizations globally. He also writes an occasional article at Jungle Light Speed.
Cameron Myhrvold
General Partner and Founder, Ignition
At Ignition, Cameron Myhrvold invests in software and infrastructure companies. He represents Ignition as director on the boards of Cloudmark, Ratify, Likewise (formerly Centeris), Seven, Topsy and Zenprise. He also acts as Ignition observer on the board of Azaleos and Splunk. He previously served on the boards of Consera (acquired by Hewlett Packard), Rendition Networks (acquired by Opsware) and RLX Technologies (acquired by Hewlett Packard).
Prior to Ignition, Myhrvold spent thirteen years with Microsoft Corporation, most recently as vice president of the Internet Customer Unit, where he was responsible for building business relationships with network operators and a broad range of telecommunications providers. Myhrvold was responsible for setting strategy and building relationships with such global telecommunications providers as NTT, AT&T, Comcast, Cisco, Qualcomm, British Telecom, and Deutsche Telecom.
Adam Nash
Executive in Residence, Greylock Partners
Adam Nash advises the leadership teams of Greylock Partners's existing consumer technology companies as well as evaluating new investment opportunities.
Prior to joining Greylock, Nash was vice president of product management at LinkedIn, where he led LinkedIn's Platform & Mobile products, including the launch of LinkedIn's open developer platform and their highly successful native applications and mobile web experiences. He also was responsible for leading LinkedIn's search & cloud efforts, as well as forming and leading their user experience & design team.
Nash has also held leadership roles at eBay, Atlas Venture, Preview Systems, and Apple.
Abhi Nemani
Director of Strategy and Communications, Code for America
Abhi Nemani leads Code for America’s national outreach and awareness campaigns, which have been featured in the New York Times and Mashable, as well as spearheading new program development, such as the launch of a civic startup accelerator. He is also currently directing the development of Civic Commons, a marketplace for government technology. Prior to Code for America, Nemani led a 30-person research team at the Rose Institute to increase transparency in government, and has had stints with Google and the Center for American Progress. He graduated magna cum laude from Claremont McKenna College with a honors degree in philosophy, Ppolitics, and economics (PPE). As a designer, editor, and developer, Nemani has extensive experience creating popular and award-winning websites, magazines, graphics, and publications.
Geoff Nunberg
Adjunct Professor, UC Berkeley School of Information
Geoffrey Nunberg is a linguist and an adjunct full professor at the School of Information. His linguistics research includes work in semantics and pragmatics, text classification, and written-language structure. He also works and writes on the social and cultural implications of digital technologies.
Nunberg is well known for the regular feature on language he does on the NPR show “Fresh Air.” He has contributed “letters from America” to the BBC4 and has written numerous commentaries on language for the Sunday New York Times Week in Review, as well as articles and commentaries on language, politics and culture for The Atlantic, The American Prospect, Forbes, Fortune, the Washington Post, and other periodicals. He is the emeritus chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. Nunberg’s most recent books are Talking Right (2006) and The Years of Talking Dangerously (2009). His new book, about civility in American public life, will be published in July 2012 by PublicAffairs.
Tapan Parikh
Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley School of Information
Tapan Parikh’s research focuses on the use of computing to support sustainable economic development across the world. His interests include microfinance, agriculture, public health, human-computer interaction, mobile computing, and distributed information systems.
DJ Patil
Data Scientist in Residence, Greylock Partners
Dr. DJ Patil is a data scientist in residence at Greylock Partners. Previously, he was the chief product officer at Color and the chief scientist and head of the analytics and data teams at LinkedIn. At LinkedIn, Patil was responsible for all analytics projects including reporting and web analytics, as well as products on the site that leverage LinkedIn's unique data set.
Before joining LinkedIn, Patil was a distinguished research scientist and the director for strategy, product, and analytics of corporate architecture at eBay. He received a B.A. in mathematics from the University of California, San Diego and a doctorate in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland, in the top-ranked applied nonlinear dynamics and chaos group. In 2001, Patil joined the faculty of the University of Maryland, where he helped start a major research initiative on numerical weather prediction.
Bryce Roberts
Managing Director and co-founder, O'Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures
Bryce Roberts co-founded O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) in 2005. At OATV he focuses on consumer and enterprise software and services investments.
Prior to OATV, Roberts led a number of successful early-stage investments at Wasatch Venture Fund, a Draper Fisher Jurvetson affiliate. In 2004, Roberts co-founded the Open Source Business Conference (sold to IDG) in order to spark a conversation around commercializing the highly disruptive technologies and services emerging from the open source community.
Roberts’ investments at OATV include Bit.ly, Devver, Foursquare, GameLayers, Get Satisfaction, OpenCandy, OpenX, Parakey (acquired by Facebook), Path Intelligence, and Wesabe.
Matthew Salganik
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
Matthew Salganik is a sociologist specializing in social networks, quantitative methods, and web-based social research. One main area of his research has focused on developing network-based statistical methods for studying populations most at risk for HIV/AIDS. A second main area of work has been using the world wide web to collect and analyze social data in innovative ways.
Salganik’s research has been published in journals such as Science, PNAS, Sociological Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. His papers have won the Outstanding Article Award from the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New Yorker. Salganik’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Joint United Nations Program for HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), and Google.
Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan
CEO, ClearStory Data
Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan is the founder and CEO of ClearStory Data. She also serves on the board of big data companies Hadapt and Lattice-Engines. Previously, Shahani-Mulligan served as chief marketing officer for Aster Data, where she led product and marketing strategy. There she created a new market category for big data analytics and drove Aster Data to a leading position within it. Aster Data was acquired by Teradata in April, 2011. Prior to Aster Data, Shahani-Mulligan was CMO of the largest business unit within HP software and was responsible for a $3+ billion software products portfolio spanning all major aspects of IT management. Prior to HP, she was CMO at Opsware, where she joined Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz to re-position Loudcloud into a software company and formed Opsware in 2002, which was eventually acquired by HP for $1.65 billion; she has also held executive positions at Kiva Software, Netscape, AOL, and Totality.
Peter Skomoroch
Principal Data Scientist, LinkedIn
Peter Skomoroch is a principal data scientist at LinkedIn, where he leads a team focused on identity, reputation, information extraction, and building data-driven products. He was also the creator of LinkedIn Skills. Prior to LinkedIn, he was based in Washington, D.C., where he mined insights from search query data as the director of advanced analytics at Juice Analytics and as a senior research engineer at AOL Search. While in D.C., he also founded DataWrangling.com, which provided custom data mining solutions to clients in bioinformatics, finance, and cloud computing. He spent the previous 6 years in Boston implementing Biodefense pattern detection algorithms for streaming sensor data at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and constructing predictive models for large retail datasets at Profitlogic (now Oracle Retail). Skomoroch has a B.S. in mathematics and physics from Brandeis University and did graduate coursework in machine learning at MIT.
Hal Varian
Chief Economist, Google
Hal Varian is the Chief Economist at Google, where he has been involved in auction design, econometric analysis, finance, corporate strategy, and public policy. He is also a UC Berkeley professor emeritus in business, economics, and information management. Varian was the founding dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information (then known as the School of Information Management & Systems).
A world-renowned economist, Varian has published numerous papers in economic theory, industrial organization, financial economics, econometrics, and information economics. He is the author of two major economics textbooks and the co-author of a bestselling book on business strategy, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. Varian also wrote a monthly column for the New York Times from 2000 to 2007.
Martin Wattenberg
Research Scientist, Google
Martin Wattenberg is a computer scientist and artist and the co-leader of Google’s “Big Picture” data visualization group.
Before joining Google, he co-founded Flowing Media, Inc., a visualization studio focused on media and consumer-oriented projects, with Fernanda Viégas. Prior to Flowing Media, they led IBM’s Visual Communication Lab, where they created the ground-breaking public visualization platform Many Eyes. From 2005 to 2010, Wattenberg founded and managed IBM's Visual Communication Lab, exploring new forms of visualization and how they can enable better collaboration. A key project was Many Eyes, an experiment in open, public data visualization and analysis.
Wattenberg is known for his visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such as the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New York Museum of Modern Art. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from UC Berkeley.
Steven Weber
Professor, School of Information and Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley
Steven Weber is a specialist in international relations with expertise in international and national security; the impact of technology on national systems of innovation, defense, and deterrence; and the political economy of knowledge-intensive industries particularly software and pharmaceuticals.
Weber’s major publications include The Success of Open Source, Cooperation and Discord in U.S.-Soviet Arms Control, and the edited book Globalization and the European Political Economy; and numerous articles and chapters in the areas of U.S. foreign policy, the political economy of trade and technology, politics of the post-Cold War world, and European integration. With colleague and co-author Bruce Jentleson at Duke, Weber directs the "New Era Foreign Policy Project". Weber and Jentleson's new book is The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas (2010).
Andreas Weigend
Director, Social Data Lab, Stanford University
Dr. Andreas Weigend studies the ongoing revolution in social data and its impact on consumers, business, and society. He teaches at Stanford University and directs the Social Data Lab. Weigend was the chief scientist of Amazon.com where he focused on building the customer-centric and measurement-focused culture that has been central to Amazon's success.
Weigend works with innovative startups and global companies alike, helping them understand and leverage the irreversible changes in how consumers express themselves, make purchasing and lifestyle decisions, and relate to each other. His goal is to guide his clients through the evolving landscape of consumer behavior and unprecedented data to identify new business opportunities.
Weigend studied electrical engineering, physics and philosophy in Germany and Cambridge (UK), and received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. His career as a data scientist combined with his deep industry and startup experience allows him to successfully bridge the gap between academia and industry. He lives in San Francisco, Shanghai and on weigend.com.
Ben Werther
Founder and CEO, Platfora
Ben Werther is the founder and CEO of Platfora, a company that unlocks data in Hadoop with intuitive visual interaction and analytics. Werther was previously the VP of Products at DataStax, where he led the inception and launch of Brisk (Hadoop powered by Cassandra). Prior to DataStax, he was director of product management at EMC’s Data Computing Products Division (formerly Greenplum). At Greenplum, Werther led product management for the company, and drove product strategy, prioritization and product definition. Prior to Greenplum, Werther was at Microsoft where he was responsible for planning of the ‘post-Longhorn’ Windows Server platform and strategic planning for Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization platform. Werther was a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Stanford University, and holds an M.S. from Stanford University and a B.Comp. from Monash University.
Scott Young
Associate Executive Director for Clinical Care and Innovation, Kaiser Permanente, Permanente Federation
Scott Young, M.D., is responsible for delivery system innovation, clinical process improvement, and resource stewardship at the Permanente Federation, the national umbrella organization for Kaiser Permanente’s Permanente Medical Groups. He also serves as senior medical director and co-executive director of Kaiser Permanente’s Care Management Institute, a nationwide team that is integral to Kaiser Permanente’s commitment to improve the care and wellness of its members.
Young is the former director for Health IT at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Prior to joining AHRQ, he served as a senior clinical advisor in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Young’s policy experience also includes service as a Robert Wood Johnson health policy fellow in the office of U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico.
Young received an M.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 1987 and completed his training at the Fairfax Family Practice Residency. He is board-certified in family medicine.