XLDB-2016 Invited Speakers

Vinayak is responsible for all development activities and brings 15 years of technical leadership in the area of big data and parallel computing. Prior to X15, Vinayak was the CTO and head of engineering at DVO Software as well as the inventor and lead contributor of Hyracks, an open-source parallel data processing platform. He began his career at BEA Systems, where he led the development of the first XQuery-based data integration platform. Vinayak was the recipient of the Facebook Fellowship award for his contribution in the area of large-scale data management and holds a BS in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Mumbai and an MS in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

Per Brashers is an inventor, strategist, and the founder of Yttibrium LLC, a consultancy focused on Product Strategy and Market Development for hyperscale solutions. He has experience in industry and academia, ranging from enterprise storage to high performance computing, and has worked for storage heavyweights such as EMC, DDN, and facebook. He holds 18 patents and patent-pending inventions, with over 25 years in the business.
Per has designed systems to support scalable data storage and processing solutions, and brings the business savvy to help organizations derive value from data. Per is a long-time supporter 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

Andy is a senior principle engineer in the Big Data division of AWS, contributing to the Redshift and EMR services. Prior to joining AWS he was a member of the initial team of Tabula, a programmable hardware startup where he served as the Chief Software Architect. His work in the hardware design automation industry includes logic synthesis, transistor and standard cell placement, timing estimation, logic verification, routing, and manufacturability optimization. He has a BS in Computer Science and Engineering from UCLA (1997). He is a co-inventor of over 80 patents.

Concetta "Tina" Cartaro is computing coordinator for the BaBar experiment based at SLAC and manager of the offline computing for the SuperCDMS experiment to be built at SNOLAB, Sudbury, Canada. BaBar is in the post-data taking phase and continues to publish results about the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter. BaBar (and its Japanese counterpart, Belle) findings lead to the assignment of the 2008 Nobel Prize to the theorists that first introduced the matter-anti-matter symmetry breaking mechanism. Observation of the sky tells us that 85% of the matter in the Universe is "dark". A leading hypothesis is that dark matter was produced moments after the Big Bang. SuperCDMS is the next generation of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment and is aiming to the direct observation of dark matter. Tina holds a PhD in high energy particle physics.

Glenn Chisholm is the CTO at Cylance and directs the strategic product direction for the company, while leading the research and dev teams. Prior to Cylance, he was CISO and Director Security Operations for Telstra, the leading telecommunications provider in Australia and Asia. He led security of the $50 billion org and its managed services and consumer customers across the Asia-Pacific region.

Shirshanka is the architect for LinkedIn’s Data & Analytics team. He was among the original authors of a variety of open and closed source projects built at LinkedIn, including Databus, Espresso, and Apache Helix. His current focus at LinkedIn includes all things Hadoop, high-performance distributed OLAP engines, large-scale data ingestion, transformation and movement, and data lineage and discovery.

Binny has extensive experience in building distributed systems that evolve towards simplicity. At Nutanix, Binny leads the technical vision and architecture of the product portfolio. Prior to Nutanix, he was at IBM Research where he led the next generation of flash technologies in storage systems. He is the three-time recipient of the highest technical award in IBM research, and four-time recipient of the Research Accomplishment award for significantly impacting IBM business through his work.

Binny is the inventor of key caching algorithms in DRAM and Flash technologies and is the author of more than a dozen well-cited publications. He holds more than 50 issued patents in the fields of flash, caching algorithms, distributed storage systems, and virtualization. Binny received his Masters degree in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Bachelors degree in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur.

Julian Hyde is an expert in query optimization, in-memory analytics, and streaming. He is PMC chair of Apache Calcite, the open source query planning framework used by databases including Apache Hive. He was the original developer of the Mondrian OLAP engine. He is an architect at Hortonworks, and was previously chief architect at SQLstream.

Mohan Kumar is a Senior Principal Engineer in Intel’s Data Center Group. During his 23 years at Intel Mohan has played a key role in driving several technologies and specifications, including Plug and Play, ACPI, PCIe, TXT, and MCA Recovery. He currently leads Intel’s Rack Scale Architecture efforts. He has 45 issued patents and is the author of the book "A Vision for Platform Autonomy". He is a graduate of University of Texas at Austin.

Raffael Marty is vice president of security analytics at Sophos, and is responsible for all strategic efforts around security analytics for the company and its products. He is based in San Francisco, Calif. Marty is one of the world's most recognized authorities on security data analytics, big data and visualization. His team at Sophos spans these domains to help build products that provide Internet security solutions to Sophos' vast global customer base. Previously, Marty launched pixlcloud, a visual analytics platform, and Loggly, a cloud-based log management solution. With a track record at companies including IBM Research, ArcSight, and Splunk, he is thoroughly familiar with established practices and emerging trends in the big data and security analytics space. Marty is the author of Applied Security Visualization Applied Security Visualization and a frequent speaker at academic and industry events. Zen meditation has become an important part of Raffy's life, sometimes leading to insights not in data but in life.

Luke McConoughey is an innovative cyber security executive with 20 years of technology experience covering all aspects of information security.

Nirav Merchant of the University of Arizona (UA) is Director of Bio Computing and co-PI for the NSF-funded life sciences cyberinfrastructure platform CyVerse (formerly iPlant Collaborative). Over the past two decades Nirav has focused on developing computational platforms that improve research productivity and collaboration for interdisciplinary teams and virtual organizations. He utilizes project based learning methodologies and teaches a course on applied cyberinfrastructure concepts, an interdisciplinary curriculum where students learn by working through actual research problems using commercial, institutional, and national computational infrastructure alongside the researchers proposing the problem.

Dr. Jelena Pješivac-Grbović is a staff software engineer in Cloud at Google, in Mountain View, CA. She is the lead for MapReduce and one of the leads of the Google Cloud Dataflow project. Jelena's research interests include large-scale data processing, distributed, and cloud computing. She is an active member of IEEE, ACM, and SWE.

Prabhat leads the Data and Analytics Services team at NERSC. His current research interests include scientific data management, parallel I/O, high performance computing and scientific visualization. He is also interested in applied statistics, machine learning, computer graphics and computer vision. Prabhat received an ScM in Computer Science from Brown University and a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT-Delhi. He is currently pursuing a PhD in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at U.C. Berkeley.

Raghu Ramakrishnan is a Technical Fellow and CTO for Data at Microsoft. He also heads engineering for Big Data platforms and services.
From 1987 to 2006, he was a professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he wrote the widely-used text “Database Management Systems” and led a wide range of research projects in database systems (e.g., the CORAL deductive database, the DEVise data visualization tool, SQL extensions to handle sequence data) and data mining (scalable clustering, mining over data streams).  In 1999, he founded QUIQ, a company that introduced a cloud-based question-answering service. He joined Yahoo! in 2006 as a Yahoo! Fellow, and over the next six years served as Chief Scientist for the Audience (portal), Cloud and Search divisions, driving content recommendation algorithms (CORE), cloud data stores (PNUTS), and semantic search (“Web of Things”). Ramakrishnan has received several awards, including the ACM SIGKDD Innovations Award, the SIGMOD 10-year Test-of-Time Award, the IIT Madras Distinguished Alumnus Award, the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, and the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE. He has served as Chair of ACM SIGMOD and the Board of the VLDB Foundation, and is on the Board of ACM SIGKDD.

Greg Schvey is a Founding Partner of Axoni, a blockchain infrastructure services company. Axoni's order and portfolio management system serves as the world's leading inter-dealer settlement infrastructure for digital currency liquidity providers. Most recently, Axoni has applied the same underlying blockchain technology to optimize traditional financial asset infrastructure. Greg previously worked as a fixed income analyst at Citigroup and in business development for a payments software company. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University.

Mehul is a software development manager in the Big Data division of AWS, contributing to the Redshift and Data Pipeline services. From 2011-2014, he was co-founder and CEO of Amiato, an ETL cloud service. Prior to that, he was a research scientist at HP Labs where his work spanned large-scale data management, distributed systems, and energy-efficient computing. He received his PhD in databases from UC Berkeley (2004), and MEng (1997) and BS in computer science and physics (1996) from MIT. He has received several awards including the NSDI 2016 Test of Time Award and SOSP 2007 best paper. In his spare time, he serves on the SortBenchmark committee.

Kapil Surlaker leads the Data & Analytics team at LinkedIn. The team builds and enhances core infrastructure platforms such as Hadoop, Spark, other computation frameworks such as Rubix and Pinot, an OLAP serving store, data movement engines such as Gobblin and Data applications such as Raptor (reporting) and XLNT (A/B testing).

Eric Tschetter started the Druid project, an open source, real-time analytical data store. Eric currently works as a distinguished engineer at Yahoo, where he endeavors to speed up analytics with a mix of data science and traditional BI. Eric previously worked with diabetes data at Tidepool, a nonprofit, was the VP of engineering and lead architect at Metamarkets, and has held senior engineering positions at Ning and LinkedIn. He holds bachelor’s degrees in computer science and Japanese from the University of Texas at Austin and an MS in computer science from the University of Tokyo.

Henry is a product manager of Amazon Glacier based in Seattle. He leads the product development of Glacier and has over 10 years of experience building large scale cloud services. Henry is a graduate of Stanford University.

Marcin is a Co-Founder of Snowflake Computing, a San Mateo-based startup offering an elastic data-warehousing cloud service. Previously he was a Co-Founder and CEO at Vectorwise, a high-performance analytical DBMS company. He is an expert in various aspects of data storage and processing. He holds a PhD degree from University of Amsterdam and is an author of numerous scientific articles.