CONFERENCE SPEAKERS

Richard Self worked in the aerospace sector for thirty years supporting the business with innovative approaches to the use of analytics to model aspects of decision forming and making.

He then made the transition into academia in 2002, where he now has small teams of Undergraduate and Masters students researching to identify the best frameworks of questions for developing strategies for the governance of analytics and data in order to deliver ethical and trustworthy business solutions.

Richard was co-chair of the IBM sponsored Big Data Analytics Educational Conferences between 2014 and 2018.

Richard is a regular invited keynote speaker at UK and international business conferences where he always provides the audience with the important questions for evaluating their business needs and technologies.

A prolific inventor and cyber security & digital identity executive with an “art of possible” mindset who led global teams to secure world class organizations including American Express, Visa, PayPal and is credited with 95+ patents issued and pending. Upendra is the Chief Security Officer of Snap Finance, a leading omnichannel digital first fintech and POS lender, where he leads cyber security while building new platforms to enable growth opportunities. This includes securing innovative multi-cloud platforms and products, Artificial Intelligence, client-facing technology, and customer and developer experiences. He is a regular speaker at esteemed conferences for Stanford University, Global Big Data Conference, NFC forums, European Identity Conference, KNOW Identity Conference, Global Retail Conference in Canada, IOT conference and others. Featured in Genius Journal, he helped pioneer blockchain in Amex and filed patents on blockchain and DLTs. He and his team worked on IOT security and payments and participated in several industry standard bodies like EMV,Global Platform, PCI-DSS, FIDO, etc. He is an advisory board director for select security startups and helps venture capitalists evaluate companies. He holds an MBA from Santa Clara University, California and Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from VNIT, Nagpur, India. He is credited with 95+ patents issued and pending and has received awards for innovation and leadership.

Steve Ennen leads the market analytics and intelligence unit for West Pharmaceutical Services, Inc., a global designer and manufacturer of injectable pharmaceutical packaging and delivery systems. Steve's journey to data and analytics began in earnest at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania where he and academic colleagues launched the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, a global research center that served students, academics, and corporate partners in advanced data analytics and infrastructure. While there, Steve built curriculum for and instructed MBA programs and executive education programs, while also advising global corporations on data-driven transformation. From Wharton, Steve helped launch a social media, data and analytics company called SocialStrategy1, serving as president and chief intelligence officer before moving on as a contract, data transformation executive for a number of global companies. Steve was also the Chief Digital Strategy Officer for MJH Associates, North America’s largest healthcare education, media, research and marketing operation.

Tony is an experienced Big Data executive with more than 25 years of global professional services experience in the areas of performance marketing, big data and analytics, information governance, customer relationship management, and program management. He has significant work experience in the financial services, life sciences, retail, and automotive sectors. He has extensive international experience in Belgium, Australia, China, England, France, Thailand, Turkey, and Japan. He is a Senior Partner and is currently IBM’s Global Data Platform Services Practice Leader.  He has functioned in various roles, including positions such as Senior Partner, Executive Vice-President, Service Line Leader, and Financial Services Practice Partner. Academic qualifications include; a Masters in Business Administration in Accounting and Bachelor of Computer Information Systems Degree. He  has multiple certifications in Information Management, a patent in Data Integration Modelling, and two books on Information Management.

• An industry thought-leader with extensive experience in Enterprise Information Management, MDM, Data Warehousing, Big Data & Analytics

• Winner of Gartner’s Excellence Award in Enterprise Information Management
• Frequent speaker on trends in data and advanced analytics topics at Gartner, IDMA, Informatica World, TDWI and others.

• Mehdi is a technical thought leader with a track record for delivering large complex projects. Mehdi’s expertise is sought after to turn around distressed or difficult projects, that require a new way of looking at problems and designing solutions for them.
• Mehdi is a strategic innovator constantly looking at pushing the technical boundaries to solve business problems. As a strong Open-Source advocate, Mehdi is constantly experimenting with new technologies with a value potential to clients. This requires a unique combination of a deep understanding of software vs the risk/return ratio for clients.
• Mehdi has deep Retail, Travel & CP industry expertise. He worked with many global retailers and distributors worldwide on mission critical projects such as data platforms, point of sale, eCommerce and analytics implementations.
• Mehdi is well versed into Information Security Cloud architectures and has delivered projects with a security-first approach, encompassing technical design, people and processes.

• Kimberly Mosley, CAE, CPE has been a leader in the association industry for more than 20 years. She is the executive director of the Digital Analytics Association (DAA). A trade association serving analytics professionals through professional development, career services, certification, and networking.
•  Prior to her role with DAA, she served as the executive director of the American Specialty Toy Retailing Association (ASTRA) and CIO for the American College of Healthcare Executives. She is a member of the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) and Association Forum where she served in many leadership roles including board service for the Association Forum. She has chaired the Diversity Workforce Committee and served on the CAE Commission. In 2002, she was awarded the Diversity Executive Leadership Scholarship and in 2003, she earned distinction as a Certified Association Executive. She is a Certified Play Expert - a certification that recognizes the important role of play on healthy brain development. 
• She serves as adjunct faculty and on the advisory board for several colleges and training centers. She also lectures, blogs and writes articles on specialty toy retailing, association management, and technology.
• Ms. Mosley holds a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from Governors State University and an MBA from Keller Graduate School of Management.
   

Head of Data Engineering for TD - Accountable for building, maintaining and evolving the culture and community of Data Engineering Practice supporting Data-as-a-Service platforms. The practices for Big Data, Cloud, ETL, Java/.NET/Angular, Data Modeling, Database and Business System Analysts establish data engineering standards, frameworks, methodologies and processes across the enterprise acting as enablers for the Platform Delivery teams.

Ravi Shankar is the senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Denodo. He is responsible for Denodo’s global marketing efforts, including product marketing, demand generation, field marketing, communications, social marketing, customer advocacy, partner marketing, branding, and solutions marketing.

Ravi brings to his role more than 25 years of proven marketing leadership and product management, business development, and software development expertise within both large and emerging enterprise software leaders such as Oracle, Informatica, and Siperian. His deep expertise in data-related technologies facilitates increased global awareness of the Denodo Platform and accelerates its growth.

Ravi holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and an MS and an Honors BS degree in computer science. He is a published author and a frequent speaker on data management and governance. Prior to joining Denodo, Ravi was the vice president of product marketing at Informatica and was instrumental in positioning the company as a leader in the master data management (MDM) market. He helped accelerate MDM revenue and customer acquisition, and helped propel Informatica into a $1B company.

Ariel is an Audience Specialist at InfoTrust LLC. In her role she works with multinational organizations to analyze their advertising data, develop a customized audience strategy that fits their business and optimize campaigns to increase their return on ad spend. Previously, Ariel has worked as an in-house marketer covering areas such as organic search, paid search, social, and email. With her marketing background, she fully understands how data can be siloed and works with her clients to offer innovative solutions to overcome this barrier. She’s proud to help her clients embrace their data and take their analysis and marketing to the next level.

Ariel recently graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a Master of Science in Analytics. In her spare time she enjoys hiking the mountains with her husband and two huskies, Cheza and Kova.