DecisionCAMP-2016 Presenters

Biography

Charles is the CTO of Production Systems Technologies and a Strategic Advisor to Sparkling Logic. Charles has been involved with rule engines for decades. In the mid 1970’s he developed the Rete algorithm while a Ph. D. candidate at Carnegie-Mellon University. After graduating in 1979, he remained at Carnegie-Mellon on the research faculty, where he was co-principal investigator of a DARPA-funded project to develop special hardware for rule engines. In 1983, he co-founded Production Systems Technologies (PST) to continue research and development of rule engine technology. The primary business of PST is to customize and license rule engines for embedding in large systems. At PST he developed the more efficient Rete-II and Rete-NT versions of the Rete algorithm, as well as a parallel rule engine for handling high volume and high velocity data. Charles met his future wife, Diana, while at Carnegie-Mellon. Charles and Diana still live in Pittsburgh, PA. They have three children and two grandchildren.

Founder and co-chair of the annual bpmNEXT conference, Bruce Silver is a well-known consultant, industry analyst, and educator specializing in BPM. He is founder and Principal of BPMessentials, the world’s leading provider of BPMN training and certification, and methodandstyle.com. Author of BPMN Method and Style and DMN Method and Style, Dr Silver served on the OMG technical committees that developed the BPMN 2.0 and DMN 1.1 standards. Previously, he served on the board of directors of Captiva Software until its acquisition by EMC in 2005, and was Vice President and head of workflow and document management research at the industry analyst firm BIS Strategic Decisions (which became Giga Information Group, now Forrester Research). In the 1980s, he was engineering manager at Wang Labs in charge of one of the very first commercial document imaging and workflow systems. He holds Physics degrees from Princeton and MIT, and four patents in imaging and workflow. 

Alan is an authority in Decision Modelling and Decision Management, especially in the support and/or automation of organisational decision-making. With over 30 years experience in this field, he has been responsible for many projects at the forefront of current technology. He invented the "Decision Requirements Diagram" (DRD) which exposes the structure of a domain of decision-making, and developed Decision Requirements Analysis (DRA): a methodology for building and using such decision models. He is the author of "Knowledge Automation: How To Implement Decision Management in Business Processes" (Wiley), and a co-author of the OMG specification Decision Model and Notation (DMN).

Gary has been at Oracle since 1989. He invented Oracle's distributed transaction technology and received Oracle's first patent. He invented Oracle parallel query technology. Moving from database to middleware, Gary contributed to Java and XML based middleware technologies, including Weblogic, XML database, JAXB, security, fault-tolerance, SOA, web services, application integration, connectors and adapters, message oriented middleware and JMS, business rules, business processes (BPEL and BPMN), workflow management systems, object-relational mapping, domain-specific languages, Swing and JSP UI development. Gary contributed to standards including OMG Corba, J2EE (JMS, EJB), W3C RIF (co-author), and OMG DMN. Currently, Gary is an Architect for Oracle Process Cloud Service (BPMN, business rules, workflow, and more) and is leading the development of a Decision Modeling product based on OMG DMN. Gary invented the DMN FEEL language. He co-chaired the DMN standards committee, and co-authored the standard. 

 Alvin To is a Consulting Member Technical Staff from Oracle’s Process Cloud Service development team. At Oracle, he has worked on a wide range of PaaS development projects including BPMN and Human Workflow PaaS platforms, cloud­based security, PaaS­to­PaaS integration and Decision Modeling Service. Prior to Oracle, he was a staff engineer at Siebel working on Siebel Workflow and Task Services. Alvin holds a masters degree and a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Michigan.

Jan Vanthienen is professor of information management at K.U. Leuven (Belgium), Business Information Systems Group, where he is teaching and researching on business rules and business intelligence, information and knowledge management. The area of business rules modeling, validation and verification, and decision modeling has been his major area of research and expertise for many years

Chief Architect, IBM Decision Server

Dr. Jacob Feldman is CTO of OpenRules, a NJ corporation that created and maintains the highly popular Open Source Business Rules and Decision Management System commonly known as “OpenRules”(http://openrules.com). He has extensive experience in development and support of decisioning software using business rules, optimization, and machine learning technologies for real-­world mission-­critical applications. He is a frequent presenter at the major business rules and decision management forums. Jacob is also a Specification Lead for the JCP standard JSR-­331 "Constraint Programming API". 

Mr. Elbert is a Distinguished Data Scientist at GILT. He has been dealing with big data for over 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 pushed innovative data analysis to new frontiers. As VP of Quantitative Analytics for Barnes & Noble Mr. Elbert used a plethora of data to offer his customers a unique in-store and digital experience. Having joined Gilt.com as Principal Data Scientist, Mr. Elbert is supporting Gilt’s mission to create the most exciting, curated shopping experience that helps company’s customers find and express their style.

http://gilt.com

Tom Debevoise is the Chief Evangelist for Business Decision Management of Signavio. Tom is a leading authority in Business Decision Management (BDM), BPM and Business Rules. He has experience providing next-generation solutions in DMN and BPM. Tech experience in the domains of Financials, Petroleum Logistics, Pharmaceutical, and Industrial Manufacturing. He has modeled decisions and processes for such agencies as the Navy, the Defense Logistics Agency, and for large corporations in the areas of finance, supply chain planning, security and next-generation power systems. Tom is the author of three books including "The MicroGuide to Process Modeling and Decision Modeling in BPMN/DMN”.

Most recently, Will has been responsible for launching Berlin based Signavio GmbH's SaaS business in the US. Prior joining Signavio, Will has held senior management roles at Twiki, Rackable Systems (SGI), Penguin Computing, and Nominum. Will has also worked as a member of Ericsson's International Procurement Office helping to establish software license and partnership agreements for the leading wireless infrastructure provider. His interest in process optimization and business decision management provides a common link across multiple operating roles including Sales, Quality, Customer Service, and Manufacturing.

Larry Goldberg is an evangelist for Sapiens DECISION, and as a member of the senior management team is responsible for all products in the Sapiens Decision company. He was Co-founder and Managing Partner of Knowledge Partners International LLC, acquired by Sapiens Decision, and has over forty years of experience in building technology based companies on four continents. Commercial applications in which he played a primary architectural role include such diverse domains as banking, healthcare, supply chain, property & casualty insurance, and enterprise modeling tools. He has been the business lead and/or business sponsor on many major projects in both the public and private sector, and is a trusted adviser to senior executives from major corporations. Larry is a leading international authority on business requirements, and is the co-author of the best-selling book “The Decision Model: A Business Logic Framework Linking Business and Technology” (Auerbach, New York 2009). 

Benjamin Grosof is CTO, CEO, and co-founder of Coherent Knowledge, a software-centric startup that is commercializing a major research breakthrough in logic-based artificial intelligence combined with natural language processing.  He is an industry leader in the theory and practice of how to reason with, and acquire, logical knowledge.  He has pioneered semantic technology and industry standards for rules combined with ontologies, their acquisition from natural language, and their applications in finance, e-commerce, policies, e-learning, life science, defense intelligence analysis, legal regulations, and security/privacy.  He co-founded the influential standards design body RuleML and has had driving roles in W3C’s RIF and OWL-RL.  Previously he was senior research program manager in advanced AI at Vulcan Inc. for Paul G. Allen, MIT Sloan professor, and IBM Research scientist.  He has extensive experience in user interaction design, and in combining logical methods with machine learning and probabilistic uncertainty.  His background includes a part-time expert consulting practice, a Harvard BA, a Stanford PhD, over 60 refereed publications, 2 patents, and 5 major industry software products.

Dr. Janine Bloomfield (Director of Marketing & Operations) has experience in knowledge engineering; marketing, writing, and website development, for research and non-research audiences; Janine Bloomfield small-business administration; education, including teaching and curriculum development; data analysis and statistics; and scientific research in life sciences. She is a mindfulness educator for students, teachers, and parents. Previously in her career, she was a senior scientist, on global climate change, at Environmental Defense Fund, one of the most influential USA environmental non-profits. There, she did science communications at national and international level, including: national media; state and federal policy advising; and science curriculum development. She authored a series of influential white papers, op-eds, and web material. Before that, she was a researcher on acid rain at US Forest Service. She received a MS in biology from Stanford University, and a PhD in ecosystem ecology from Yale University.

James is a Senior BRMS Consultant/Architect for Business Rules Management Systems. He has a deep understanding of how to design and implement rule-based systems (BRMS, aka, Decision Management Systems) and wide-ranging experience in migrating legacy applications to BRMS. He also has years of experience in migrating rule-based applications between product versions. He has extensive expertise in rulebase performance metrics and benchmarks and has published many papers and articles in InfoWorld as well as refereed national academic journals on all of these topics and on BRMS applications in particular. He can be contacted at jco_kbsc@icloud.com

Mark is co-creator of Drools and Red Hat Platform Architect

Klaus Mueller received a PhD in computer science from the Ohio State University. He is currently a professor in the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University and is also an adjunct scientist in the Computational Science Initiative at Brookhaven National Labs. His current research interests are visualization, visual analytics, data science, medical imaging, and high-performance computing, He won the US National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2001 and the SUNY Chancellor Award in 2011. Mueller has authored more than 170 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, which have been cited more than 6,500 times. He is a frequent speaker at international conferences, has participated in numerous tutorials on various topics, and was until recently the chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Visualization and Computer Graphics. He is also back on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics and he is a senior member of the IEEE. For more information, please see http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~mueller

Shenghui Cheng is a fourth year PhD candidate at Visual Analytics and Imaging (VAI) Lab, Computer Science Department, Stony Brook University, USA. His advisor is Prof. Klaus Mueller. Also he is a guest researcher at Computational Science Initiative, Brookhaven National Lab, USA with Prof. Wei Xu. Over the past 5 years he has developed a number of interactive high-dimensional visualization systems, some of them in frequent use at collaborating institutes in the US, Asia, and Europe, where he was a visiting research scientist at several occasions. His primary research interest includes visual analytics, information visualization and scientific visualization with a special focus on high-dimensional and multivariate data. Specifically, he worked on high dimensional data layouts (embeddings), time-series data visual analytics, geospatial data visual analytics, social and supercomputing network/graph visual analytics, bioinformatics etc. For more information on Shenghui’s diverse research projects see http://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~shecheng/.  Shenghui is a student member of the IEEE and can be reached at shecheng@cs.stonybrook.edu.