Dr. Charles “Chaz” Daly has served with the CIA since October 2002, entering duty as a Project Management Engineer in the National Reconnaissance Office. Chaz is the incoming Chief of the CIA Human Language Technology (HLT) Program Office and an Executive Expert on East Asia Open Source in the Directorate of Digital Innovation’s Open Source Enterprise. Previously, he enlisted in the USAF in 1975 and was a Chinese and Korean linguist. Dr. Daly was commissioned in 1988 and supported test launches of Minuteman and Peacekeeper missiles. Before retiring as a Major from the USAF in 2002, Chaz specialized in satellite communications and information warfare, developed payload technologies for the NRO, and supported NRO payload initializations. After retiring, he briefly worked as an imaging scientist for the Boeing Company.
Chaz has a BS in Electrical Engineering (EE) from Texas A&M University, an MS in EE from the USAF Institute of Technology, and Ph.D. in Imaging Science from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Dr. Daly co-authored numerous papers on ultrasonic imagining and a book entitled Scalar Diffraction from a Circular Aperture. In terms of HLT, Chaz considers himself a self-taught localization engineer and holds a certificate in Post-editing of Machine Translation from TAUS and another in Global Digital Marketing and Localization from the Localization Institute.
Anne Lapkin has 30 years of experience helping companies extract value from information, and she uses her deep understanding of enterprise information issues to guide Smartlogic’s product and communication strategies. Before joining Smartlogic, Anne spent 10 years as a research vice president at Gartner, where she managed the information management research agenda and was responsible for all Gartner research on big data, information management and governance, information infrastructure, data quality and data integration. She studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and speaks fluent Hebrew and English and enough French to order her dinner and keep up with the news.
Dr. Philippe Loustaunau is a Scientific, Engineering and Technical Assistant (SETA) at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). He has a Ph.D in mathematics.
James earned a Ph.D in Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on numerical, statistical, and streaming algorithms for data analysis. The applications include complex networks, online media, and observational medical data. James is a core maintainer of the Julia Package LightGraphs for complex network analysis and is currently working at the Georgia Tech Research Institute on Data Analysis and High Performance Computing as applied to healthcare and social science problems. His work focuses on designing and developing large scale software for technical computing using optimization, statistics, and machine learning to analyze complex data such as cyber networks, financial networks, and online media.
Charlie Greenbacker is VP of Analytics at In-Q-Tel, an independent, non-profit, strategic investment firm that works to identify, adapt, and deliver innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the United States Intelligence Community. He specializes in artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, data science, unstructured data analytics, and geospatial applications. Charlie earned an MS in Computer Science from the University of Delaware, received a Blackfriars Fellowship to study at the University of Oxford as an undergraduate, and has co-authored over a dozen academic publications in peer-reviewed journals and research conference proceedings. A veteran of the United States Air Force, he served overseas in Iraq, Kuwait, and Spain, attaining the rank of Captain and receiving the Air Force Commendation Medal. Prior to joining In-Q-Tel, Charlie worked as a Data Scientist supporting the CIA, DIA, DARPA, and other elements of the defense & intelligence communities.
Andrew Merlino, currently the CEO of Pixel Forensics, has over 30 years of industry experience in operational software systems development and multimedia analytics. He has gained technical, business and management skills from companies large and small. While at Raytheon, he was part of Raytheon’s electronic part analysis program involving CAD/CAM and decision tree analysis. At MITRE Corporation, Andrew managed “Broadcast News Navigator”, breaking new ground in automated on-demand news processing. At Virage, he established and managed the Virage Advanced Technology lab in Massachusetts; building it into a successful, self funded research and product development organization. At BBN technologies, Andrew established and managed a successful and profitable image analysis group. Pixel Forensics was founded by Andrew and two others in 2007. Pushing technology in new exciting and innovative ways is a repeated career theme which continues as Andrew leads Pixel Forensics forward. His thirst for taking on new challenges and developing solutions that address complex challenges is a driving force behind Pixel Forensics.
Andrew’s training comes his education and participation at technical conferences. Andrew graduated with a B.S. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a M.S. in Computer Systems Engineering from Northeastern University. He currently holds 3 patents. As a recognized leader in his field, Andrew has attended and presented at numerous technical conferences. He has taken numerous business and management courses at Boston University as well as corporate seminars. Recently Andrew received an Outstanding Achievement in Entrepreneurship award from the University of Massachusetts.
Although he is proud of his career, he will tell you first hand that he is more proud of his accomplishments of his wife, two daughters and son.
Dion Wiggins, Omniscien Technologies’ CTO and Co-Founder, is a highly experienced ICT industry visionary, entrepreneur, analyst and consultant. He has comprehensive knowledge in the fields of software development, architecture and management, as well as an in-depth understanding of Asian ICT markets. He is an accomplished speaker and has a high media profile for his perceptive analysis of ICT in Asia Pacific.
Previously Dion was Vice President and Research Director for Gartner based in Hong Kong, where his research reports on ICT in China had a crucial impact on how the world views this market. Dion is also a well-known pioneer of the Asian Internet Industry, being the founder of one of Asia’s first ever ISPs (Asia Online in Hong Kong). In his role as consultant, Dion advised literally hundreds of enterprises on their ICT strategy.
John R. Frank, CEO of Diffeo, a Cambridge-based startup developing artificial agents that collaborate with you. The platform engages all aspects of your digital life, so our machine learning algorithms can see what you are studying and doing. The digital “sensors” enable our unique collaborative machine learning algorithms.
Diffeo’s first application is an AI-powered research assistant that works with you in familiar tools such as Chrome and Microsoft Outlook. Diffeo uncovers new connections from disparate sources, including the Internet and private data stores. The Diffeo agent is augmenting decision makers in operations teams and analyst teams of businesses and the most critical government institutions across the world.
John is an entrepreneur and theoretical physicist with a long-standing interest in improving how people digest complex information. In 1999, John founded MetaCarta, which pioneered map-based search with statistical natural language processing that helps people find everything written about any place. Nokia acquired MetaCarta in 2010. John served as Chief Architect for Search at Nokia until 2012 when he founded Diffeo with two other Hertz Fellows from MIT. John is ABD at MIT in soft condensed matter physics where his research focuses on understanding how curvature influences chemical reactions and patterns on membranes. John holds a B.S. in physics with distinction from Yale University where he led Yale’s first solar car team.
Dr. Catherine Havasi is CEO and co-founder of Luminoso, an AI based, natural language understanding company in Cambridge. Luminoso was founded on nearly a decade of research at the MIT Media Lab on how NLP and machine learning could be applied to text analytics. Catherine also directs the Open Mind Common Sense Project, one of the largest common sense knowledge bases in the world, which she co-founded alongside Marvin Minsky and Push Singh in 1999.
Chris leads the U.S. Public Sector team at Basis Technology, working with government customers to meet their text analytics and digital forensics mission needs using Basis software and services. He holds a BS in Mathematics from the US Naval Academy and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. After flying with the US Navy as an F-14 Tomcat RIO (Radar Intercept Officer), Chris founded a sales-enablement software company and then worked delivering Public Sector solutions with search and database software at Verity, Autonomy, MarkLogic, and MongoDB.