Andy Edmonds is a Distinguished Product Manager at eBay in mobile and local, having driven innovations in search at eBay for the last years. He's been developing the internet based experiences for almost 20 years and was trained in cognitive psychology.

Balaji Thiagarajan is currently vice president, cloud computing at Motorola Mobility. Mr. Thiagarajan oversees research, development and operations of Motorola’s Cloud Platform and Services. His global team of engineers and scientists deliver cloud based applications and services for millions of smart phone customer’s worldwide. As a developer of cloud based data and business intelligence systems, Mr. Thiagarajan dedicated the last decade developing cloud services for on demand storage and business intelligence at Microsoft and Yahoo in the realm of email, search and display advertising systems that serve over half a billion customers. A holder of multiple patents, Mr Thiagarajan has a MS in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University and an MBA in Finance and Operations from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Deepak Agarwal currently leads a group of scientists at LinkedIn responsible for improving relevance of LinkedIn products through large scale machine learning, data mining and statistics. His main focus is computational advertising, feed recommendation and content recommendation. Previously, as Director of Research at Yahoo! he deployed algorithms that improved CTR on www.yahoo.com by 300% and power Yahoo!'s well known Content Optimization Knowledge Engine (C.O.K.E). He also deployed response prediction algorithms that significantly improved performance for Yahoo!'s RightMedia Ad Exchange. He has published extensively in top-tier conferences and journals. Deepak's number one passion is to bridge the gap between academic research and industrial practice.

Saurin Pandya is currently Director, Analytics at Expedia, the world's leading online travel provider and leads a global team of business analysts. In his role, Saurin provides decision support to Expedia Worldwide Global Product Development team, US business, Australia and New Zealand business and Strategy and Operation leadership. Saurin Joined Expedia in Feb’ 2006 and has excelled in various decision support roles including decision support manager/statistical modeler. Saurin has expertise in web/site, product, marketing, merchandising and customer analytics. In addition, he has great experience of advanced statistical modeling. Saurin’s research paper titled “Volatility of Stock Returns: Emerging and Mature Markets”. Analyzing and Comparing Various Characteristics of Emerging Stock Exchanges With Those of Matured Stock Exchanges Through EGARCH (Exponential Generalized Autoregressive Conditionally Heteroscedastic) Model And VAR (Vector Auto Regression) Analysis” was published in special issue of reputed Managerial Finance Journal. Saurin earned a bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from Gujarat University, India and a MBA from the Rutgers University.

Ken Johnston is a frequent presenter, blogger, and author on software testing and services. Recently he joined the Windows App Store as the Principal Test Manager. Prior to joining Windows he worked in Microsoft’s Bing search service on various features including Cosmos, AutoPilot, Shopping, and Local/Maps data. Since joining Microsoft in 1998 Johnston has filled many other roles, including test lead on Site Server and MCIS and test manager on Hosted Exchange, Knowledge Worker Services, Net Docs, MSN, Microsoft Billing and Subscription Platform service, and Bing Infrastructure and Domains. Johnston has also been the Group Manager of the Office Internet Platforms and Operations team (IPO) and for two and a half years (2004-2006) he served as the Microsoft Director of Test Excellence. He earned his MBA from the University of Washington in 2003. His is a co-author of “How we Test Software at Microsoft” and contributing author to “Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation.” For more information contact him through twitter @rkjohnston.

Anna Smith is a resident data scientist at bitly in New York while being in absentia from the University of Oregon physics doctorate program. Recently, she has published in both Forbes and Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. Her interests include manipulating data, running marathons up mountains, and catching up on the latest celebrity gossip.

Linda Tai heads marketing analytics and testing at YouSendIt, a file collaboration start-up company. While there, she has created a testing and web analytics infrastructure from the ground up, and utilizes her expertise in subscription offerings to integrate web analytics data with transactional datamarts. Prior to YouSendIt, Linda led marketing analytics and datamart teams at Intuit, Yahoo! and Genealogy.com. In her previous career as advisory engineer at IBM, Linda focused on disk drive manufacturing failure analysis to optimize the manufacturing test process. Linda holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from University of Michigan and University of California, Berkeley.

As Senior Director of Informatics, Steven has responsibility to transform Big Data into actionable l business information using advanced statistical analytics. Steve collaborates with internal teams to develop new solutions, enhance product capabilities and conduct customer data analytics projects. Steven comes to SocialWellth most recently from Wellness & Prevention Inc., a Johnson and Johnson Company, where he was the Director of Outcomes Research and Data Analytics. Prior to that, he was the Director of Corporate Research at HealthMedia Inc., a Principal at C3 Technologies, LLC and has held various clinical and teaching positions at University of Michigan and University of Michigan Medical Center. Steven earned his Ph.D. in Clinical/Health Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University, his M.A in Experimental Psychology from The College of William and Mary and his B.A. in General Psychology from Wayne State University.

Frank is the Sr. Director of Risk Management at Paychex, a leading provider of payroll, human resource, and benefits outsourcing solutions for small- to medium-sized businesses. Fiorille has over 20 years experience in risk management and credit and joined Paychex in 2002 to lead the company’s initiative to build an enterprise wide risk apparatus. Before joining Paychex he spent four years with PNC Financial and twelve years with Citigroup. He is a graduate of the inaugural 2007 class at the Wharton Business School advanced risk management program. He is credited for leading successful projects to build the first risk and retention models in the educational lending and payroll outsourcing industries.

Nellwyn Thomas is an analyst on the Data team at Etsy, where she works closely with product, engineering, and senior management to scout, build, instrument and improve Etsy’s product portfolio. Before Etsy, she worked on analytics and product teams at two small NYC area start-ups. Nell is a graduate of Harvard College, and holds a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Yan Chow is Director of Kaiser Permanente Information Technology’s Innovation & Advanced Technology Group (IAT), which assesses new and emerging clinical information technologies at the Garfield Innovation Center, an advanced simulation laboratory. He has had a successful clinical practice for over two decades as well as managed regional IT systems. Dr. Chow has worked with startups in the Internet, health care technology, storage, and database spaces. He holds 3 U.S. patents and has been an author and invited speaker at industry conferences. Dr. Chow earned his A.B. from Harvard and his M.D. from the UC San Diego. In 2005 he received his MBA from UC Berkeley, where he graduated as valedictorian.

Nilesh Jain is Sr. Research Scientist with the Cluster Computing Architecture team in Intel Labs. His current research focus is on emerging frameworks for large-scale machine learning and big data analytics. His other research interests include systems architectures and technologies that improve scaling, performance, and power consumption of distributed parallel computing. Before joining Intel Labs in 2007, Nilesh spent 11 years working on various telecom and I/O technologies within Intel product groups and at a premier telecom research organization (C-DOT) in India. Nilesh was an open source contributor to Linux Standard Base (LSB).

David is Executive Editor of Sloan Management Review’s Innovation Hubs, which focus on management issues related to sustainability, analytics and social media. He is responsible for delivering online content and published outputs connected with MIT SMR’s hub work, and guiding the launch of new hubs. Prior to joining SMR, David was a senior researcher at Harvard Business School, where he worked closely with more than 100 senior level executives to produce dozens of case studies over a ten-year span. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Rochester.

Anand Venugopal or "AV" has been instrumental in building the Big Data Analytics consulting services practice at Impetus Technologies over the last three years. With a diverse 17 year long techno-business background in Telecom, Interactive entertainment and Hi-Tech industry verticals, AV with the rest of the Impetus team, has been helping IT and line-of-business executives in large enterprises understand and extract the enormous value embedded in their static and "in-motion" Big-Data assets.

As Vice President of Quantitative Analytics for Barnes & Noble, Igor Elbert is responsible for deep analytics on loyalty, customer behavior, sales and marketing program effectiveness. For more than 20 years, from calculating financial risk for Salomon Brothers to tracking movements of millions of items across the supply chain for major brands, Mr. Elbert Mr. Elbert pushed innovative data analysis to new frontiers. He was dealing with big data before it was 'big'. In his current position at Barnes & Noble Mr. Elbert uses a plethora of data to offer his customers a unique in-store and digital experience.

Drew Linzer is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Emory University, and a 2012-13 Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University. He received a Ph.D. from UCLA in 2008. A statistician and expert in public opinion, Dr. Linzer launched the website votamatic.org during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign, where he accurately forecasted the election outcome in all 50 states, as early as June. His published research has appeared in journals including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Political Science Review, Political Analysis, and Journal of Statistical Software. He is currently working on a new book, Measurement Models for Social Research. Follow him on Twitter @DrewLinzer.

Abhishek Gattani is the creator of Polaris – the search engine for the second largest eCommerce retailer in the world. At WalmartLabs, he heads a diverse group of product and engineering teams which build the next gen platforms for product search, store search, product discovery, and merchant insights to help manage and grow the eCommerce business on the web, mobile, and internationally. Previously, he was Director of Engineering at Kosmix (acquired by Walmart) where he created the Kosmix.com search engine and the social genome platform. Prior to Kosmix, he was the lead architect at Stryker and founder of two startups. Abhishek brings a strong background in big data, search relevance, social media, and computer vision; and has filed over 17 patents in these areas. Abhishek holds a Masters in Computer Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where he worked on visual pattern recognition.

Andrew Claster, Deputy Chief Analytics Officer for President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, helped create and lead the largest, most innovative and most successful political analytics operation ever developed. Andrew previously developed microtargeting and communications strategies as Vice President at Penn, Schoen & Berland for clients including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Ehud Barak, Leonel Fernandez, Verizon, Alcatel, Microsoft, BP, KPMG, TXU and the Washington Nationals baseball team. Andrew completed his undergraduate studies in political science at Yale University and his graduate training in economics at the London School of Economics.

Jeff Markham has been focused on application design and development in enterprise Java with the last few years focused on cloud and distributed development. Presently a Solution Engineer at Hortonworks, Jeff helps people realize the value of open source Hadoop.

Natasha Balac is the Director of Predictive Analytics Center of Excellence at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD encompassing many data mining projects including the Medical School, Smart Energy Grid, and Fraud detection. Natasha received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University with an emphasis in Machine Learning from large data sets. Previously, she has been working on mining, analytics and bioinformatics in the biotech industry. She has collaborated, managed and directed a number of large government, industry and research funded projects including the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, NSF and NIH funding agencies.

6+ years working experience in Business Intelligence, Predictive Analytics, Fraud Detection/Analytics/Operation, and Statistical Modeling across Financial , E-commerce, and now Social network industry. Now lead the business analytics team supporting the Hiring Solutions business line (50%+ LinkedIn's revenue), working with Sales/Product/Marketing/Operations with focus on developing end-to-end scalable analytic solutions.

Gagan is Terracotta’s Chief Evangelist. He has over 15 years of experience creating and implementing digital strategies for leading technology companies on six continents. His areas of expertise include business and IT transformation, enterprise architecture, e-commerce, and high traffic (1 billion users) web businesses. Prior to joining Terracotta, Gagan was a leader within Deloitte Consulting’s Digital practice where he led web-related projects for clients like Adobe, Agilent, Expedia, HP, McAfee, Seagate and Walmart, among others. Gagan also worked for software services providers Zensar and Network Programs in India for five years before moving to the US with IT consultancy Techspan. Gagan is a published author and speaker and who shares his knowledge at conferences and via blogs. He holds a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree from the renowned Delhi College of Engineering.

Khader Mohiuddin is a Big Data Solution Architect at Oracle. In his current role, Khader applies his 20 years of Enterprise Software, Hardware and Industry Consulting expertise to architect highly optimized solutions that solve the most complex business problems for customers. Khader is an expert in Information Architecture and has developed creative solutions for Oil & Gas, Utilities, Telecom, Finance and Auto Industries in the areas of Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Hadoop, NoSQLDB, Infrastructure Optimizations etc. Prior to Oracle, Khader worked at Accenture as a Business Transformation Architect focusing on private/public clouds, DbaaS, IaaS etc. Prior to Accenture, he worked at Sun Microsystems for 5 years as a Staff Engineer leading the effort of optimizing Oracle database and Oracle Enterprise Applications on the Sun Platform. He was part of the Exadata product during it’s initial conception as a Engineered system combining Oracle and Sun technologies. Before Sun, Khader had already worked at Oracle for 6 years as a Senior Engineer in the Database Performance group, where he won several competitive benchmarks against other database vendors.

Jamie de Guerre is VP Product at Topsy, a leader in providing real time analytics for the social web. In this role Jamie leads the definition of Topsy's products which enable customers to analyze several year's worth of data from the world's largest social networks. Prior to joining Topsy Jamie was Chief Technology Officer at Cloudmark, a global leader in messaging security for mobile, fixed and social networks. Jamie has spoken at numerous industry events and panels in the areas of social analytics, big data processing, real time data analysis, mobile security and threat vector analysis.

Derek Steer leads Business Analytics at Yammer, the enterprise social network. His work there has focused primarily on providing insights and building tools to support better focus and prioritization among Yammer's Sales and Marketing teams. Following Microsoft's recent acquisition of Yammer, Derek has been working to bring user behavioral analysis into Microsoft's sales process. Derek has worked on Facebook's Monetization Analytics team measuring the performance of new ad products and analyzing pricing in emerging markets, and at FTI Consulting measuring the economic impact of large mergers.