Chris Gladwin founded Cleversafe in 2004. Previously he was the creator of the first workgroup storage server at Zenith Data Systems and was a manager of corporate storage standards at Lockheed Martin. Gladwin also created and managed a number of successful new technology start-ups, including MusicNow, which was acquired by Circuit City. He has been the creative force behind the development of the first dispersed storage system to solve the growing global problem of big data storage. Gladwin understood the growing issues surrounding unstructured data and the inability of traditional technology solutions to accommodate the explosive growth of digital assets such as audio, video, and imaging. He applied advances in dispersed information technology to storage to create a reliable, cost-effective, secure solution with a limitless ability to scale. Gladwin holds a degree in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

John Marion has a broad background in lasers and optical materials, strategic defense, and persistent surveillance. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory he led the team that pioneered the field of persistent surveillance, developing hardware and image-processing capabilities and field testing of these new systems. At Logos he led the technical effort to develop a deployable system, resulting in Constant Hawk, the first persistent surveillance system intheater, as well as championing the use of this new intelligence collection and exploitation paradigm in the DoD and the intelligence community. Currently he leads the Logos team developing the Kestrel persistent surveillance systems for aerostat deployment and is developing future persistent surveillance systems, including the analysis and visualization tool development for exploitation of the imagery. His group also develops novel systems for the intelligence community and is leading a cyber defense technology development effort sponsored by DARPA. He provides technical analysis and support to NAVAIR, ARL, NVESD, DARPA and the CIA.

Benjamin Reed is a research scientist at Yahoo! Research. He has worked for almost 2 decades in industry, in positions ranging from work as an intern on cad/cam systems, to shipping and receiving applications in OS/2, AIX, and CICS, to operations, to system admininistration research and Java frameworks at IBM Almaden Research (11 years). He arrived at Yahoo! Research 3 years ago to work on the largest distributed-computing problems. His main interests now are large-scale processing environments and highly available and scalable systems. He has worked largely in open source, including writing and maintaining the Linux Aironet wireless driver. His research project at IBM grew into OSGI which is now in application servers, cars, and mobile phones. Two projects for which he has led research are Pig and ZooKeeper, which are Apache Software Foundation projects.

Eldar Sadikov is on leave from the Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University. While at Stanford, Eldar conducted research in web search and social network mining. He also worked at Google and at Microsoft Research in web search. He founded Qwhisper, whose goal is to make exponentially growing social content more useful by automatically inferring its meaning and giving it structure. Qwhisper is a highly stimulating intellectual environment in which robust distributed systems are built that handle web-scale data and design algorithms that challenge the published state of the art.

Asher Sinensky holds a Ph.D. from MIT in materials science and engineering and oversees product development at Palantir Technologies, where he is directly responsible for plotting the development roadmap for all features and functions. He has been involved in national security for a decade including having worked at Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories on projects related to bio security and detection of chemical and biological pathogens. He has received several security-related awards, including the Sandia National Security Fellowship and a Department of Homeland Security Fellowship. At MIT he explored techniques in nanoscale detection of organic molecules such as anthrax DNA. Sinensky is involved in numerous Palantir Technologes deployments across the defense, intelligence community, and law enforcement spaces.

Rod Smith is an IBM fellow and vice president of the IBM Emerging Internet Technologies organization, where he leads a group of highly technical innovators who are developing solutions to help organizations realize the value of big data. His early advocacy in the industry has played an important role in the adoption of technologies such as J2EE, Linux, Web services, XML, rich Internet applications, and various wireless standards. As an IBM fellow, Smith is helping lead IBM’s efforts around big data analytics and the application of IBM Watson-like technologies to business solutions, helping companies make better decisions more quickly for improved business outcomes. His early identification of emerging technologies has led to a sustained record of achievement in the global software community. Smith has authored numerous invention patents and disclosures, and he is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the TJ Watson Design Excellence Award. Smith is a computer science graduate of Western Michigan University, and holds an M.A. and a B.A. in economics with a concentration in math from Western Michigan University.

David Thurman currently leads computing strategy development at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) as well as providing oversight for activities at the Seattle Research Center in nonproliferation policy analysis, systems engineering, and human-centered analytics. He was previously responsible for program management for PNNL’s information analysis portfolio in the national security domain, coordinating a range of research and development projects focused on delivering new analytic capability to a range of government users. With more than 25 years of professional experience in research and university settings, Thurman has managed a variety of information analysis projects that developed new analytic methods and capabilities for a range of client organizations. He previously conducted research on advanced knowledge representation techniques to support intelligence analysis, led efforts to define information integration architectures for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, studied information analysis methods at the International Atomic Energy Agency, and developed integrated analysis systems for a variety of government clients. Internally at PNNL, he has served in leadership roles for research initiatives on data-intensive computing, threat anticipation, and signature discovery. He is currently leading the definition of a new research initiative in distributed analytics for multisource data. Thurman was previously a research engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology’s Center for Human-Machine Systems Research, developing human interfaces, training systems, and automation in the domains of satellite ground control and commercial aviation. Prior to that, he worked as a software developer in PNNL’s Computational Sciences Department, developing advanced data analysis and visualization applications. He has more than 40 peer-reviewed publications and technical reports on a range of information processing and analysis topics. Thurman was a Presidential Fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he received an M.S. in human-machine systems engineering. He also holds B.S. degrees in mathematics and computer science from the University of Oregon. He is a member of IEEE, and ACM and was previously a fellow of the World Affairs Council in Seattle.

Paul Twohey is the vice president and a co-founder of Ness Computing. Previously, he was the co-founder of Good Ga.me and also worked as a software engineer for Palantir Technologies. Ness, whose mission is to make search personal, is sometimes referred to as the “Palantir for fun.” Twohey gained his M.S. in computer science from Stanford University and his B.S. in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the recipient of the 2002 William Everitt Award for Excellence.