Biography

Jean Staten Healy manages a marketing and business development organization with the responsibility for IBM Linux strategy across all company brands. In this role she coordinates the cross-company strategy for Linux including the achievement of revenue goals, ensures rapid response to changes in the market environment and acts as the IBM spokesperson in the Linux space.

Prior to her current position, Ms. Staten Healy was the Director of Marketing Strategy in the IBM Software Group, Director of Business Development and Regulatory Affairs in the IBM Systems and Technology Group, Director of Innovation Initiatives at IBM Corporate Headquarters, and the IBM Customer Advocate in the Office of the Chairman and CEO. In addition, she has held management positions in the IBM Global Services Group. Ms. Staten Healy has lived and worked in Asia.

She holds a M.A. degree in theoretical linguistics and a J.D. with a certificate of concentration in International Law. Ms. Staten Healy is licensed to practice law in the States of New York and Connecticut and is a published author on various legal topics.

Biography

Conor Allen is Global Head of Research and Development at NYSE Technologies, the commercial technology division of NYSE Euronext. In this role, Conor is responsible for identification, evaluation and application of new and emerging technology to the commercial technology business.

In 2010, Conor launched the NYSE Technologies Technical Advisory Group, a set of senior and influential technologies focused on the global capital markets technology. Conor was instrumental in the creation, development and launching of the NYSE Technologies Data Fabric: a multi-transport shared memory based messaging system that provides breakthrough messaging performance in terms of latency and throughput leveraging the capabilities of the latest generation in networking technology.

Conor holds a BEng in Aeronautical Engineering and an MSc in Computer Science from Queen's University of Belfast.

Biography

Tom Befi is Vice President of Information Systems Services at Insurance Services Office, Inc. Mr. Befi is responsible for ISO IT Infrastructure, Operations and Customer Technical Support.

Mr. Befi has worked at Insurance Services Office, Inc. for more than twenty years holding positions of increasing responsibility.

He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry New York.

Biography

As part of the Watson/Deep QA project, Edward Epstein is responsible for scaling out Watson's computation over thousands of compute cores in order to achieve the speed needed to be competitive in a live Jeopardy! game.

For the past seven years, Mr. Epstein has been manager of the IBM team doing ongoing development of Apache UIMA. Originally an internal IBM Research project, Apache UIMA is an open source, highly scalable, multimodal framework used to create applications doing deep analysis of natural human language text and speech. Mr. Epstein also previously contributed as a Research Staff Member and manager to IBM's development of large vocabulary speech recognition technology.

Before coming to IBM, Mr. Epstein worked for Technicon Instruments on development of the first automated white blood cell differential system based on flow-through cytochemical analysis.

Biography

Vikram Mehta, president and CEO of BLADE Network Technologies, an IBM Company, is the driving force behind the company's growth and rapid global expansion, making BLADE one of the fastest growing companies in enterprise data center networking. Under his leadership, the company has attracted partners such as HP, IBM, Juniper Networks, NEC, Netezza and SGI, and closed a Series B financing for a valuation of $240M.

Vikram brings over 23 years technology industry experience, and has been at the helm of the company since its inception. He brokered the spin out of Nortel's Blade Server Switch Business Unit (BSSBU), establishing BLADE as an independent company in February 2006. Vikram came to Nortel in 2000 through its acquisition of Alteon Web Systems and there he laid the foundation for what became Nortel's BSSBU.

Prior to this, he spent 12 years at Hewlett-Packard in various management and executive positions in several countries across the Asia Pacific region and the US. His last position at HP was general manager Enterprise Servers, Americas Region, a $1B+ business.

In 2009, Vikram won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® award in the "Emerging" category for Northern California, and was subsequently honored as a National Finalist Winner and inducted into the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Hall of Fame. Vikram has been a frequent speaker at industry events and is often quoted by media and analysts.

He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology.