The Speakers of Data Platform 2017

John Alioto is a software architect. He currently serves as the CTO of Technical Evangelism & Startup in Microsoft’s Developer Experience and Evangelism group (DX) in the United States. John is the former CTO of Microsoft DX West Region where he ran DX’s startup mission in Silicon Valley. John works with technical leaders, architects and developers from start-ups and large enterprises alike to define strategies and develop innovative approaches for the use of technology. Before joining Microsoft, John served as a co-founder and CTO of a security startup focused on Machine Learning. John has more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry and a degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

Oskar has 20 years of diverse technology experience, with the past 2 years leading Big Data and Data Warehouse efforts at Gannett, the publishing company of the USA TODAY NETWORK, encompassing 110 newspapers across the nation with a monthly readership of more than 100 million. With his background he comes at data from an end-user's standpoint; how do we make it actionable and effective for the business and consumer's alike.

Jeff Barr is Chief Web Services Evangelist at Amazon Web Services, where he is focused on furthering awareness among software developers of the opportunity to innovate and build businesses using Amazon Web Services. In this role, Jeff travels, speaks, blogs, and maintains an active social media presence. Jeff has a longstanding interest in Web services and programmatic information interchange. He has held development and management positions at Microsoft, KnowNow, eByz, and Akopia and was a co-founder of Visix Software.

He earned his Bachelor’s degree in computer science from American University and his Master’s degree in Communication and Digital Media from the University of Washington. He has written over 2700 posts for the AWS blog and another 1100 for his personal blog. He’s been a technical reviewer for 4 books on web services, wrote a chapter on advanced scripting for a book on Second Life, and is the author of Host Your Website in the Cloud, published by SitePoint in 2010.

Mick Bass is CEO of 47Lining, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with Big Data Competency, and brings 25+ years experience in design of distributed systems and definition, build & launch of managed service platforms. Experienced in leading teams of 50+ contributors in CTO, consulting, technology and IT service development roles. Synthesizes technology strategy and Cloud-based solutions for customers in the media and entertainment, communications, energy, life sciences, gaming, and financial services verticals. Mick is an AWS Professional-level Certified Solutions Architect, has a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois and an MS in Management of Technology from MIT.

Santanu Dey is currently a director of data science and engineering at Fanatics. He focuses on product recommendations, personalization, user behavior targeting, email science and optimization, Web and customer analytics, in addition to building data platform for the company. He has wide range of skills and experiences in building distributed systems & web services, and solving complex problems with data and machine learned models. In the past he worked in various capacities in the area of software engineer and data science at eBay and as a data scientist in Facebook.

Sean grew up in Hawaii, where he trained in mathematical physics at Texas A&M University with an emphasis on supergravity and string phenomenology. He jumped to travel industry with Expedia in 2015, where he is now a Senior Data Scientist. He presently works on assorted problems, particularly in platform/marketplace design and Learning to Rank.

he Honorable Dr. R. David Edelman served as Special Assistant to President Obama for Economic & Technology Policy at the White House’s National Economic Council (NEC). Dr. Edelman played three roles in the Administration: as leader of the White House team managing issues at the intersection of technology and economic policy; as strategic advisor to the President; and as product manager of an over $15 billion portfolio of signature Presidential programs. He also served as the NEC’s industry and public-facing lead on technology matters, regularly addressing industry summits ,and working closely with company General Counsels and CEOs facing specific public policy challenges at home and abroad.

In his role at the NEC, he has overseen the economic team’s policy development and implementation on broadband/telecom, Internet policy, high-tech trade, competition/antitrust, and homeland security matters —including cyber security, privacy, and intelligence reform.

Dr. Edelman received his Doctorate and Master’s in International Relations from Oxford University, where he was a Clarendon Scholar, and his Bachelor’s (with honors) in History from Yale University.

Steve Gotlieb is the ADP Data Pipeline Architect for the PDG Product Delivery and Analytics Services Team. He joined Autodesk in 2002 and built much of the corporate revenue and expense reporting system still in use today. He later joined the Product Engineering team and was responsible for building much of the CIP and CER reporting infrastructure. This led into one of the earliest big data initiatives at Autodesk designed to enable reporting and analytics on the of Identity Service logs via Hive/MapReduce. More recently, Steve has been a key member of the ADP team focused on delivering a robust log ingestion pipeline to process and deliver analytic data and reporting on web, mobile and desktop product usage.

Evan Harris is a Data Scientist at Return Path. He specializes in building machine learning applications at scale, and running analytics and big data processing end-to-end in a cloud computing environment. Recently, his focus has been on information extraction and prediction with unstructured text. Coming from an Applied Mathematics academic background, he previously worked in quantitative trading in financial markets, and has since landed in the exciting world of data and technology.

Vinay Kumar is Sr. Director Product Management at Oracle, responsible for Oracle Infrastructure product strategy. He leads product teams focused on compute, storage, networking, database, security, and an expanding set of foundational services. He has wide range experience in building distributed systems, and specializes in building V1.0 products. Before joining Oracle, he led product teams at Amazon S3 and EBS, where he built multiple new services including EBS GP2 and S3 IA. He has held various product management and engineering roles at Akamai, EMC, and Wipro. He holds MBA from Babson College, F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business.

Sriranjan Manjunath (Sri) is the CTO of Saavn, India’s leading music streaming service. Sri joined Saavn in 2010 and helped build out its infrastructure and create initial versions of its products. He has since led various engineering teams within Saavn and currently oversees all of its engineering efforts including product development, infrastructure and operations. Prior to Saavn, Sri was a lead engineer at Yahoo focussing on building scalable backend systems.

Balaji Mohanam is a product manager at Qubole. He has over 8+ years of product development and management experience across financial services, online and mobile payments, e-commerce, big data and cloud computing. Previously he has worked at companies such as Oracle, eBay/Paypal, Google and MapR. He also holds an MBA degree from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

Austin graduated from MIT in 2015 and is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Machine Learning and AI from Georgia Tech. He currently works for the Center for Machine Learning at Capital One, building ML models for various use cases in Cybersecurity, Small Business and Social Media. He has experience working with many different open source tools and libraries to build these models, such as Keras and TensorFlow.

Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman is a member of the Oak Table Network and an Oracle ACE Director alumnus. She is the Technical Intelligence Manager for the Office of CTO at Delphix, a company recognized for it’s impressive virtualization and data masking environment capabilities. Kellyn is known for her extensive work with cloud migrations, virtualization, the command line interface, environment optimization tuning, automation and architecture design with multiple database and application platforms. Her blog, http://dbakevlar.com and social media activity under her handle, DBAKevlar is well respected for her insight and content.

Charles Pritchard has worked in data engineering for over a decade, architecting custom search and reporting solutions and working with the broad open source ecosystem that has developed around big data. He brings hands-on experience from his time supporting software and business intelligence developers at Expedia and The Walt Disney Company.

Karthik was the engineering manager and technical lead for Real Time Analytics at Twitter. He is the co-creator of Heron and has more than two decades of experience working in parallel databases, big data infrastructure and networking. He cofounded Locomatix, a company that specializes in real time streaming processing on Hadoop and Cassandra using SQL that was acquired by Twitter. Before Locomatix, he had a brief stint with Greenplum where he worked on parallel query scheduling. Greenplum was eventually acquired by EMC for more than $300M. Prior to Greenplum, Karthik was at Juniper Networks where he designed and delivered platforms, protocols, databases and high availability solutions for network routers that are widely deployed in the Internet. Before joining Juniper at University of Wisconsin, he worked extensively in parallel database systems, query processing, scale out technologies, storage engine and online analytical systems. Several of these research were spun as a company later acquired by Teradata. He is the author of several publications, patents and one of the best selling book “Network Routing: Algorithms, Protocols and Architectures.” He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UW Madison with a focus on big data.

Colin Riddell is a big data platform architect and engineer with Epic Games. Having specialized in providing AWS hosted solutions to analytics teams since 2011. Colin has enabled Epic to manage their data assets cost effectively, whilst granting them the flexibility to derive deep insights.

Prior to joining Epic, he spent 4 years at Netflix focused on streaming activity analytics; part of his almost 18 years of experience in the data warehousing and analytics space. He believes passionately in keeping analytics systems simple, yet scalable to enable data-driven cultures.

Debashis Saha is a former VP of Commerce Platform Infrastructure at eBay, where he led the engineering teams who built, managed and operated the platforms and infrastructure services for eBay. His portfolio included eBay’s entire infrastructure ranging from data centers to cloud, platforms, frameworks, data, engineering services and operations.

Saket Saurabh is the Co-founder and CEO of Nexla. A serial entrepreneur, Saket started his career in engineering. At Nexla he and his team are building the data operations infrastructure to power the AI and machine learning age. Prior to starting Nexla, Saket was Vice President of Mobile at Rubicon Project (NYSE:RUBI) where he led mobile product, engineering and operations. He also provided the idea, leadership and business development to transform Rubicon Project’s ad exchange into a platform which now drives over $400M in annual revenue. Saket came into Rubicon Project through the acquisition of Mobsmith, a startup he co-founded in 2009. Saket holds an MBA from The Wharton School and a BTech in Computer Science & Engineering from IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), Kanpur.

Andy has been involved in and excited about what big data technologies can do since 2008. In his role as CTO at Return Path he spearheaded the successful migration from relational database technology to big data technologies including Hadoop, Apache HBase, Apache Kafka, Elasticsearch and others. After Return Path Andy worked with Oracle Data Cloud to help optimize and manage their cloud based big data infrastructure.

In his current role at Google he works on the Search team as a technical manager building infrastructure for Google’s proactive search efforts.

Andy has also been an organizer of the Boulder / Denver Big Data meetup for over 6 years. Joined monthly by many of the big names in the industry including Netflix, Twitter, Cloudera, MapR and Hortonworks, the meetups provide a means for over 3,200 members to learn and share their big data experiences.

Before co-founding Qubole Joydeep worked at Facebook where he boot-strapped the data processing ecosystem based on Hadoop, started the Apache Hive project and led Facebook’s Data Infrastructure team. Joydeep was also a key contributor on the Facebook Messages architecture team and brought the power of Apache Hbase to Facebook and to the transactional and reporting backends for Facebook Credits.

Shrikanth Shankar is a Director of Engineering at LinkedIn where he leads multiple teams that work on infrastructure and platforms to support LinkedIn’s analytic needs. Shrikanth has a long background in data and has worked at big companies and startups in a variety of technical and management roles.

Tripp Smith is the Chief Technology Officer of Clarity Insights. Tripp joined Clarity in 2011 to lead Clarity Labs, building tools, teams, and strategies applying big data analytics to solve real business problems for clients. During this period, Clarity has grown nearly 20x to become the largest independent consultancy in the US focused solely on data analytics. His team’s’ efforts have generated multi-million dollar impacts at Fortune 1000 companies in industries including healthcare, technology, finance, and consumer products for the world’s most innovative companies. Prior to joining Clarity Insights, Tripp consulted with Knightsbridge Solutions, acquired by Hewlett-Packard, and developed Analytics SaaS products at the Advisory Board Company.

Rakesh has been all data all the time during his last 20+ years of experience with American Express, Mayo Clinic, Nestle and most recently with Accenture. Rakesh leads the Intersys West Big Data and Analytics practice. In recent years, his focus has shifted to helping clients derive business outcome from their massive data assets. He’s recognized for large-scale DW transformations, big data solutions, cloud computing and application portfolio rationalization, which have business impacts worth millions of dollars. He is passionate about using big data as a strategic tool that makes businesses more competitive. His mantra: “Data-driven companies will win the fight for a bigger market share.” Rakesh currently lives in Scottsdale, AZ with his wife and one child. When he’s not building outcome focused solutions, he enjoys traveling as much as possible.

Karthik Subramaniam leads the Data Platform team within the Data Science & Engineering organization at UA Connected Fitness. The team specializes in building a flexible platform that enables insights and understanding of user behavior around health & fitness and building of intelligent data products. They work on various big data technologies including Hive, Presto & Spark and perform various functions including batch processing, stream processing, feature generation & performant storage/retrieval of data which enables the Analytics platform, builds our catalog of data assets and is the foundation of data products like Cognitive Coach, Search, and Restaurant Logging.

Before co-founding Qubole, Ashish ran Facebook’s Data Infrastructure team; under his leadership the team built one of the largest data processing and analytics platforms in the world. This platform achieved not just the bold aim of making data accessible to analysts, engineers and data scientists, but drove the “big data” revolution. In the process of scaling Facebook’s Big Data infrastructure, he helped drive the creation of a host of tools, technologies and templates that are used industry wide today.

Dale Treece currently serves as a Senior Solutions Architect and Engineering Lead for the Digital Data Services team at Scripps Networks Interactive. He has 17 years of service to Scripps Networks as a system administrator, database administrator, web developer, search engineer, solutions architect, development lead, and engineering manager. Previously Dale served for 16 years in the Instrumentation and Controls Engineering field with both the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (DOE Research Facility) and Duke Energy – Oconee Nuclear Station.

While at Scripps Networks, Treece has led the efforts to architect and migrate the on-premise search platform to a scalable cloud search service that delivers dynamic, relevant content for consumption on the company’s digital sites. He led the design and development of the company’s data and analytics self-service platform that supports multiple business and analytic consumers.

ODC (formerly Datalogix) was one of the principal adaptors of Qubole back in 2014, and has grown to be one of Qubole’s largest customers in big data processing. Justin works with over 100 analysts & developers within ODC using Qubole for their workloads and has helped grow Qubole into their primary processing platform over the last two years. Currently, ODC runs approximately 70 Hadoop & Spark clusters totaling over 2 million processing hours per month in Qubole.

With over 25 years of engineering leadership experience in groundbreaking companies Organic, Loudcloud/Opsware, Verisign and Netflix, Wade has been a part of building the internet we know today.

As the SVP of Global Engineering and Technical Operations at Wikia/Fandom Wade is responsible for building the collaborative global media platform where over 200 million fans around the world come to share their knowledge and passion about every topic imaginable in nearly 400,000 online communities.