Mark Brooks has been a Systems Engineer with StreamSets for more than four years, helping customers design and implement StreamSets-based solutions. At StreamSets, Mark specializes in Kubernetes and Kafka-based data integration. His past experience includes four years at Cloudera as well as roles with several other enterprise and date integration companies.

Are digital technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) and robots going to take all the jobs and leave us worse off? Absolutely not, says Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at MIT and co-founder of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. On the contrary, he argues, they have been enhancing our lives and continue to unveil countless opportunities for business, economic and individual growth and, most importantly, solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing humanity.

A highly sought-after speaker and advisor, McAfee studies the effects of technology on industries, sectors and countries, and offers data-driven insights into existing and emerging trends. His work is particularly valuable to decision makers at financial institutions, health care organizations and government agencies, and to firms interested in emerging technologies that can streamline operations, enhance innovation and offer a competitive edge. Since much of McAfee’s work looks at ways technology can help solve larger societal problems, he is also an excellent resource for corporate social responsibility leaders and organizations interested in balancing profit with purpose.

“We are living through exciting times right now, something that happens maybe every 100 years,” says McAfee, whose optimistic pro-growth, pro-market, pro-innovation and pro-technology views are tempered with healthy levels of practicality and caution. “New technologies and a new breed of leaders are coming together to create unprecedented levels of value – and disruption. Incumbents in every industry will be challenged and a lot of them won’t be able to respond effectively.

“When it comes to our relationship with the planet we all live on, we are seeing ways we can invest to improve both the human condition and the state of nature, and how technology can help solve larger world problems around hunger, housing, jobs, climate change and even COVID-19, while also contributing to economic growth,” he adds.

McAfee has been shining a bright light on the far-reaching impact of technology since 2011 when he and co-author Erik Brynjolfsson released their paradigm-shifting book “Race Against the Machine.” Their next two books, The New York Times bestseller “The Second Machine Age“ (2014) and “Machine | Platform | Crowd“ (2017) expanded on this theme. In 2019, McAfee went solo with his pessimist-defying book “More from Less” in which he shares profound examples of economic and environmental progress driven by a combination of powerful technologies, economic freedom and smart regulation and policy.

McAfee and his MIT team have ample evidence showing how technology is allowing societies to progressively decouple economic growth from planetary harms. His findings are counterintuitive, but encouraging: we now have the playbook for growing our populations and prosperity while decreasing energy use, natural resource extraction and pollution.

In addition to being a data-driven optimist, however, McAfee is also a realist who acknowledges some of the downsides of technological progress, such as people and communities left behind and technology races ahead. But he is also quick to offer practical ways businesses and policymakers can address such problems with smart investments, regulations and reforms. He further points out that humans and machines often end up working together, with technology reducing drudgery and opening up opportunities for creativity and empathy.

“Geek Leadership,” McAfee’s next book, starts out by noting that Netflix, Amazon, and Bridgewater all have extraordinary track records of sustained performance, and also strange corporate cultures that are strange in the same ways – which he views as no coincidence. The three companies are the most prominent examples of a fundamentally new way of running and growing companies, as different from today’s standard practices as electricity was from steam power. The book describes this rapidly spreading new paradigm, demystifies its lexicon – agile development, scrums and sprints, minimum viable product, radical candor and transparency, disagree and commit, day one, fail fast, and so on – and explains why it works as well as it does.

“Technological progress is what allows us to continue this amazing run where output goes up, prices go down and volume and quality continue to explode,” says McAfee. “Some call this shallow materialism but that is the wrong way to look at it. This is abundance, which is exactly what we want our economic system to provide.”

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Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the co-founder of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. He studies how technology is changing the world — economies, business models, work and the environment.

McAfee’s 2014 bestseller “The Second Machine Age,” co-authored with Erik Brynjolfsson, was hailed by The Economist as “a striking attempt to wrestle with the massive management changes that will result from autonomous machines” and “the most influential recent business book.” Their follow-up book, “Machine | Platform | Crowd,” was praised by the same publication as “an astute romp through important digital trends… [that] is hard to beat.” And McAfee’s own 2019 book “More from Less” –  which explains how technology and capitalism have combined in recent years to let us tread more lightly on the earth – was praised by Steven Pinker as an “exhilarating book… fascinating, enjoyable to read, and tremendously empowering” and by Marc Andreessen as “an urgently needed and clear-eyed view of how to have our technological cake and eat it too.”

McAfee has written for publications including Foreign Affairs, Harvard Business Review, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He’s talked about his work on CNN and 60 Minutes, at the World Economic Forum, TED, the Aspen Ideas Festival, with Tom Friedman, Fareed Zakaria and Andrew Ross Sorkin, and in front of many international and domestic audiences. He and Brynjolfsson are the only people named to both the Thinkers50 list of the world’s top management thinkers and the Politico 50 group of people transforming American politics.

Andrew McAfee is available to advise your organization via virtual and in-person consulting meetings, interactive workshops and customized keynotes through the exclusive representation of Stern Speakers, a division of Stern Strategy Group®.

I’ve spent over 15 years living on the edge of social technology. 

I head up West Coast business development for Republic, an inclusive fundraising platform that is disrupting conventional venture capital. 

I often play product therapist (you can book me via Superpeer!) and help founders and makers nail their launches on Product Hunt.

Generally, I try not to take myself too seriously.

I’m best known for inventing the hashtag, but I’ve also designed products and experiences for Google and Uber, founded startups, and changed the world with the creation of other social innovations, like coworking and BarCamp. 

I am a product designer and have spoken around the world about social technology, product design, synthetic media, founder culture and mental fitness.

I have twice spoken at TEDx, and SXSW, Google I/O, Microsoft’s Future Decoded and many other leading conferences. I have been quoted in media outlets like The New York Times, Business Week, LA Times, Washington Post, and Wired. I have also appeared (briefly!) in The Social Dilemma on Netflix, and in books like No Filter by Sarah Frier, and Billion Dollar Loser by Reeves Wiedeman. 

Throughout my career, I have created movements online and off, and acted as catalyst for change in large and small organizations.

In 2004, I helped to organize the grassroots movement that propelled Mozilla Firefox to its first 100 million downloads. 

In 2005, I co-organized the first BarCamp and then popularized the unconference event model to over 350 cities around the world. 

In 2006, I, along with several friends, opened the first coworking spaces in the world, giving rise to a global movement. 

Then in 2007, I invented the hashtag, changing the social media landscape forever by providing a means to galvanize popular social movements.

Jer Thorp is an artist, writer and teacher living in New York City. He is best known for designing the algorithm to place the nearly 3,000 names on the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan. Jer was the New York Times’ first Data Artist in Residence, is a National Geographic Explorer, and in 2017 and 2018 served as the Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. Jer is one of the world’s foremost data artists, and is a leading voice for the ethical use of big data.

Jer’s data-inspired artwork has been shown around the world, including most recently in New York’s Times Square, at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, at the Ars Electronica Center in Austria, and at the National Seoul Museum in Korea. His work has also appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Scientific American, The New Yorker, Popular Science, Fast Company, Business Week, Popular Science, Discover, WIRED and The Harvard Business Review.

Jer’s talks on TED.com have been watched by more than a half-million people. He is a frequent speaker at high profile events such as PopTech, and The Aspen Ideas Festival. Recently, he has spoken about his work at MIT’s Media Lab, The American Museum of Natural History, MoMA, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena.

Jer is a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, and an alumnus of the World Economic Foundation’s Global Agenda Council on Design and Innovation. He is an adjunct Professor in New York University’s renowned Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), and is the Co-Founder of The Office for Creative Research. In 2015, Canadian Geographic named Jer one of Canada’s Greatest Explorers.

Jer’s book ‘Living in Data’ will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the spring of 2020.

Rick Bull is an Australian based music producer, sound designer, and educator, best known by his artist name Deepchild – one of the Antipodes’ best regarded electronic music exports for two decades. With club, broadcast and composition experience driving a passion for critical-discourse, Bull’s investment in electronic music is deeply rooted. The formerly Berlin-based artist made his debut at the city’s legendary Berghain club in 2007 and has toured internationally and extensively since then – performing at venues as diverse as the Sydney Opera House Studio and EXIT Festival in Serbia. Rick is also one half of the Juno Award nominated duo, Concubine, and a passionate arts-facilitator for the not-for-profit group Heaps Decent, focusing on developing work with young people in marginalized and regional communities. His academic engagements have spanned tertiary institutions ranging from Sydney University to The Australian Institute of Music, with a passionate focus on Afrofuturism, Hauntology, Late Capitalist critique and oblique compositional strategies.

Dr. Theresa Johnson invests in AI technology platforms and Payments infrastructure. As a data scientist and product leader, she works on product teams focused on growth and quality.

She has a BS, MS and PhD in aeronautics and astronautics engineering from Stanford University. She is the board chair of StreetCode Academy, the California non-profit of the year in 2020-2021 for providing high quality technology education to underserved communities. She is also on the Stanford Alumni Association Board of Directors and on the Board of Trustees for Presidio Knolls School.

Theresa recently moved from San Francisco to Oakland with her husband Brian, daughters Cora and Luna, and her rescued catahoula hound, Amelie.

David McRaney is a science journalist and an internationally bestselling author, podcaster, and lecturer who created You Are Not So Smart, a podcast where today he continues to interview scientists who study the psychology of reasoning, decision-making, and self-delusion.

David began a blog writing about the psychology of reasoning in 2009. That blog became an internationally bestselling book, now available in 18 languages. His second book, You Are Now Less Dumb, released in July of 2013, and his third book, How Minds Change, all about the suprising science of belief, opinion, and persuasion, will be released by Penguin in 2022. 

His writing has also been featured in Politico, Salon, Boing Boing, The Atlantic and others. In 2021, he wrote and recorded an audio documentary about IQ and genius for Himalaya, and he co-produced a television show with James Burke about how to better predict the psychological impact of technological disruption. Learn more at davidmcraney.com. 

Simon Wardley is a researcher for DxC. He is a former CEO, former advisory board member of startups, fellow of Open Forum Europe, creator of mapcamp and Wardley mapping. He spends a great deal of time speaking about maps.

Girish Pancha is a data industry veteran who has spent his career developing successful and innovative products that address the challenge of providing integrated information as a mission-critical, enterprise-grade solution. Before co-founding StreamSets, Girish was the first vice-president engineering and chief product officer at Informatica, where he was responsible for the company’s corporate development and entire product portfolio strategy and delivery. Girish also was co-founder and CEO at Zimba, a developer of a mobile platform providing real-time access to corporate information, which he led to a successful acquisition. Girish began his career at Oracle, where he managed the development of its Discoverer Business Intelligence platform.

Sanjeev Mohan started his data and analytics journey at Oracle where he worked on emerging technologies and building cutting-edge solutions. He implements and advises on changing trends and technologies in the modern cloud data architectures. Until recently, as a Gartner research vice president, he was known for his prolific work and thought leadership. He regularly presents on topics pertaining to end-to-end data pipelines. When not immersed in data, he can be found gallivanting all over the world.

Alistair Croll is an author, entrepreneur, and conference organizer. He co-founded web performance startup Coradiant, the Year One Labs accelerator, and several other early-stage companies. He is the author of four books including the bestselling Lean Analytics, and is currently writing Just Evil Enough, the subversive marketing playbook. He has chaired many of the technology world’s leading conferences including Cloud Connect, Strata, and FWD50. Alistair lives in Montreal, Canada, and writes at acroll.substack.com.

Judy is an enterprise software veteran and an expert in DataOps, data integration and cloud. Currently, Judy is chief product officer at StreamSets, provider of the leading platform dedicated to building the smart data pipelines needed to power DataOps. As StreamSets CPO, Judy is responsible for the product strategy and delivery. She thrives on galvanizing product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams to work together to deliver true customer impact and attain a market leadership position.

In the enterprise software arena, previously Judy was at Informatica, the leader in data integration software, where she held a variety of senior leadership roles including product management, product marketing, demand generation and corporate marketing. Judy has also spent time at BEA Systems, and Calico Commerce.

In the cleantech and energy world, Judy previously led product and corporate marketing at AutoGrid Systems, where she launched AutoGrid’s flexibility management platform. She also led marketing and product management at REPOWER America, a software-enabled network of residential solar providers. She is currently a startup mentor at Cleantech Open and at Plug and Play Tech Center in their Energy vertical.

Judy holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering and management systems from Princeton University and a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard Business School.

Thierry co-founded Snowflake and currently serves as Chief Technical Officer. Thierry is a leading expert in query optimization and parallel execution. He spent 13 years at Oracle focused on the optimization and parallelization layers in Oracle databases including as lead for the optimization group. Before Oracle, he spent seven years at the IBM European Center of Applied Mathematics working on data mining technologies. Thierry has a PhD in Computer Science with a focus in Database Systems and holds over 70 patents.

Corey James Gray is a rapper, producer, DJ, and a cornerstone of the New York Hip-Hop community. As a co-founder of Freestyle Mondays, the world’s longest-running live band hip-hop event, he has mentored some of the city’s most talented underground rappers. Corey has DJ-ed events for the NFL and NBA, and was featured in the “Beats by Dre Artist Spotlight” in 2019. As an official US State Department Ambassador of Culture, he toured the world and performed in more than 24 countries including Turkey, Cabo Verde, and China. Corey James Gray’s music has been featured in NBC’s Winter Olympics commercials, and his rap single “Last Call” remained at number one on the FlaixFm dance charts in Barcelona for fourteen weeks.

Baba Brinkman is a rapper, entrepreneur, and science communicator, best known for his “Rap Guide” series of science-themed plays and albums, which have enjoyed successful runs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and off-Broadway. Called “astonishing and brilliant” by the New York Times, Baba is a Scotsman Fringe First Award winner for Exceptional New Writing, and a two-time Drama Desk Award Nominee for “Outstanding Solo Performance” and “Unique Theatrical Experience”. Baba has performed live on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” and shared stages with science luminaries including Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and more recently he is the founder of Event Rap Inc, the world’s first custom rap service provider, which you are about to witness.

Phani Konduru serves as Chief Technology Officer for Digital Health, Home, InterOperability and Innovation. In this role, he partners with executive leadership of the company to formulate innovative healthcare technology strategy and deliver best in class technology capabilities, advance business operations and run technology operations that enables transformation of the company from an Insurance company to a Care company.   

Phani has been with Humana for 12+ years in various leadership roles enabling key enterprise and segment priorities across the company, while helping the company’s digital transformation.  Most recently, he served as Chief Enterprise Architect and Vice President of Technology Advancement at Humana.  In his role, he guided technology enabled business strategy, provided thought leadership, strategy development, advanced product centric agile ways of working while providing Architectural governance to help lead Humana’s Technology Modernization.  Previously, he also served as Vice President of Consumer Technology where he was responsible for technology enablement of Enterprise Bold Goal, Consumer Experience, Enterprise CRM, Digital Strategy, Enterprise Data & Analytics, Enterprise Marketing & Communications and the Wellness segment.  Prior to Humana, Phani worked across multiple industries – retail automotive, manufacturing & distribution, commercial software development and telecom in various leadership roles. 

Phani is passionate about our community and enjoys helping further Louisville’s brand of a compassionate city.  He is a Bingham Fellow of the class of 2019 and serves on St John’s Center for Homeless board as chair of the Strategic Planning committee. Phani has lived in Louisville area for 12 years.  He is married to Leela, has a college junior daughter, Neha, a high school senior son, Sahil and an adorable Cavachon dog, Asha.

Anne-Britton Arnett is the Vice President of Integrated Data Engineering Advancement at Humana.  In this role, she leads the IT component of enabling various types of operational and analytic reporting to be accomplished.  Her development teams lead new initiatives across the enterprise in areas that include data warehousing, advanced analytics, data movement and submissions, lake hydration, visualization and reporting, data mastering, and other areas.  The vision of the organization is to be able to present the right data to the right people at the right time, enhancing key decision making.

Prior to her current role, A-B has held various roles at Humana since 2007, including Director, Manager, and developer within the EDW space.  She led Associate Engagement for IT for many years, and is very passionate about volunteerism and the opportunities that engage associates across the org, as well as reaching out to those in our community who come to us for help.  Some of her passions in this role have been work with the homeless in Louisville, as well as opportunities to work with troubled teenagers.

Prior to her time at Humana, A-B held positions at various companies in the Financial and Insurance sectors, including Database Administrator, Developer, Manager, and Project Lead.  She received an Undergraduate degree from the University of Richmond, in VA and a Masters degree from Bellarmine University.  She has two children that attend Xavier University and Depauw University, and her husband is a Teacher’s Assistant at Field Elementary, who works with special needs children.  She is the third generation at her church, Crescent Hill Baptist Church, where she continues to hold various leadership positions. 

Amy Heineike is the VP Engineering, EMEA at Primer, building machines that read and write text, leveraging NLP, NLG, and a host of algorithms to augment human analysts. On Primer’s founding team, she built their data science and engineering teams and recently moved to England where she will grow their UK presence. Previously, she developed technology for visualizing large document sets as network maps, and worked in London modeling cities. A Cambridge mathematician, Amy is fascinated by complex human systems and the algorithms and data that help us understand them.

Torsten currently serves as Director of Product Management for Snowflake, where he heads product management for Snowflake’s data engineering, data lake, and data science workloads, as well as the Snowpark developer experience. Before joining Snowflake, Torsten spent more than a decade at Microsoft in the SQL Server product group in Redmond, WA, serving in different roles in software development and product management. Considering himself a “database person”, Torsten holds a PhD in computer science from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland.

Raji Narayanan is a product leader who comes with a wealth of experience leading product and engineering teams at startups and industry leaders. She focuses on solving challenging problems for businesses around data, cloud and APIs. At StreamSets, she leads a stellar team of product managers and designers to drive overall product roadmap and strategy for delivering compelling products and user experiences.

Wilson currently leads the global Customer Data Engineering team within NatWest Group, delivering advanced cloud data platforms for Retail Analytics and Decisioning. During his career across a variety of industries, Wilson has performed engineering and operational roles including high performance computing, platform engineering and big data. Currently as a senior data leader he is driving the adoption of Federated Data Engineering and ML Ops as part of NatWest Group’s data driven strategy.

Jeremy D. Rader is the General Manager of Enterprise Strategy & Solutions (ESS) in Intel’s Data Platforms Group (DPG), Cloud & Enterprise Solutions (CESG) organization. He leads enterprise ecosystem partnerships and solution integration to highlight the value of IA in the data center. Collaborating across Intel, ESS focuses on providing the enterprise platform and solution requirements and ecosystem enabling strategies.

Rader joined DPG in 2015 where he led as the Sr. Director of the Data-Centric Solutions (DCS) organization responsible for accelerating enterprise customers’ digital transformation by delivering analytics & AI solutions enabled by partners and scaled through the industry.

Prior to joining DPG in 2015, Rader served fifteen years in Intel’s IT organization culminating in his role as Director of Business Intelligence, leading Intel’s global team responsible for driving advanced analytics and insights across manufacturing, sales & marketing, supply chain, and finance. Earlier in his Intel career, he held positions in the eBusiness group and supply chain organization. Rader joined Intel in 1997 as a Materials Services Manager in Intel’s manufacturing business.

Shekhar is responsible for the company’s Global Customer Operations including Sales, Marketing and Customer Success functions. Iyer’s career includes more than a decade of executive roles at Couchbase, SAP and Informatica. Before joining StreamSets, Iyer served as chief revenue officer at Couchbase, creator of the world’s first engagement database. At SAP, Iyer was global vice president of big data and analytics, where he led the go-to-market, sales and global center of excellence functions. During Iyer’s tenure at SAS, he was general manager with responsibilities covering Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. At Informatica, Iyer served as senior vice president and general manager for the company’s Strategic Initiatives unit.

Anthony Gatti is Senior Product Manager at StreamSets, where he manages elements across all facets of the StreamSets DataOps Platform. Anthony began his career in data science, which evolved into an interest in data engineering and software. That interest led him to StreamSets, where he functioned as the company’s first customer success engineer. In working with StreamSets’ customers, he developed a passion for taking the product to the next level. He transitioned into product management and has worked for nearly two years to build the next generation DataOps Platform. He lives in Akron, OH with his wife and three children.

Dileep is an engineering leader with a passion for distributed computing architectures being used for solving business problems. He is currently running the Enterprise Data Lake platform for NatWest. Prior to that, he has performed various architecture and engineering lead roles for real time analytics, business intelligence, data ware house and data lake implementation initiatives within and outside the bank.

Anirban Chakraborty is AWS and Google Cloud Certified Architect at TATA Consultancy Services and has 16+ year experience in Data and Analytics domain and IT which includes Cloud Computing, Enterprise Architecture, Database technologies, Transformation, DevOps, StreamSets, Visualization and Analytics technologies. Outside of work, he is an amateur paraglider pilot, black belt in martial arts and likes cycling, hiking, running, kayaking and to be outdoors.

Manoj Vadehra is currently working as Lead Engineer at NatWest Group involved in extending the capabilities of Big Data Ingestion system (EAS RAW) built on top of the on-premise Streaming Platform. Recently, he has played a key role in deploying the “Enterprise Streaming platform” backed by Apache Kafka and StreamSets.

Chris Finlayson is a Co-Founder at bigspark and a Principal Engineer at NatWest Group within the big data platform team. He is responsible for building out frameworks in support of federated data engineering teams across the bank and for ongoing management of the platform in areas such as data ingestion, profiling/quality measurement and lifecycle management.

Sushil has over 15 years of experience in the Software industry and is extremely passionate about technology in any form or shape, EAI, SOA, Java EE, Angular, DevOps, Cloud Computing, Continuous Delivery….. pretty much any interesting technology evolution that has happened since 2004. He loves working with people and collaborating with them to foster a strong work culture. He is extremely passionate about innovation and believes strongly in the Open Source community.He leads all initiatives from the front and is looked up to as a natural thought leader across various technology paradigms. Sushil holds a Bachelors in Engineering from Jadavpur University, West Bengal, India.

Zeashan is a technology executive and architect who has 19+ years of enterprise software architecture, engineering, consulting, and project management expertise. He manages to write code every day and manage a team of solution architects, whilst being managed himself by his four kids.

Terry has 20+ years of extensive experience in Foundational Enterprise Architecture, Database & Cloud Infrastructure Architecture, Large scale project management & Cyber Security (infrastructure & application).

As a passionate technologist and tech community contributor, he thoroughly supports open source projects, blockchain technologies and training and developing youth interested in a career in tech.

Kirti Velankar is an engineering manager at StreamSets Inc and part of Engineering Productivity team. Kirti is passionate about software engineering and has worked at Sun Microsystems, Yahoo and EMC. She has worn many hats through the course of these experiences and has worked with a variety of systems and applications, some of which are still deployed at scale and operating with millions of users.

Levi Bailey is an Associate Vice President of Cloud Architecture at Humana.  Humana is a health insurance company whose focus is on achieving its member’s best health.

His background includes over 15 years in the technology sector across multiple industries including Finance, Healthcare, and Retail.  Levi’s career has varied across roles such as Software Engineer, Software Architect, and Technology Leader.  His background includes being the Lead Engineer on multiple teams that built Credit Union software systems from the ground up and being the Solution Architect designing best in class sales solutions for the Credit Card Processing industry.  Levi has extensive experience with building and managing large enterprise systems in both data center and cloud environments.

Levi has spent the last 5+ years in the healthcare sector working to transform the industry through interoperability and analytics to enable improved outcomes for patients.  He currently leads teams that are focused on creating platforms to enable interoperability across the healthcare ecosystem to impact patient outcomes at the point of care.

Levi focuses on impacting people’s lives in a positive manner and uses his job to do that with his associates and with the consumers that use the solutions his teams deliver.  Levi believes that health is the most important factor in everyone’s lives and is driven to improve the healthcare system so people get to live their best lives.

Originally from Myrtle Beach, SC, Levi lives in Sellersburg, IN with his wife and two children.

Keith is the head of the data engineering practice at Axis and a passionate technical leader, mentor, and manager with over 15 years of professional experience. He helps Axis with creating strategies to stay on top of the competition in the Data Engineering space, taking into account trends, people, process, and technology.

Shivnath Babu is CTO/Cofounder at Unravel Data Systems and an adjunct professor of Computer Science at Duke University. His work focuses on ease-of-use and manageability of data-intensive systems, automated problem diagnosis, and cluster sizing for applications running on cloud platforms. Shivnath cofounded Unravel to solve the application management challenges that companies face when they adopt systems like Airflow, Kafka, Snowflake, and Spark. Unravel originated from the Starfish platform built at Duke, which has been used by over 100 companies. Shivnath has won a US National Science Foundation CAREER Award, three IBM Faculty Awards, and an HP Labs Innovation Research Award.

Naveen works for PlayStation Studios FP&A team. He is the architect for the backend systems that help financial analysts in profitability analysis and other financial KPIs. As an architect he constantly evaluates data frameworks that are easy to maintain and future proof. He currently is focused more on Snowflake and data integration tools like Informatica Cloud, StreamSets and DBT. He eventually wants to make systems event driven and pay-per-use costing models.

Tami is a senior leader in Deloitte’s Analytics and Cognitive practice. She specializes in data-driven Artificial Intelligence, Analytics, Data Science, Data Management, and Data Visualization anchored in the Hi-Tech and Insurance sectors. Her breadth of experience includes establishing Cloud and Data Modernization strategies to optimize business performance and enhance decision support through analytics and artificial intelligence.

Pankaj is a Deloitte Certified Chief Architect in Deloitte’s Analytics and Cognitive practice. He has more than 20+ years of global technology consulting experience. He is focused on cloud data modernization platforms and has architected & delivered large data transformation programs.

Saurabh has over 13 years of experience in solution integration for highly complex enterprise wide systems. He has successfully helped greenfield solution providers integrate their offerings on AWS, and helped existing AWS Data & Analytics Partners to enhance their solutions on AWS. He has worked across multiple industries, including telecommunication, finance and insurance. Saurabh holds a bachelor’s in computer engineering from University of Mumbai (India) and an MBA from Virginia Tech.

Rich is a strategic analytics leader at Axis Group with over 20 years of experience designing transformative data solutions that provide tangible returns in the enterprise. His broad expertise includes enabling analytics adoption and cultural transformation, use case design and development, community building, knowledge management and instructional design.

Ronald Petty is a consultant at RX-M, a global cloud native advisory and training firm in the founding classes of Kubernetes Certified Service Providers (KCSP) and Kubernetes Training Providers (KTP). He has consulted, developed, and trained across many domains including academic research, government, high-tech, finance, and energy. Ronald has also worked as CTO/advisor at multiple companies. In addition, he authors and edits technical material around programming languages and software development techniques. He participated in the creation of CKA and CKAD certification exams. He holds the CKAD, CKA, and CKS.

Olivia Hinkle has provided data quality intelligence to top brands for more than 13 years. As Sr. Product Marketing Manager, she oversees promotion of the Validity for Data Management solutions suite, which helps businesses around the world optimize their CRM implementations by establishing data best practices, such as analysis, process, and flow. Olivia holds a BA from Hiram College and has certifications in Salesforce Administration, DemandTools, DupeBlocker, and PeopleImport. When she’s not thinking about CRMs, she’s spending time with her husband, young daughter, and dog, Tuukka.

Mr. Katzman serves as the Vice President of Strategy & Operations for SME Solutions Group and specializes in process excellence and business architecture. Mr. Katzman has over 25 years of experience in various industries including Manufacturing, Financial Services and Utilities, and specializes in Process Excellence and Data Analytics. He is a certified Six Sigma Quality Blackbelt and has been recognized for innovation with interactive dashboards in the Utility industry. Currently, Ron is focused on spreading the importance of Data and Business Intelligence (BI) Governance and the fundamentals of building a successful BI roadmap for numerous audiences including Utility Analytics Institute, CIO Forums, and those interested in Smart Cities. Ronald holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Lehigh University and an MBA from the University of Utah.

In his 5 years with SME as a Solutions Engineer, George has specialized in data analytics, data engineering, and business intelligence solutions for companies of all industries and sizes. Graduating from the University of Florida with a degree in information systems, George joined SME with a passion for data and a willingness to learn new skills. George is adept in all of SME’s products and solutions and is constantly looking for new technology innovations to bring into the portfolio. While George plays a key role in pre-sales initiatives, he also works with the digital marketing teams on video content and webinars.

Thomas Vanhove completed his PhD from Ghent University, Belgium, in 2018 researching polyglot data storage. During his time at the university he created a DataOps orchestration platform to help researchers build complex data architectures for their experiments. This eventually led to him founding Tengu as a spin-off company from Ghent University and imec together with Gregory Van Seghbroeck. Since then they’ve been expanding on the concept of metadata in DataOps and how it should go beyond just the technology.

Andrea is currently CTO at Radicalbit, Milan. His main works have been focused on streaming technologies, machine learning, and performance-boosting. Andrea co-authored “flink-jpmml” ML streaming serving project; he loves to spread the voice about how to regulate machine learning end-to-end lifecycle and streaming applications. He co-authored “Benchmarking Data Flow Systems for Scalable Machine Learning” science paper at DIMA Group, TU Berlin.

Ernie is SVP of Products at MANTA, focusing on solutions for lineage and metadata integration. He has over thirty years of experience in the data integration space, including over twenty years with IBM (with DataStage heritage) working in a variety of roles with responsibilities in product management and technical sales support. Earlier in his career, Ernie was building decision support systems with fourth generation languages and data access middleware. Ernie maintains a blog on open metadata, data lineage and overall metadata management and governance. He is a graduate of Boston College. While not pursuing MANTA initiatives, working on his blog (http://www.dsrealtime.com), or spending time with family, Ernie enjoys motorcycles and playing piano.

Ahmed is the founder and CEO of Narrator. Narrator enables companies to make better decisions by providing them with the ability to answer any question in under 10 minutes. Ahmed started his career at Cornell’s Autonomous Systems Laboratory building algorithms for autonomous vehicles and human-robot interaction. He then joined Raytheon to develop AI algorithms for missile defense, focusing on tracking and discrimination. In 2015, Ahmed joined WeWork as the first hire on their data team. He built their data engineering infrastructure and grew the team to forty data engineers and analysts. Recently, Ahmed was recognized as one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 for 2021.

Miklos Szegedi, MBA, M.Sc., is an experienced Software Engineer. He built solutions at Big Tech, pre-IPO companies, and small startups. He is an expert in IT infrastructure from hardware, operating systems, networking, cloud, including real-time video, storage, observability, databases, ethical and legal challenges. He is building his own business Schmied Enterprises, working on the One Dollar Cloud.

He has been living in Silicon Valley since 2013.

Rustem Feyzkhanov is a senior machine learning engineer at Instrumental, where he works on analytical models for the manufacturing industry, and AWS Machine Learning Hero. Rustem is passionate about serverless infrastructure (and AI deployments on it) and is the author of the course and book “Serverless Deep Learning with TensorFlow and AWS Lambda” and “Practical Deep Learning on the Cloud”. Also, he is the main contributor to the open-source repository for serverless packages https://github.com/ryfeus/lambda-packs.

Jordan Volz is Director of Field Engineering at Continual, where he helps clients operationalize their production AI use cases. He has worked in the data space for over a decade in a variety of roles: software development, data scientist, systems architecture, and more. His passions lie in the fields of big data and machine learning, and he has ample experience working with fortune 500 companies in the NYC metro area.

Francesco comes from Verona, Italy and works as a Developer Advocate at Aiven. With his many years of experience as a data engineer, he has stories to tell and advice for data-wranglers everywhere. Francesco loves sharing knowledge with others as a speaker and writer, and is on a mission to defend the world from bad Italian food!

My corporate experience spans more than two decades across a number of multinational organisations. It has helped me to develop my organisational, communication and technical skills, as well as nuanced understanding of Business Intelligence, data integration, strategical analysis, machine learning and data insights. My technical and managerial skill have evolved from being a Developer to a Business Analyst then moving over to Data Integration Consultant, then a Data Engineer and finally, an Operations Lead.

In my current role as Operations Lead for Customer Insights Tech Family @DNB, I have worked towards setting up a Centre of Practice for Data Engineering and DataOps to enable DNB to work in a more streamlined way by setting up guidelines, standards, best practices, design patterns and bringing Data Engineers from across DNB on one collaboration platform. Also, my role as Senior Data Engineer provides me with the technical edge of new leading-edge technology and tools. Managing data as an enterprise asset and building trust in the data is a critical element and I am mindful about the importance of enriching the data with additional internal and external sources to provide analytics across the bank for actionable insight.

Joseph Arriola is Senior Data Manager at Yalo Chat and he is also the host of Big Data Guatemala Meet-up group. Joseph is passionate about technology related to the power of the data. His experience as an engineer started in development in different languages and he later found interest in how technology met business with data, so he migrated to the world of analytics. Joseph chats with us about chatbots, Tensorflow models, and the handoff between his engineering team and the data science team.

Banjo is a Senior Research Engineer at Two Six Technologies, where he develops platform solutions for productizing various researched-based projects. Banjo is passionate about operationalizing data and has started a podcast, a meetup, and open-source projects around utilizing data. When not building the next big thing, Banjo likes to relax by playing video games especially JRPGs and exploring events happening around him.