Lecturers

Research Assistant, Computer Systems Department, Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Short biography

Rok Hribar is a research assistant at Computer Systems department, Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia. His research focus is automatic differentiation of programs and gradient based optimization especially when applied to machine learning and large-scale optimization. He applied this methodology to various use cases including deep learning, time series forecasting, representation learning, clustering, deep reinforcement learning, simulation based optimization, similarity learning and others. His work also found applications in genetics, molecular dynamics, biomedical knowledge discovery, transportation, acoustics, logistics and others. He lead numerous lectures and workshops especially on the use of gradient based optimization in customized machine learning and in engineering and on the use of modern approaches in deep learning.

Associate professor, Faculty of electrical engineering and computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Short biography

Krešimir Pripužić is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia (UNIZG-FER), where he leads the Data Streams Laboratory. He has been affiliated with the Department of Telecommunications at UNIZG-FER since 2003.

He received his diploma degree in electrical engineering with a major in telecommunications and informatics from the UNIZG-FER in September 2003. In March 2005 he started his PhD studies at the UNIZG-FER, which he successfully finished in June 2010 by defending his dissertation. As a part of his PhD studies, he spent academic year 2006-2007 at the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), Switzerland, as a scholarship holder of the Swiss Government scholarship for university, fine arts and music schools for foreign students.

He has co-authored 40 scientific journal and conference papers. His main research interests are large-scale distributed systems, algorithms and data structures, big data analytics, data stream processing and internet of things.

Head of Computer Systems Department, University Computing Centre (SRCE), University of Zagreb, Croatia

Short biography

Emir Imamagić is a Head of Computer Systems Department of University of Zagreb University Computing Centre (SRCE). He is operations manager of HPC cluster Isabella and HTC Cloud platform that are provided to Croatian research community. As a member of international projects, he is developing and running monitoring system ARGO and participating in various operations activities.

He leads an activity in project Croatian Scientific and Educational Cloud (HR-ZOO) that will build new HPC and HTC Cloud infrastructures. He is also task leader in the project National Competence Centres in the framework of EuroHPC – EuroCC. He leads a team of SRCE experts team in the project EGI Advanced Computing for EOSC (EGI-ACE) and EOSC Future.

He graduated in 2004 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia.

Professor, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

Short biography

Prof. Veljko Milutinović (1951) received his PhD from the University of Belgrade, spent about a decade on various faculty positions in the USA (mostly at Purdue University), and was a co-designer of the DARPAs first GaAs RISC microprocessor. Later, for almost 3 decades, he taught and conducted research at the University of Belgrade, in EE, MATH, BA, and PHYS/CHEM. Now he serves as the Chairman of the Board for the Maxeler operation in Belgrade, Serbia. His research is mostly in datamining algorithms and dataflow computing, with the emphasis on mapping of data analytics algorithms onto fast energy efficient architectures. For 7 of his books, forewords were written by 7 different Nobel Laureates with whom he cooperated on his past industry sponsored projects.

Dr. Milutinovic has over 40 IEEE journal papers, over 40 papers in other SCI journals (4 in ACM journals), over 400 Thomson-Reuters citations, and about 4000 Google Scholar citations. Short courses on the subject he delivered so far in a number of universities worldwide: MIT, Harvard, Boston, NEU, Columbia, NYU, Princeton, Temple, Purdue, IU, UIUC, Michigan, EPFL, ETH, Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, Napoli, Salerno, Siena, Pisa, etc. Also at the World Bank in Washington DC, Brookhaven National Laboratory, IBM TJ Watson, Yahoo NY, ABB Zurich, Oracle Zurich, etc.

Co-Founder and CTO at Tolar.io

Short biography

Josip Maričević is currently working as CTO at Tolar HashNET, developing next generation blockchain network. He was involved in researching blockchain and related consensus algorithms, atomic cross-chain swaps and of- chain settlement protocols for the past 4 years. Before that worked on systems for secure communication by implementing encrypted VoIP, chat, file transfer and storage solutions that was used by groups all over the world. Interested in general algorithm research and development. Worked for Shazam on application that implements Shazam song recognition technology to identify songs in your iPod library and play them with synchronized lyrics and visualizations. He has a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, with Graduate thesis “Geometry shaders” which studies and demonstrates different methods of shader linking and implementation, and their capabilities, especially focusing on geometry shaders application in real-time 3d geometry generation.

Director of Enterprise Computing for EMEA, Altair

Short biography

As Director of Enterprise Computing for the EMEA region, Chris has more than 20 years of experience working in the high-performance computing sector. He is responsible for the technical, sales and support teams which deliver our products and services to a wide range of customer industries, from Weather and Life Sciences to Automotive, Oil and Gas. Before joining Altair in 2018 Chris worked in the information technology & software industry both in a technical and sales capacity. His early career started in the Aerospace industry followed by 10 years in Motorsport and Formula 1 focusing on manufacturing and aerodynamics.

EMEA HPC Support Manager, Altair

Short biography

Alexander Franke has been a member of the Enterprise Computing business unit of Altair for more than 10 years and is responsible for support and services across EMEA. His focus is the workload management system PBS Professional and related products like Altair Access and Altair Control. He supports customers in many industry verticals and helps people with building a reliable layer for workload management, access to the infrastructure and automation for small and mid-size clusters as well as for the largest HPC centres in EMEA. He has a background in computer science.

Customer Support Manager, Altair

Short biography

Marco Donauer already started working with Grid Engine in the late 1990s, writing his Diploma Thesis in Computer Science at Sun Microsystems, later he joined the Sun Grid Engine Development Team as Software Engineer. Since then, he was continuously working with the team, working with Grid Engine as Core, Sustaining, Support Engineer, Trainer and meanwhile being the AGE/Navops Support Team Manager at Altair with an experience of over 20 years in HPC and Workload management.

Product Manager, Altair

Short biography

Ian Littlewood forms part of the Product Management team within Altair’s Enterprise Computing group. He spends his time focussing on automated cloud bursting workflows, user compute time budget management and workload management simulation tools which all form part of the Altair Control product. He joined Altair 20 years ago to work in the HyperWorks engineering simulation business in technical roles before moving to an HPC technical focus when Altair acquired PBS Professional. A series of customer facing roles from support and implementation through to solution architecture and training were undertaken before spending several years in sales. This broad experience of the business brought him to Product Management to bring his customer focus and technical knowledge together to help build future HPC solutions for Altair customers in partnership with engineering teams.

Technical Manager (UK and Nordics), Altair

Short biography

Adarsh Patil has been a member of the Enterprise Computing business unit of Altair for more than 10 years and is responsible for technical support and services across UK and Nordics, focussed mainly on presales, implementation, customisation, and support of PBS Works Suite in both on premise and cloud environments. He has experience in supporting workload management systems on bare metal systems ranging from commodity off-the-shelf clusters to supercomputers and public cloud environment. He has experience working with customers across various industry verticals incl. auto, aero, biosciences, energy, research, and education. He has a background in Computer Science and Engineering.

Senior Director, Cloud Solution, Altair

Short biography

Rick Watkins joined Altair in 2006 in a commercial development role and has worked across the spectrum of Altair interests for many years. These interests include customer development of oil and gas exploration simulation and HPC use across the Americas and as domain specialist for Altair globally. In the latter part of his career with Altair, Rick turned his focus to HPC full-time, leading the ongoing development of Altair HPC Appliances and Cloud bursting offerings. In this regard Rick works closely with large compute providers both for physical and cloud hardware and has built up a wealth of experience in how to configure a compute appliance with simplicity of use in mind in equal shares for end-users, system administrators and procurement managers of such systems.

Vice President Business Development - Engineering Analytics

Short biography

Experienced Vice President Of Global Business Development with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. Skilled in Data Analytics, Marketing Management, Business Planning, Innovation Management, Market Analysis, and Manufacturing. Strong research professional graduated from Politecnico di Torino. Experience on product development process, with experience on data analytics management, Machine Learning workflows, product costs, weight and balance control of complex products

Vice President, Engineering Data Science · Altair

Short biography

Fatma Kocer’s talent for leading engineering machine learning strategy and building teams led to her promotion to vice president at Altair. Education: Doctor of Philosophy in Mechanical Engineering, University of Iowa.

Sr. Director Product Management, Data Analytics

Short biography

Sabina Stanescu since the beginning of her carrier worked on Data Analysis, starting from Markering analysis, Data Mining for Text Analytics and developed experiences leading R&D teams that Identifying areas of business where ML can improve business outcomes, and Implementing Proof of Concept ML Projects, including segmentation, classification and regression problems. She is now Serione Direct of Product Management Data Analytics at Altair. Education: Doctor of Science, Biology and Psychology at Univ. Of Toronto and M.SC Biology at University of Guelph.

Solution Specialist for Data Analytics at Altair Engineering

Short biography

At his job at Altair Engineering, Jakob is focusing on introducing data analytics solutions to new industries and companies. Jakob is working with preparing data, making predictions using AI/Machine Learning and visualizing data to help out clients in a wide variety of projects. Jakob started his career at the European Space Agency where he wrote is master thesis on micro-gravity fluid dynamics and using open-source AI-libraries to analyze the data. He also has a background in research, consulting and Sales. Jakob lives in Lund, Sweden with his girlfriend and likes to ride motorcycles in his free time.

Full Professor of Physics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Short biography

Manuel Delfino Reznicek (male, born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1956) is Full Professor of Physics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He is also a Senior Scientist at the Institut de Física d'Altes Energies (IFAE) working at the Port d'Informació Científica (PIC). He currently works on Data Archiving and Preservation for the MAGIC Telescopes and with the EU Pre-Commercial Procurement project ARCHIVER. He is the founding Director of PIC. He led the Information Technologies Division of CERN from 1999 to 2002, helping to incorporate the LHC Computing Grid into the CERN Research program and to launch what is now known as the European Grid Infrastructure. Prof. Delfino has a Bachelor's Degree in Applied Mathematics, Engineering and Physics, a Master's Degree in Physics and a Ph.D. in Physics with a minor in Computer Science, all from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His Ph.D. thesis made fundamental contributions to electroweak physics using the MAC detector at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). He has made significant contributions to large-scale scientific data processing and computing in the context of the MAC detector at SLAC and the ALEPH detector and the RD-47 project at CERN. He has served as member of many committees on computing and, recently, as chair of the IceCube Scientific Computing Advisory Panel and the European Gravitational Observatory External Computing Committee.

Sr. Deep Learning Data Scientist at NVIDIA

Short biography

Miguel Martínez is a senior deep learning data scientist at NVIDIA, where he concentrates on RAPIDS (machine learning) and Merlin (Deep Recommender Systems). Previously, he mentored students at Udacity's Artificial Intelligence Nanodegree. He has a strong background in financial services, mainly focused on payments and channels. As a constant and steadfast learner, Miguel is always up for new challenges.

Deep Learning data scientist at NVIDIA

Short biography

Meriem Bendris is a senior solution architect at NVIDIA France focusing on natural language processing and conversational AI. She supports NVIDIA partners and customers delivering AI - Deep Learning solutions. She has a Ph.D in Signal & Image at Telecom ParisTech France, focused on Machine Learning applied to audio-visual biometric systems.

Ph.D. candidate at School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade

Short biography

Milos Kotlar is a Ph.D. candidate at School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade. His general research field includes implementation of machine learning algorithms using the dataflow paradigm (FPGA and ASIC accelerators). It also includes meta learning approaches for anomaly detection used in AutoML frameworks.