XLDB-2013 Invited Speakers

Yasir Anwar
Vice President of Engineering, macys.com and bloomingdales.com

Yasir Anwar is on D.I.E.T - Disruption, Innovation, Execution and Technology excellence. He is head of engineering for macys.com and bloomingdales.com, focusing on the intersection of social, mobile, and retail with an OMNI- CHANNEL focus and successfully leading innovation, growth and change in one of the most competitive and fast-moving industries. He has executive management experience leading social, mobile and eCommerce product development. Yasir has credentials in delivering massively scalable Consumer and Enterprise software products / services, directing product development, engineering, people and organizational excellence, defining and translating company strategies into innovative technology products / services in diverse markets. Successful entrepreneurial and Fortune 500 experience.


Magdalena Balazinska, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, University of Washington

Magdalena Balazinska is an Associate Professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Magdalena's research interests are in the field of database management systems. Her current research focuses on big data management, sensor and scientific data management, and cloud computing. Magdalena holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006). She is a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow (2007), received an NSF CAREER Award (2009), a 10-year most influential paper award (2010), an HP Labs Research Innovation Award (2009 and 2010), a Rogel Faculty Support Award (2006), a Microsoft Research Graduate Fellowship (2003-2005), and multiple best-paper awards.


Jacek Becla
Technology Officer for Scientific Databases, SLAC

Jacek Becla enjoys working with scientists, helping them use scalable technologies for managing and analyzing their massive data sets. His experience with peta-scale databases goes back to early 2000s, when he led the database team for the High Energy Physics experiment called BaBar. In his "spare time", he tries to bridge the gap between science, industry and academia. He initiated and chairs the XLDB conference series and all associated activities, co-founded SciDB, authored many papers, and served on several review committees for large database and IT projects.

Prior to joining SLAC / Stanford University back in 1997, he worked at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland on researching database technologies for the LHC experiment.

Jacek received a M.Sc. in Electronic Engineering from the University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland.


Per Brashers
Founder, Yttibrium Consulting

Per Brashers is an inventor, strategist, and the founder of Yttibrium LLC, a consultancy focused on BigData infrastructure solutions.  He has experience in industry and academia, ranging from enterprise storage to high performance computing, and has been a senior strategist for storage heavyweights such as EMC, DDN, and facebook.  He holds 16 patents and patent-pending inventions, with over 25 years in the business.  Per has designed systems to support scalable BigData solutions, and brings the business savvy to help organizations derive value from data.  Per is a long-time supporter and charter member of OpenCompute, having architected OpenVault and the ColdStorage solutions.  He has a passion for efficiency and efficient solutions.  Outside work, Per's interests include amateur radio, home brewing, and growing organic vegetables. Per can be reached at per@yttibrium.com.


Peter Breunig
General Manager of Technology Management & Architecture, Chevron IT

Peter Breunig is the General Manager of Technology Management and Architecture at Chevron IT.  In his role, he is responsible for Chevron’s Information Technology technical direction/strategy.  Peter earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Geology from Boston College in 1977 and a Master of Science degree in Geophysics in 1980, also from Boston College.


Aashish Chandra
Divisional Vice President, Sears Holdings/ GM, MetaScale

As Divisional Vice President and head of Applications Modernization at Sears Holdings Corporation [NASDAQ: SHLD, a Fortune 100 Company], Aashish has responsibility over strategy, design and implementation of applications modernization across all aspects of Sears Holdings businesses. His current efforts are focused towards transformation of existing legacy environment that has hundreds of business critical applications to state-of-the-art distributed systems, on Sears Holdings' private cloud, leveraging open source, big data tools and pioneering innovative solutions.
 
Furthermore, Aashish is head of Big Data / Legacy Modernization Business for a Big Data start-up, MetaScale. A wholly owned subsidiary of Sears Holdings, MetaScale offers end-to-end services for Hadoop and Big Data. He is responsible for all aspects of the practice including full P&L accountability, Product Strategy & Development, Innovation Lab, CoE, Service Offerings, Go-to-Market Strategy, Marketing, Sales, and Operations.
 
He was previously heading the IT department as Senior Director at Lucky’s / Save Mart Supermarkets, a privately held $5 Billion regional retail grocer. Aashish has a Bachelor’s in Electronics and Communication Engineering and Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering.


Jeremy Cole
Google, Inc.

Jeremy Cole is a long-time MySQL Geek and pioneer of MySQL scalability. Jeremy started his MySQL adventure in 2000 as the fourteenth employee of a startup: MySQL AB. His initial work was primarily on documentation and core development, soon transitioning into support, and finally running the training and consulting organization during his four and a half years there. After MySQL, Jeremy coined the “MySQL Geek” title at Yahoo!, supporting hundreds of internal users of MySQL and many thousands of MySQL servers within Yahoo!’s infrastructure, as well as building a large team of MySQL experts around the world. Jeremy went on to found one of the premier MySQL consulting companies, Proven Scaling, which during its more than three years of operation provided detailed advice, optimization, new tools, and hands-on DBA and emergency support to more than 100 influential companies. For more than two years, Jeremy managed the growing team of DBAs at Twitter, keeping the world tweeting. Jeremy is currently making MySQL more awesome at Google. For more information, see http://blog.jcole.us/about-me/.


Jeffrey Dean
Google Fellow, Google, Inc.

Jeff joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Google Fellow in Google's Knowledge Group.  He has co-designed/implemented five generations of Google's crawling, indexing, and query serving systems, and co-designed/implemented major pieces of Google's initial advertising and AdSense for Content systems.  He is also a co-designer and co-implementor of Google's distributed computing infrastructure, including the MapReduce, BigTable and Spanner systems, protocol buffers, LevelDB, systems infrastructure for statistical machine translation, and a variety of internal and external libraries and developer tools.  He is currently working on large-scale distributed systems for machine learning.  He is a Fellow of the ACM, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of the Mark Weiser Award and the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences.


Dirk Duellmann, Ph.D.
Deputy Leader of the Data and Storage Services Group, CERN IT

Dirk Duellmann is deputy leader of the data and storage services group in CERN's IT department, which provides storage services for the physics community at CERN. He is responsible for the development and evolution of CERN's storage components and high performance disk pools for LHC data analysis. Previously Dirk lead the LCG persistency framework project and the LCG distributed database deployment projects. Before he worked on object and relational databases in the RD45 and Espresso projects.  Dirk joint CERN in 1995 after receiving a Ph.D. in high energy physics from the University of Hamburg. Since 1986 he worked in several software companies on  database management systems and database applications.


Harrison Fisk and Domas Mituzas
Facebook

Harrison Fisk and Domas Mituzas are members of the data performance team at Facebook.  Before they both worked at MySQL AB.


Andrew Hanushevsky
Information Systems Specialist, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Andrew Hanushevsky works for SLAC National Acceletaor Laboratory as an Information Systems Specialist and specializes in large scale highly distributed systems. He is the architect and lead developer of XRootD in an international software collaboration that includes CERN, Duke, JINR, UCSD, UNL and SLAC.


Anu Jain
Technology Leader of Enterprise Information Management, Target

Anu Jain is a Technology Leader of Enterprise Information Management for Target, and uses the emerging science around Big Data to drive innovation which enables a personalized shopping experience at all touch points. Information is delivered in the hands of every store team member through mobile devices which enables improved store operations and enhances guest experience. Anu is a strategist and an architect with keen interest in innovative solutions for challenging problems and driving them from early concept stage, through prototypes to eventual products/applications. Anu has responsibility over technical strategy and architecture for Target's Data Warehouses, applications and analytics lab - fulfilling Enterprise needs for BI.


Steve Lacy
Group Leader of Global Chemical Informatics, ExxonMobil Chemical

Steve Lacy currently serves as the Group Leader of Global Chemical Informatics at ExxonMobil Chemical.  He has 20 years of experience working on software applications within R&D organizations across a broad spectrum of industries – drug discovery, biotech, materials discovery and chemical research.  Steve spent the first half of his career working at a series of combi-chem startup companies where his software and electronics brought to life multiple first generation combinatorial synthesizers including the first production GeneChip® synthesizer.  The latter half of his career has been spent working within research at ExxonMobil Chemical Company in Baytown where he has worked on a diverse set of projects from analytical data loading to predictive modeling.


Victor Markowitz
Senior Scientist and Department Head, Biological Data Management and Technology Center (BDMTC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)

Victor M. Markowitz, D.Sc. is Senior Scientist and Department Head, Biological Data Management and Technology Center (BDMTC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). He is the technical lead for the Integrated Microbial Genomes (IMG) data management and analysis system (http://img.jgi.doe.gov/) developed in collaboration with the Microbial Genome and Metagenome Program at the Joint Genome Institute (JGI). Before joining LBNL in 2004, he was Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President, Data Management Systems, at Gene Logic Inc., responsible for the development and deployment of Gene Logic’s Genesis data management and analysis systems.  Prior to joining Gene Logic in 1997, Dr. Markowitz was at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), where he led the development of the Object Protocol Model (OPM) data management and integration tools that were used for developing public and commercial genome databases. Dr.  Markowitz received his M.Sc. and D.Sc. degrees in computer science from Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, has conducted research in various data management and database areas, and has authored over sixty articles and book chapters on various aspects of databases and scientific data management.


Richard Mount
Computing Coordinator [elect], ATLAS experiment at CERN LHC

Richard is currently the Computing Coordinator [elect] of the ATLAS experiment at the CERN LHC.  He directed computing at SLAC for more than a decade, and in the early 1990s he led physics analysis for the L3 particle physics experiment at CERN.  Over the last decade,he has had fun, and occasional limited success, persuading the US Department of Energy of the rising importance of data in science.


Ravi Murthy
Engineering Manager of Analytics Infrastructure, Facebook

Ravi Murthy is the engineering manager of Analytics Infrastructure at Facebook. He leads development of the big data platform for one of the largest data warehouses in the world. His teams develop popular open source software such as Hive and Hadoop(Corona), as well as systems for interactive queries (Presto), real-time stream processing (Scribe/Puma), and graph analytics (Giraph). Previously he was Senior Director of Engineering at Oracle Corporation leading the Special Projects group. He also worked on various aspects of Oracle RDBMS - extensible data management, parallel/distributed, object-relational and indexing technologies.


Alex Nazaruk
Middle Lake Partners, LLC

Alex Nazaruk has over 20 years of IT and Database Management systems engineering experience. His career includes over 15 years focusing on full cycle development and operations of Big Data systems for the financial services industry. He has demonstrated leadership in devising enterprise data strategies and in building and managing world-class data capability for GETCO, leading global securities trading firm. In addition, Alex has served as an investor, advisor and consultant to multiple startups in the technology arena. Alex's broad experience includes building and managing petabyte-scale data processing and computing systems with extreme performance requirements.


Frank Olken, Ph.D.
Program Director, National Science Foundation

Frank Olken is a program director at the National Science Foundation, Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, Intelligent Information Systems Division. As part of the Information Integration and Informatics cluster he handles database proposals, graph mining proposals, semantic web technology proposals, and various other topics.

Prior to NSF, he worked at at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory doing performance evaluation in the Real Time Systems Group, then database research in the Scientific Data Management group, and metadata systems for the Distributed Systems Group. He has worked on file compression, random sampling from databases, file migration management, remote building monitoring, power grid informatics, various aspects of BART train control, bioinformatics, metadata repositories, graph data management, semantic web technologies, workflow management, and standards development for RDF Schema, XML Schema, and Metadata repositories.

He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and has taught the graduate DBMS course at UCB and various UCB Extension classes.


Greg Papadopoulos, Ph.D.
Venture Partner, New Enterprise Associates

Greg joined NEA as Venture Partner in 2010 after more than twenty years of experience in the technology industry and academia. He focuses on early-stage systems, software and semiconductor companies. Prior to NEA, Greg was EVP and CTO of Sun Microsystems, where he guided the company’s $2B R&D portfolio. Before Sun, Greg was an Associate Professor of EECS at MIT, where he worked on massively parallel dataflow computing architectures. He also helped found a number of companies, from video conferencing (PictureTel) to computational fluid dynamics (NASDAQ:EXA), and was an engineer with HP and Honeywell.

Greg is an active advisor for the schools of engineering at UCSD, UC Berkeley, and MIT He also serves on the UC Presidents Board for Science and Innovation, and is a trustee for the Computer History Museum. Passionate about technology and its possibilities, Greg is a relentless advocate for diversity in engineering and a supporter of open development models that stimulate communication, inclusiveness and innovation. Greg holds an undergraduate degree from UCSD and an S.M. and Ph.D. from MIT. He is also a Senior Fellow of the American Leadership Forum.


Michael Stonebraker
Adjunct Professor, M.I.T.

Michael Stonebraker has been a pioneer of data base research and technology for more than a quarter of a century. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES, and the federated data system, Mariposa. All three prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science for twenty five years.

He is currently an adjunct professor at MIT, where he has been involved in the development of the Aurora, C-Store, H-Store, Morpheus, and SciDB systems.

He is the founder of a number of database companies, including Ingres, Illustra, Cohera, StreamBase Systems, Vertica, VoltDB, and Paradigm4.


Ani Thakar
Associate Director of Operations, John Hopkins University IDIES

Ani Thakar is a Principal Research Scientist at the Johns Hopkins University, and he is the Associate Director of Operations for the JHU Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES). Ani is in charge of the Catalog Archive Server (a.k.a. SkyServer) development and operation for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and has played a leading role in the SDSS catalog data management since the inception of the project in the late 1990s.He also led JHU's development of the Pan-STARRS PSPS catalog archive - the Object Data Manager. In addition to his involvement in large astronomy surveys, Ani has been a key participant of the US National Virtual Observatory and Virtual Astronomical Observatory projects.  Ani's research has focused on the common challenges associated with data intensive science across disciplines in science and engineering.