Speakers
The Call for Speakers closed February 1. You may still submit a proposal to present a 5 minute lightning talk-demo. Click here.
Brooke Aker, CEO, Expert System
Personal Bio: Brooke Aker is the CEO of Expert System USA, a leading semantic technology firm, and is a long standing speaker and writer in the areas of Competitive Intelligence, Knowledge Management and Predictive Analytics. Mr. Aker is a serial entrepreneur having formed both Acuity Software and Cipher Systems and was a member of the Intelligence practice at The Futures Group/Deloitte Consulting.
Mr. Aker earned a MA in Economics from Boston University and a BA in Economics from the University of Vermont.
Steve Alexander, Senior VP, Serendio
Steve Alexander began his career with IBM working in both engineering and sales positions and subsequently went on to start two technology firms providing consulting services to Fortune 1000 firms. Most recently, he was co-founder and CEO of Digital Focus, a technology development firm that designed and implemented large-scale enterprise applications for firms such as Fannie Mae, AOL, McKesson and OnStar. Digital Focus was acquired by Command Information in 2006. He holds BS and MS degrees in Chemical Engineering from Virginia Tech and is a member of the Young Presidents' Organization.
Seth Altman, Senior Consultant, Mark Logic Corporation
Seth Altman is a Senior Solutions Consultant at Mark Logic Corporation with a focus on customers in the Media vertical. Seth's professional experience spans a twelve-year career that has been focused primarily on content management, content delivery and content search platforms and applications. Seth holds a B.A. from Yale University and resides in Boston.
Tom Anderson, Founder and Managing Partner, Anderson Analytics
Tom H. C. Anderson is founder and managing partner of Anderson Analytics, the first market research firm to leverage natural language processing for ad-hoc market research. Anderson, who writes the Next Gen Market Research blog, has won several awards for refining text analytics methodologies from organizations such as ESOMAR and the ARF. Tom's firm is also leveraging text analytics in social media and has been called the "uncrowned father of Web 3.0 market research". In 2008 his firm was the first to analyze user data from a major social network (LinkedIn).
Shlomo Argamon, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology
Dr. Shlomo Argamon is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington, DC. He has been a Fulbright Fellow (Bar-Ilan University, 1994-96), and a Hertz Graduate Fellow (Yale University, 1990-94), and has consulted for a number of IT companies including AOL, Radcom, and Expert-Ease (now part of Thomson Reuters).
His current research focuses on the use of machine learning for functional analysis of natural language, with particular focus on questions of style, authorship, and sentiment. He has published nearly 100 peer-reviewed articles and is an editor of Computational Methods in Counterterrorism (Springer, 2009) and The Structure of Style (Springer, forthcoming).
Breck Baldwin, President, Alias-i
Breck Baldwin is the president of Alias-i, creators of LingPipe. LingPipe provides a suite of Java based Natural Language Processing tools for developers to build custom software for common linguistic tasks like sentiment analysis, entity extraction and classification.
Leslie Barrett, Consultant, LBTechconsulting
Leslie Barrett is the former Director of Language Technology at the Financial Times. Having worked on the sentiment analysis tool inside the Newssift search engine, she has extensively tested news-based sentiment performance. Her research interests in computational semantics also include the syntax and semantics of Opposition and Polarity. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from New York University.
Richard Brown, Global Business Manager, Machine Readable News, Thomson Reuters
Mr. Brown is the global business manager for the machine readable news program at Thomson Reuters, responsible for the NewsScope product portfolio, which includes its archive product, real-time feeds, and news analysis solutions. Prior to his current assignment, Mr. Brown co-founded and was the Chief Operating Officer at Foresight Research Solutions, LLC, a New York-based independent research firm and member of the NASD and SIPC. Prior to Foresight, Mr. Brown was a senior client manager for International Business Machines in New York. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Management and International Business from the Pennsylvania State University and an MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business.
Claire Cardie, Cornell University
Claire Cardie, PhD, is Professor at Cornell University's Department of Computer Science and is the Charles and Barbara Weiss Director of the Information Science program. Her primary research is in the area of natural language understanding and intelligent text processing, with the goal of developing algorithms and systems that will vastly improve a user's ability to find, absorb, and extract information from online text.
She holds a MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a BS in Computer Science from Yale University.
Claire is Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Jodange.
Jeff Catlin, CEO, Lexalytics
Jeff Catlin has over 15 years of experience in the fields of search, classification and text analytics products and services. He has held technical, managerial and senior management positions within a variety of companies including Thomson Financial and Sovereign Hill Software. Prior to the formation of Lexalytics, Jeff acted as the General Manager for the unstructured data group of LightSpeed Software where he was responsible for sales, marketing and development efforts for the Knowledge Appliance and iFocus products. Prior to joining LightSpeed, he was co-owner of PleasantStreet Technologies which produced a news-filtering product. Jeff graduated from UMass Amherst with a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1987.
Bernard Chung, Director of CRM Product Marketing, SAP Labs, LLC, SAP
Bernard Chung is a 15 year veteran in enterprise CRM software, covering exclusively on marketing solutions and technologies. Bernard is the Director of CRM Product Marketing at SAP Labs, LLC in Palo Alto, CA. , responsible for the global messaging and positioning of SAP CRM Marketing solutions. He started his career in database marketing at large financial institutions, including American Express and Wells Fargo. Prior to joining SAP, he was part of the product management team at PeopleSoft and also at Oracle. He holds a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Washington and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University.
Sally Church, EVP, Icarus Consultants
Sally is at heart a science geek with an uncanny ability to condense and distil vast amounts of information into simple, easily understood insights quickly and efficiently. She likes to make the essence of data sing loudly and clearly for customers. Sally’s early background in academic research and life science in physiology and biochemistry has been instrumental to her subsequent success in the Pharma industry, where she spent over 13 years at Sandoz and Novartis in the UK and US, operating in a variety of different roles in the organization through strategic planning, licensing, sales, new product development and marketing. Her particular interests are new targeted therapies and rational drug design based on a deeper understanding of the science and biology behind the disease. At Novartis Oncology US, Sally was responsible for new product development for over a dozen agents in early development, one of which she worked on from phase I to phase IV, including marketing of several approvals in liquid and solid tumours. The initial market launch was announced by the Secretary of Health and Human Sciences and appeared on the front cover of Time Magazine, becoming a poster child for novel cancer therapies.
Over the last six years, Sally has worked on numerous therapies for clients involving a variety of scientific and analytical approaches including marketing strategy, market entry, licensing evaluations, market research, landscape opportunity assessments, competitive intelligence and sentiment analysis using innovative data mining, social media monitoring and a variety of other analytical techniques. Sally is a strong believer in market driven organisations that have a deep and enduring focus on the customer, together with research to support strategic goals. For clients this means that true actionable market insights emanate from customer and consumer generated data and not subjective ideas that have little or no rationale as their basis. She believes that sentiment analysis will prove invaluable to Pharma and Biotech companies interested in a deeper understanding of physician, patient and consumer opinions about disease and treatment.
Ravi Condamoor, CEO, Serendio
Over the last 20 years, Ravi Condamoor has been an entrepreneur and technocrat, holding senior management and technical positions in numerous organizations and help shape the computing industry with innovative products and solutions. In 2006, Ravi established Svapas Innovations - a multi-disciplinary incubator to take cutting edge academic research-to-market. Serendio, a Text Analytics company, was the first company to come out of the Svapas Innovations incubator. In 2000, Ravi co-founded NehaNet, an On Demand CRM Solutions Company for the semi-conductor vertical and as Vice President of Engineering, managed all activities related to product development, deployment and support. Prior to co-founding NehaNet Corporation, Ravi held a variety of management and technical leadership roles at Portal Software, Oracle, Sybase and IBM. He has also served on the Oracle Corporate Architecture Review Board, World-Wide Web Consortium and Object Management Group standards efforts. Ravi holds several patents in E-Commerce and On-Line Trading systems and has publications in Distributed Computing and Graph Theory. Ravi holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from University Of Madras, a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas and has completed advanced work towards a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Laurel Earhart, Vice President, Business Development, SentiMetrix
Laurel Earhart is Vice President of Business Development for SentiMetrix in Washington DC. Prior to SentiMetrix, she worked in media business development, advertising, news and politics for America Online. Aside from her ad sales group achieving $0-2.7 billion in annual ad revenues in five years, her proudest accomplishment there is launching the Associated Press and Weekly World News on the service in the same week. She's also sold news feeds for Comtex, and was network administrator for a special BBS project with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Radio Free Europe for Sovietologists during the Cold War. She is fluent in Russian.
Nathan Gilliatt, Principal, Social Target
Nathan Gilliatt is the principal of Social Target, a research and consulting firm that helps companies establish social media and customer intelligence and analytics capabilities. He is one of the world leading experts on social media analysis and the author of the Guide to Social Media Analysis, the worldwide buyer's guide to tools and services for listening to social media. Nathan blogs at The Net-Savvy Executive and runs Social Media Analysis, the industry portal for social media intelligence and analytics.
Alec Go, Stanford Univ., Twitter sentiment
Alec is a Stanford graduate student in the Computer Science department, specializing in Artificial Intelligence.
Ole-Christoffer Granmo, Associate Professor; Research Fellow, University of Agder; Integrasco
Ole-Christoffer Granmo was born in Porsgrunn, Norway, in 1974. He obtained his M.Sc. in 1999 and the PhD degree in 2004, both from the University of Oslo, Norway. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of ICT, University of Agder, Norway. He is also a Research Fellow at Integrasco AS, Norway. His research interests include Intelligent Systems, Stochastic Modelling and Inference, Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition, Learning Automata, Distributed Computing, and Surveillance and Monitoring. He is the author of more than 40 refereed journal and conference publications.
Seth Grimes, Alta Plana
Symposium chair Seth Grimes is a leading authority on sentiment analysis. Seth is an analytics strategist with Washington DC based Alta Plana Corporation, founding chair of the Text Analytics Summit, and contributing editor at TechWeb's Intelligent Enterprise. He covers text analytics for the BeyeNETWORK.com. Seth consults, writes, and speaks on business intelligence, data management and analysis systems, text mining, visualization, and related topics.
Ian Hersey, CTO, Attensity
Bradley Honan, Senior Vice President, StrategyOne
Bradley Honan is Senior Vice President in StrategyOne’s New York City offices. At StrategyOne Bradley’s core responsibilities include integrating research, insights, and analysis into client’s business strategy as well as helping clients develop and refine business and communications strategy using public opinion surveys. Bradley has extensive experience using a wide range of research tools for clients including; brand positioning and brand tracking, messaging, corporate reputation, customer targeting, crisis management, demographic and attitudinal segmentation as well as advertising copy testing and advertising tracking. Prior to joining StrategyOne in July 2009, Bradley was a Vice President with the research firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (PSB), a firm where he worked for nearly a decade.
Justin Langseth, President & CTO, Clarabridge, Inc.
Justin Langseth is President & CTO of Clarabridge, Inc. Clarabridge offers text and sentiment analytics software and hosted solutions to companies such as AOL, Capital One, Choice Hotels, Expedia, Intuit, Marriott, United Airlines, Walmart, and Walgreens.
Daniel Mayer, Product Marketing Manager, TEMIS
Daniel Mayer is Product Marketing Manager at TEMIS, where he is responsible for driving market awareness for the Luxid® text mining and analytics product line and shaping customer insights into actionable product requirements. He has more than a decade of experience helping high-tech companies productize their technologies and effectively position their products in the global IT marketplace. Prior to joining TEMIS in 2009, Daniel Mayer spent five years at storage solution manufacturer LaCie as Business Unit Manager. He holds Masters degrees in both Computer Science and Business Administration from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications and HEC School of Management, France.
Brad McCormick, Executive Vice President and Director of Digital, Porter Novelli, Porter Novelli
Brad B. McCormick has spent the past decade leading teams in the creation of best-in-class, award winning online communication solutions for top-tier clients in a variety of industries. He joined Porter Novelli as Executive Vice President of US Digital Communications at Porter Novelli in August 2008. Prior to joining Porter Novelli, Mr. McCormick was a founding member of Ruder Finn Interactive, an award winning web boutique embedded within an independently owned global PR firm, where he oversaw the creation of Digital components of a number of high-profile national campaigns.
Fiona McNeill, Global Product Marketing Manager - Text Analytics, SAS Inc.
As global product marketing manager, Fiona McNeill oversees the product marketing of text analytics at SAS. During her 11 year tenure, she has helped organizations derive tangible benefit from their strategic use of technology. In addition to her work with a wide range of industries, McNeill has defined product strategy and corporate relationships at SAS, received multiple innovation awards, and was identified as a Pioneer and one of the Most Influential People by CRMPower, 2000. Before joining SAS, McNeill was a member of IBM Global Services. McNeill has published in academic journals, co-authored white papers, conducted education seminars and presented at both academic and industry conferences over the course of her career. She received her M.A. in Quantitative Behavioral Geography from McMaster University, and graduated cum laude with a B.Sc. in Bio-Physical Systems, University of Toronto.
Dave Naffis, Cofounder, Intridea, Inc.
Dave is the cofounder of Intridea and a classic Web 2.0 “hacker”. As lead Architect, and an expert Ruby on Rails developer, Dave heads the Intridea product development efforts. He is an active member of the Rails community and the author of numerous plugins. Before Intridea, Dave spent years at both AOL and IMAKE and received a Masters in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia. In other entrepreneurial ventures, Dave built and operated CanYouConnect – a social-networking site that competed with MySpace – and Connexon Media – a Rails consultancy. Dave also helped found the Washington DC Ruby User Group.
Stephanie Noble, President, Paden Noble Consulting
Stephanie Noble, Paden Noble founder, is a Portland, Oregon native now calling New Jersey home. Stephanie is a NJ Technology Council member, speaker at events, and published author with articles in Garden State Woman, NJ Tech News and featured in GO!'s January 2010 issue on web analytics and social media measurement. Graduate of Prudential's Entrepreneur Program, attended Seton Hall University, and now Rutgers, she is an accomplished social media entrepreneur. To better connect clients with the right tools, Stephanie ensures her company boasts first hand expertise with many social media measurement and web visibility systems, thus being hi-tech and hi-touch.
Greg Radner, Global Head of PR Services, Thomson Reuters
As Global Head of PR Services, Greg is responsible for developing solutions for public relations professionals that streamline and simplify their workflow, increase the effectiveness of their media outreach, and help them analyze perceptions among their key stakeholders.
Greg joined Thomson Reuters from CCBN, where he was VP of Marketing and drove the development of marketing strategies and programs targeted to the Investor Relations departments of public companies and to portfolio managers and analysts at major institutional investment firms. Prior to CCBN, Greg worked at FleetBoston Financial in Boston in marketing and product management positions for both the retail and business banking divisions. Greg has extensive experience in brand management, corporate communications, and business development. He is a graduate of Harvard University and received his MBA from The Wharton School.
Marshall Sponder, Social Media Analyst - Web Analyst, webmetricsguru.com AND Porter Novelli
Marshall Sponder is the founder of Webmetricsguru.com, an industry blog about Web Analytics, Social Media and Search Marketing. He writes a monthly column for Entrepreneur.com on leveraging online marketing technologies that help businesses succeed in a challenging economy.
Marshall maintains his own Analytics Consultancy, Now-Seo, and is an Emeritus Director of Social Media the Web Analytics Association. He currently consults for Porter Novelli as a Social Media Analyst and is active in the Social Media, Online Search and Web Analytics communities.
Mattias Tyrberg, CEO & Founder, Saplo
Mattias Tyrberg, 26, CEO Saplo, has studied Industrial Engineering and Management for four years and during his master's thesis he met Sverker Sikström with whom he started Saplo. He was awarded fourth place in the "Swedish top Entrepreneur" contest in 2009 by the news site InternetWorld. He has also been awarded the "Most Promising Young Entrepreneur" in southern Sweden, by Founders Alliance and came at 13th position in the "Most Inspiring Entrepreneur under 36", by news site Shortcut.
Suresh Vittal, Vice President & Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Suresh serves Customer Intelligence professionals. His research agenda focuses on enterprise marketing technologies, database marketing strategies, customer analytics, and technologies that make customer insight operational. Suresh helps marketing clients navigate the ever-changing marketing technology landscape and develop data-driven marketing strategies. In the past, Suresh has written about contact optimization, inbound marketing, marketing optimization, and the changing enterprise marketing software landscape.
Prior to joining Forrester in 2006, Suresh spent seven years as a consultant with SPSS. At SPSS, he focused on enabling marketing technologies at client companies. Suresh has successfully led the implementation of Web analytics, data mining, real-time marketing, campaign optimization, and enterprise predictive applications in financial services, travel, and pharmaceutical verticals. Prior to SPSS, Suresh worked at NetGenesis, a leading Web analytics provider, where he delivered Web analytics and measurement services to clients.
Suresh has an M.B.A. from Greenwich College, The University of Hull in the UK and an M.S. in computer information systems from Bentley College.
Karla Wachter, Senior Vice President, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide
SVP, Insight and Analytics practice and product development, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide Karla Wachter joined Waggener Edstrom Worldwide in 1999 and currently leads the company's Insight and Analytics practice and product development efforts, within the WE Studio D group. In this capacity, Karla is responsible for Waggener Edstrom Worldwide's family of insight and analytics tools, such as twendztm and twendz protm, and services across a spectrum of online and offline influence channels. Through a deep understanding of influence, the highly skilled researchers and analysts provide insight into Waggener Edstrom's client's audiences, brand awareness and perception and show the clear impact of communications campaigns on a company's brand through delivery of actionable insights and analysis. Prior to Karla's leadership in the WE Studio D group, she led Waggener Edstrom Worldwide's public relations efforts for multiple business groups on the Microsoft account.