vac2011

VAC Meeting 2011 Speakers

Simon Attfield, Middlesex University Visual Analytics in Practice Panel Moderator and Working Session Lead

Simon Attfield is a Senior Lecturer at The Interaction Design Centre, Middlesex University, coordinators of the UK Visual Analytics Consortium. Simon's research lies in the area of understanding how people work with information, processes involved in individual and collaborative sensemaking and implications for interactive systems design. He is co-author of the book Interacting with Information, part of the Morgan Claypool series of Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics. He has conducted field-based user-studies at national news organizations, legal firms and healthcare settings. He has also consulted to news, legal and medical information providers. He received a B.A. in Philosophy and a BSc. in Experimental Psychology from Sussex University, and a PhD in Human Computer Interaction from University College London.

Jason Baron, National Archives and Records Administration Visual Analytics in Practice Panel

Jason R. Baron has served for the past 10 years as Director of Litigation for the National Archives and Records Administration, and is an internationally recognized speaker and author on the preservation of electronic records. In 2009 he was named Co-Chair of The Sedona Conference® Working Group on Electronic Document Retention and Production (WG1), having served on the WG1 Steering Committee since 2008 and as NARA’s representative since 2003. Mr. Baron is a named Editor-in-Chief of three Sedona publications: The Sedona Conference Best Practices Commentary on the Use of Search and Information Retrieval Methods in E-Discovery (2007), The Sedona Conference Commentary on Achieving Quality in the E-Discovery Process (2009), and The Sedona Conference Commentary on Information Governance: Finding the Hidden ROI in Information Assets (2011). Among his other publications, he is the author of “Law in the Age of Exabytes,” in the special e-discovery issue of the Richmond Journal of Law & Technology (2011) (available online). He is a founding co-coordinator of the TREC legal track, as well as founding co-organizer of a series of international workshops aimed at bringing academic scholars and e-discovery practitioners together to discuss search issues arising in litigation, including this year in both Pittsburgh and Beijing. As a Justice Department lawyer for 12 years, Mr. Baron was lead attorney on landmark lawsuits involving the preservation of White House e-mail records. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of British Columbia, and is currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland’s Graduate College of Information Studies. He also presently serves on the Georgetown University Law Center Advanced E-Discovery Institute Advisory Board and on the faculty of the Georgetown eDiscovery Training Academy. Among his many honors for public service, Mr. Baron was named a recipient of the 2008 Fed 100 Award, sponsored by Federal Computer Week, for his e-discovery related advocacy. Mr. Baron received a B.A.. magna cum laude, from Wesleyan University, and a J.D. from the Boston University School of Law.

Alex Blakemore, Apogee Integration Visual Analytics Commercial Success Stories Panel

Alex Blakemore has designed and developed software systems for over 25 years. He has long used visualizations to clarify and communicate analysis from complex systems including simulation models, election results, data mining and business operations. He has hands on experience with multiple visualization and analytical tools, with extensive expertise applying the Tableau Software toolsuite. After successfully shepherding the adoption of visual analytics throughout a large organization, he can speak to the opportunities and challenges of introducing visual analytics into an enterprise. Dr. Blakemore received his M.S. and PhD in Computer Science here at the University of Maryland, College Park, and is currently Vice President of Apogee Integration LLC in Chantilly, VA, specializing in analytical and visualization systems for engineering, data mining, aerospace and defense systems.

Shawn Bohn, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Multimedia Panel Co-Chair

Mr. Bohn is a scientist and engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory working in the fields of information retrieval, extraction and visualization. Mr. Bohn has been recognized by his peers and clients as an expert in the specific field of Item Authority and a significant contributor in Text Analytics and Information Visualization fields. Mr. Bohn has over two decades of experience in applying research to commercial sectors as well as applying practices in the commercial sector into research as well as managing and leading research programs. Mr. Bohn is currently leading work in the field of Multimedia Analytics. Part of this effort is leading a team of researchers and engineers to develop a visual analytics tool for interacting with large quantities text, image and video data. In addition to this effort, Mr. Bohn is leading the technical direction and management of the Information Synthesis and Fusion project. This project is working towards unifying information spaces and producing new signatures that serve as a basis to visual analytic platforms.

Russ Burtner, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Multimedia Panel

Russ Burtner is a Senior User Experience Lead on the Visual Analytic team with over 20 years experience in HCI, software design and vision exploration. Past work experience includes extensive product development with Microsoft, EA Sports, Disney and Oxygen Media. Current work areas for PNL are in user experience for multimedia analysis, decision support systems, collaborative and adaptive environments and emergency response. His research interests are in Human Computer Interaction, Visual Design, Ethnography/Usability, Information Visualization, vision development and future Technology Trends.

Nancy Chinchor, ChinchorEclectic Multimedia Analytics Research Challenges Panel

Nancy Chinchor is founder and President of ChinchorEclectic LLC and is currently assigned to the Open Source Center. Her work centers around visual analytics of emerging media especially social media. She has initiated multiple innovative products including Canopy, a multimedia analytics platform that is unique and utilizes best practices from visual analytics and media signature processing. She also has an interest in analytic composition tools and she mashed up IN-SPIRE with nSpace2 while directing the development of the Sandbox to be a prototype visualization composition tool in addition to its original purpose of being a Visual Thinking space that could result in analytic product.

Kris Cook, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory VAC Consortium Director, Commercial Success Panel Moderator

Kris Cook is the Visual Analytics Community (VAC) Consortium Director. She has led research and development efforts in information visualization and visual analytics for over ten years. She led the development of the initial version of the IN-SPIRE visual information analysis software, which is now in use in both government and commercial industry. She is co-editor of Illuminating the Path: The Research and Development Agenda for Visual Analytics, published in 2005 by IEEE Press.

Guy Cuthbert, Atheon Analytics Visual Analytics in Practice Panel

Guy Cuthbert is the founder and Managing Director of Atheon Analytics Ltd, a UK-based visual analytics firm. Guy graduated with a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Manchester in 1992, and worked in a number of technical roles for commercial software companies before starting his first software business - Simple Enterprise Ltd - in 1997. Guy sold Simple Enterprise two years later, to Alternative Business Solutions Ltd (acquired by Fourth Software Ltd in 2006), working there first as CTO and then CEO. Guy founded Atheon at the start of 2005 and first encountered visual analytics a year later through an early release of Visokio Omniscope; the effect of that first software application review was transformational, and Atheon started to apply VA principles to retail and FMCG data sets, growing the team through attracting senior ex-retailers and developing a VA methodology which has seen Atheon work with the likes of Tesco, Metro, WalMart, EMI, Colgate-Palmolive, Nestle and Mars.

Anita D'Amico, Secure Decisions Visual Analytics for Cyber Security Panel

Dr. Anita D’Amico is the Director of Secure Decisions. She is both a human factors psychologist and a specialist in information security situational awareness. Her primary research interests are: improving the decision-making of network defenders through visualization, and assessing the mission impact of cyber incidents. Anita started the Secure Decisions division of Applied Visions, Inc. in 2000, to develop new technologies to enhance cyber situational awareness. Since then, Secure Decisions has transitioned three network defense visualization technologies from the laboratory into operational use, including one that addresses wireless vulnerability analysis. Anita has conducted several cognitive and decision analyses of information security analysts. The results of one of those analyses were used to design a new visualization tool that has been adopted for use at US-CERT. Her previous work was nominated twice for best Small Business Innovation Research of the year by DARPA. Prior to joining Applied Visions, she was the founder and head of the Information Warfare Team at Northrop Grumman.

Mita Desai, DARPAMultimedia Analytics Research Challenges Panel

Dr. Mita Desai is currently a Program Manager at DARPA. Dr. Desai's research interests spans a wide range of topics. Her current interests include video and multimedia exploitation systems; power generation, including storage and management systems, and space based systems. Dr. Desai joined DARPA in 2007. Prior to joining DARPA, she worked at National Space and Aeronautics Administration (NASA) and National Science Foundation (NSF) among other places. Dr. Desai holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

David Ebert, Purdue UniversityVisual Analytics at Scale Panel

David Ebert is the Silicon Valley Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, a University Faculty Scholar, a Fellow of the IEEE, and Director of the Visual Analytics for Command Control and Interoperability Center (VACCINE), the Visualization Science team of the Department of Homeland Security's Command Control and Interoperability Center of Excellence. Dr. Ebert performs research in novel visualization techniques, visual analytics, volume rendering, information visualization, perceptually-based visualization, illustrative visualization, mobile graphics and visualization, and procedural abstraction of complex, massive data. Ebert has been very active in the visualization community, teaching courses, presenting papers, co-chairing many conference program committees, serving on the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee, serving as Editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, serving as a member of the IEEE Computer Society's Publications Board, serving on the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors, and successfully managing a large program of external funding to develop more effective methods for visually communicating information.

Dan Ellis, Columbia UniversityMultimedia Panel

Daniel Ellis is an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department, Columbia University, New York. His Laboratory for Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio (LabROSA) is concerned with all aspects of extracting high-level information from audio, including speech recognition and music description, and has recently focused on the classification of videos and environmental recordings into user-relevant categories. Since 1993, he has run the AUDITORY e-mail list of 1700 worldwide researchers in perception and cognition of sound. He was a Research Assistant at the MIT Media Lab, and spent several years as a Research Scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA, where he remains an external fellow.

Carol Espy-WilsonMultimedia Panel

Carol Espy-Wilson is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Maryland, College Park. She directs the Speech Communication Lab (SCL) which is engaged in research in speech recognition, speaker recognition, speech enhancement, speaker segregation, vocal tract modeling, assistive technology, language recognition and audio content authentication and forensics. She is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, an Associate Editor for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, member of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee and member of the National Advisory Board for Medical Rehabilitation Research at NIH. She earned her PhD from MIT.

Jianping Fan, University of North Carolina at CharlotteMultimedia Panel

Jianping Fan received his MS degree in theory physics and his PhD degree in optical storage and computer science from Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China. From 1998 to 1999, he was a Researcher with Japan Society of Promotion of Science (JSPS), Department of Information System Engineering, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan. From September 1999 to 2001, he was a Postdoc Researcher in the Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. At 2001, he joined the Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Charlotte as an Assistant Pofessor and then become Associate Professor. His research interests include image/video analysis, semantic image/video classification, personalized image/video recommendation, surveillance videos, statistical machine learning, and visual analytics.

Brian Fisher, Simon Fraser University Visual Analytics in Practice Panel and Multimedia Panel

Brian Fisher is Associate Professor of Interactive Arts and Technology and Cognitive Science at Simon Fraser University and Associate Director of the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC) at the University of British Columbia. He is also a member of the SFU Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Mathematical and Computational Sciences, and the UBC Brain Research Centre and Institute for Computing, Intelligent and Cognitive Systems. His research focuses on the cognitive science of human interaction with visual information systems, with the goal of developing new theories and methodologies for development and evaluation of technology to support human understanding, decision-making, and coordination of operations. This work is supported by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada for applications in disaster preparedness and response with matching funding from the US Department of Homeland Security Command, Control and Interoperability Center of Excellence, and by the Boeing Company on understanding aircraft safety, reliability, and maintainability data with matching funding from the Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems Network of Centres of Excellence (Canada).

Matthew Gordon, Palantir TechnologiesCommercial Success Stories Panel

Matthew Gordon is a Forward Deployed Engineer with Palantir Technologies in Palo Alto, CA, where he works with state and municipal law enforcement intelligence units to help them integrate, search, and analyze data across multiple data sources using the Palantir Government platform. He received his bachelors degree in physics from Princeton University in 1998 and worked as a software developer before pursuing a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher in biological physics at Stanford before joining Palantir Technologies last year.

Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, University of Illinois Multimedia Panel Chair and Multimedia Analytics Research Challenges Moderator

Mark Hasegawa-Johnson has developed machine learning and opportunistic sensing algorithms for automatic speech recognition and multimedia analytics, with applications in HCI problems including dialect adaptation, computer-assisted language learning, assistive technology, and the study of group dynamics. Mathematically, Dr. Hasegawa-Johnson's work focuses on the tight relationship between feature transformations and probability density estimation, e.g., he directed a 2004 summer research program at Johns Hopkins on landmark-based speech recognition, and was co-advisor of the ICPR 2008 "Best Student Paper" in which MAP-adapted mixture Gaussian supervectors were first used to classify natural images. Dr. Hasegawa-Johnson's teaching and service activities create channels of communication between engineering and the social sciences, e.g., he was General Chair of Speech Prosody 2010, flagship conference of the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group. Dr. Hasegawa-Johnson is co-author of 32 journal articles and book chapters, 116 conference papers, four patents, and three widely used databases. He is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America and of the Journal of Laboratory Phonology. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1996.

John Johnson, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Visual Analytics at Scale Panel Moderator

John R. Johnson is associate division director of computational science and mathematics at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) where he leads high performance computing research for national security. Prior to joining PNNL, John worked for a global macro hedge fund, where he led computational programs in portfolio construction and optimization. Before that John was a Research Program Manager with the Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) where he led multiple programs exploring novel and emerging computing architectures and progressive algorithms for data intensive applications of relevance to the national security community. John was the CS technical lead for a massively parallel, high fidelity physics simulation project at LLNL as part of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) where he received a DOE Weapons Recognition of Excellence Award. He has led projects in climate modeling and simulation as part of LLNL’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison. John holds a B.A. in mathematics from U.C. Berkeley, an M.S. in computer science from the Johns Hopkins University, and Ph.D. studies in computational science at the University of Chicago.

Greg Jones, Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute Invited Speaker

Dr. Jones has 20-years of experience working in industry, government and academics. Greg currently serves as the associate director of the SCI Institute at the University of Utah, a position he held from 2000-2005 and returned to in 2007. From 2005 to 2007 Dr. Jones served as the science advisor to Utah Governor, Jon Huntsman and as a managing director of the Governor's Office of Economic Development where he and his team focused on creating policies and programs to aid technology transfer from the Utah research universities. During his time with the SCI Institute Dr. Jones was a founding member of Visual Influence, Inc., a university spin-off, which recently sold to Numira Biosciences. Previously, Dr. Jones was a principle consultant in the StorageTek Medical Group. This group created opportunities for StorageTek in the medical markets, specifically radiology and cardiology. Dr. Jones received his B.S. in Physics and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Science from the University of New Mexico. During his graduate work he collaborated with teams at both the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla CA and the Life Sciences Division of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Jones received an MBA from the David Eccles School of Management at the University of Utah in 2000. Dr. Jones was recognized in 2005, 2008, 2009, and 2010 as one of Utah's top 100 entrepreneurs by the v|100 and in 2007 received the Governor's Medal for Science and Technology. Dr. Jones has been instrumental in the creation of several technology companies that are based on university technologies, these include Visual Influence, Inc., RayScale, Inc., iVeena, LLC and VisTrails, Inc.

David Kasik, Boeing Visual Analytics in Practice Panel

Dave Kasik is Boeing's subject matter expert in visualization and interactive techniques. He is pursuing new ways of using visualization for the huge amounts of both geometric and non-geometric data Boeing needs to run their business. Dave started work at Boeing in 1977 and has 29 years of service. His work with geometric data has made Dave a pioneer in interactive 3D computer graphics. Dave is pioneering the use of visual analytics to help extract more information from complex non-geometric data. Dave earned his Masters in Computer Science from the University of Colorado in 1972 and a Bachelors in Quantitative Studies from the Johns Hopkins University in 1970. He participates in numerous professional organizations, including ACM, which named Dave a Distinguished Scientist in 2007, and IEEE, where he is a member of the IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications editorial board.

Sanjeev Khudanpur, Johns Hopkins UniversityMultimedia Panel

Sanjeev Khudanpur has been on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University since 1996. His roles have included Associate Research Scientist in the Center for Language and Speech Processing and Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science. He is affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence. He received his bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1988, and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland in 1997.

Guljit Khurana, Centrifuge SystemsCommercial Success Stories Panel

Guljit Khurana joined Centrifuge® as CEO in October 2006. Mr. Khurana is a recognized industry leader with 20 years of experience in enterprise software companies. Mr. Khurana has successfully driven business and product strategy with early stage, fast growth companies, where he has helped create over $1 billion in market valuation. Mr. Khurana has been a frequent speaker at industry events and conferences. Prior to joining Centrifuge, Mr. Khurana was Vice President of Product Development at webMethods. He arrived there after the acquisition of The Mind Electric, a pioneer in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), where he served as Vice President of Products. Previously, Mr. Khurana led the worldwide sales engineering team at Avantgo (now Sybase). During his tenure, the sales team grew revenue from $100K to over $25M in three years. Mr. Khurana has also held leadership positions at Talarian Corporation (now Tibco), Segue Software (now Borland), and National Computer Systems. Mr. Khurana has a BSE in Electrical Engineering from the University of Iowa and an MBA from St. Ambrose University.

Joe Kielman, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Highlighted Speaker and Research with Impact Panel Moderator

Joseph Kielman is the Visualization and Analytics Lead for the Infrastructure Protection and Disaster Management Division (IDD) and also manages the Command, Control, and Interoperability Center of Excellence for the Office of University Programs within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate. For S&T, he created, established, and manages the National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC), the five-year joint NSF/DHS program on Foundations of Data and Visual Analytics (or FODAVA), the Precision Information Environments (PIE) and Transnational Islamic Activism and Radicalization (TIARA) programs, and multi-year formal research collaborations in analytics with Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada, among other activities. Prior to joining DHS S&T in 2003, he worked for 20 years at the FBI. There he served as Chief of the Advanced Technology Group for the Engineering Section, Chief of Research and Development in the Technical Services Division, and Chief Scientist and Chief Architect for the Information Resources Division. Dr. Kielman worked for the American Society for Testing and Materials, MCI Communications, and the Department of Health and Human Services prior to joining the FBI. Among other interagency assignments, he has chaired two subcommittees for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy National Science and Technology Council as well as serving on four Advisory Committees for the Department of Energy Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Dr. Kielman has an undergraduate degree in Physics and graduate degrees in Biophysics and did his postdoctoral work in Genetics. He was awarded the Presidential Rank of Meritorious Senior Professional in 2006.

Glenn Kletzky, Mobile Epiphany Commercial Success Stories Panel

Glenn began his professional education by obtaining a Biomedical Engineering degree from the Tulane University School of Engineering in New Orleans, where he graduated magna cum laude with his thesis work in robotic vision systems. He then went on to complete medical school at the Tulane University School of Medicine where he received grants from the Deafness Research Foundation for his research on middle ear Pharmacology. After training as an Anesthesiology Resident at the University of Miami, he became Chief Resident at Jackson Memorial Hospital in 1996. He was active in both trauma as well as pediatric anesthesia. Upon completion of his residency, he successfully became a Diplomat of the Board of Anesthesiology and went on to have a vigorous private practice in Denver Colorado. During his 4th year of private practice in 1999, Glenn started a software quality assurance and testing company in Denver called iBeta, which grew to over 100 employees in its second year and is still thriving today. Glenn eventually left his medical practice to run iBeta full time. As a passionate software designer himself with a love for the best-of-breed interfaces which video game technology inspires, Glenn and his team have designed and developed a breakthrough concept in user friendly, highly configurable, geospatial mobile applications for companies ranging from the largest of enterprises to the smallest of startups

Kristen Liggett, U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory Research with Impact Panel

Dr. Kristen K. Liggett is a Senior Human Factors Engineer in the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Human Effectiveness Directorate at Wright-Patterson AFB, OH. Kristen began her career with the Air Force after graduating from Wright State University in 1989 with a BS in Human Factors Engineering. Her initial area of research involved pilot/cockpit interface design, which transitioned into unmanned aerial vehicle operator control station design in the late 90s. In 1994, she received her MS in Engineering Management from the University of Dayton, and in 2000, she received a Ph.D. in Engineering from Wright State University. In 2008, Kristen attended the Senior Executive Fellows Program at Harvard's John F. Kennedy's School of Government. In 2009, Kristen became interested in the field of visual analytics and her current research focuses on information visualization for cyber domain applications. Kristen’s research has been published in 51 technical papers and journal articles, and she has also co-authored chapters in the Handbook of Aviation Human Factors and Human Factors in Simulation and Training. She is a member of Tau Beta Pi, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, the Association of Aviation Psychology, and the Society of Women Engineers.

Joe Looby, FTI ConsultingVisual Analytics in Practice Panel

Joe Looby is a senior managing director in the FTI Technology segment, delivering consulting expertise and advanced technology for investigations, antitrust and complex litigation matters, and is based in New York. He has provided expert testimony and consulting on economic and technology issues and appeared before regulatory agencies on diverse matters. Mr. Looby has spoken and written extensively on eDiscovery, technology, and forensics. Mr. Looby is a contributing author and lecturer at The Sedona Conference, for projects including: Search & Retrieval Sciences; and, Achieving Quality in eDiscovery. Joe has also participated in studies on search technology effectiveness, sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and DOD Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA). He has diverse industry experience, and most recently served as the Trustee’s forensic investigator in United States Bankruptcy Court matter SIPC v. Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities, LLC. Mr. Looby is a former U.S. Navy JAG Lieutenant, an experienced regulator, and is the patented co-inventor of the “system, software and method for examining a database in a forensic accounting environment.” Joe has a B.A. in economics from Fordham University and a J.D. from Union University School of Law. He is a certified fraud examiner, a member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and is licensed to practice law in New York and Connecticut.

Richard May, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory NVAC Director

Dr. Richard May has focused on designing new technologies and protocols to generate and interact with complex, massive data sets. Over the course of his career, Dr. May has conducted research in video and image processing, information visualization, virtual and mixed reality and visual analytics. In the early 1990s, he transitioned his research from visualizing science to interacting with the visualizations, to better understand the complex nature of the problems being studied. This new focus led to research in both the logical and physical aspects of interacting with electronic information and eventually to looking at analytical processes and visual analytics. As Director for the Department of Homeland Security's National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC), Dr. May develops opportunities to transfer technologies to meet the needs of regional preparedness experts and coordinates visual analytics research across government and academic partners. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Washington State University and his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Washington.

Tom Millar, U.S. CERT Visual Analytics for Cyber Security Panel

Mr. Millar joined US-CERT in 2007 as a network analyst. Since then he has served as a senior watch officer, deputy operations manager, and chief of communications, playing a significant role in coordination and response activities during major global cyber events such as the 2007 Estonian DDoS attacks, Conficker's countdown, the US DDoS attacks of 2009, and several others. He holds a M.Sc in Engineering Management & Systems Engineering from George Washington University.

Roger Nicholson, Boeing Aviation SafetyCase Study Panel

Roger Nicholson is an Associate Technical Fellow in Aviation Safety at Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA). He holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington, a Postgraduate Diploma in Computing Science from the University of Adelaide and a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Western Australia. Roger joined Boeing as a flight test engineer in 1987, and has an extensive background in commercial jet transport system architectures, including design, development and test experience with autoflight, flight management, navigation, and flight operations, flight test, system and airplane safety assessment. As an avionics lead engineer, he was responsible for navigation and GPS implementation on the Boeing 777. He led the Boeing Year 2000 rollover (Y2K) assessment and conducted ground and flight demonstrations throughout the world. He is currently investigating Pitot icing and bird strikes, and implementing new tools for human-machine interface and flight crew reliability assessment. Additionally, he is advancing aviation safety data capability using visual analytics techniques, and managing aviation safety research and development. He has published technical papers spanning fluid mechanics research; wind shear; flight test of autoflight systems; Free Flight, Y2K, and flight crew response to smoke and fire. He serves on the SAE International S-18 committee for airplane and system safety assessment, the steering team for the Bird Strike Committee - USA, and the steering committee for the International Bird Strike Commitee.

Lucy Nowell, U.S. GovernmentVisual Analytics at Scale Panel

Dr. Lucy Nowell’s work in visualization and analytics is informed by her background in theatrical design and cognitive psychology, as well the computer science fields of information storage and retrieval, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. She was a pioneer in information visualization, designing one of the first visualization interfaces for a digital library, Virginia Tech’s Envision system. During her service as a Chief Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Lab, Dr. Nowell was a member of the team that designed and developed the award-winning OmniViz bioinformatics software and she contributed to patented user interface designs for ThemeRiver™ and AniViz (animated visualization). Dr. Nowell is newly appointed as a Program Manager the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) in the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, where she will manage a broad portfolio of computer science research projects, with a particular focus on Data and Visualization programs. She joined ASCR in April after a two-year term at the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure, where she was a Program Director for Data, Data Analysis, and Visualization. Prior to her assignment at NSF, Dr. Nowell was a Program Manager with the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), where she managed the programs on Novel Intelligence from Massive Data (NIMD), Geospatial Intelligence Information Visualization, and Advanced Research in Interactive Visualization for Analysis.

Catherine Plaisant, University of MarylandResearch with Impact Panel

Dr. Catherine Plaisant is Associate Director of Research of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. She earned a Doctorat d'Ingenieur degree in France in 1982 (similar to a Industrial Engineering PhD) and has written over 100 refereed technical publications on diverse subjects such as information visualization, digital libraries, universal access, image browsing, help, digital humanities, technology for families, or evaluation methodologies. She co-authored with Ben Shneiderman the 4th and 5th Editions of Designing the User Interface, one of the major books on the topic of Human-Computer Interaction. She enjoys working with multidisciplinary teams on designing and evaluating new interface technologies that are useable and useful. Research contributions range from focused user interaction techniques (e.g. Excentric Labeling) to innovative visualizations (such as LifeLines for personal records or SpaceTree for hierarchical data exploration) and interactive search interface techniques such as Query Previews. Those interaction techniques have been carefully validated with user studies and are finding applications in industry, government information systems and digital libraries.

Fred Roberts, Rutgers UniversityInvited Speaker

Dr. Fred S. Roberts is a Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University, where he is a member of seven graduate faculties, in Mathematics, Operations Research, Computer Science, Computational Molecular Biology, BioMaPS (Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program at the Interface between the Biological, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences), Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Education. Since 1996, he has been the Director of DIMACS, the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science and Technology Center, which was founded as an NSF "science and technology center" and is a joint academic-industry partnership. In 2009 he became Director of CCICADA (the Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis), the data sciences half of the DHS CCI Center of Excellence. In recent years, Dr. Roberts' work on homeland security has led him to co-chair the NJ Universities Homeland Security Research Consortium and the Preparedness College of the NJ Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, and to serve on the Secretary's epidemiology modeling group at the Department of Health and Human Services and the NJ Governor's Health Emergency Preparedness Advisory Council. Dr. Roberts' many books and articles deal with topics involving data science and discrete mathematics and their connection to problems of energy, environment, epidemiology, psychology, sociology, biology, transportation, and communications.

Dan Roth, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Multimedia Panel

Dan Roth is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a University of Illinois Scholar. He is the director of the DHS funded Center for Multimodal Information Access & Synthesis (MIAS) and has faculty positions also at the Statistics and Linguistics Departments and at the graduate School of Library and Information Science. Roth is a Fellow of AAAI, for his contributions to the foundations of machine learning and inference and for developing learning centered solutions for natural language processing problems. Prof. Roth got his B.A Summa cum laude in Mathematics from the Technion, Israel and his PhD in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1995.

Han-Wei Shen, The Ohio State UniversityVisual Analytics at Scale Panel

Han-Wei Shen is an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University. His primary research interest is on large scale data analysis and visualization. He received his PhD degree in computer science from the University of Utah. Before joining Ohio State, he was a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center from 1996 to 1999. Professor Shen is a winner of National Science Foundation's CAREER award and Department of Energy's Early Career Principal Investigator Award. He is currently a principle investigator for the Department of Energy's SciDAC Institute for Ultrascale Visualization and two Office of Science's exascale research projects.

Ben Shneiderman, University of MarylandCommercial Success Stories Panel

Ben Shneiderman (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/) at the University of Maryland. He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM) in 1997, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2001, and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2010. He received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. Ben is the co-author with Catherine Plaisant of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (5th ed., 2010) http://www.awl.com/DTUI/. With Stu Card and Jock Mackinlay, he co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999). His book Leonardo's Laptop appeared in October 2002 (MIT Press) and won the IEEE book award for Distinguished Literary contribution. His latest book, with Derek Hansen and Marc Smith, is Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL (www.codeplex.com/nodexl, 2010).

John Stasko, Georgia TechResearch with Impact Panel

John Stasko is a Professor in and the Associate Chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He is a widely published and funded researcher on the topics of information visualization and visual analytics, approaching each from a human-computer interaction perspective. He recently chaired the IEEE Information Visualization and Visual Analytics Conferences, and he has served on numerous journal editorial boards. Stasko is the creator of the Jigsaw visual analytics system for exploring and understanding large text document collections.

Margaret Varga, QinetiQHighlighted Speaker

Dr. Margaret Varga is a QinetiQ Fellow. She joined QinetiQ’s precursor organisation, The Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, after she graduated from Cambridge University. She is a visiting fellow at Oxford University. Her current research interests are in visualisation, visual analytics, uncertainty analysis, Bayesian reasoning, pattern processing, image processing, content-based image compression and decision support. She also has an interest in medical image processing, she developed the world’s first automated breast cancer grading system. She is the UK National Leader on the NATO IST-85/RTG41 “Interactive Visualisation of Network Dynamics” and has been UK National Leader on previous NATO IST Visualisation groups since 1996. She was Chairman of the group for 5 years. Dr. Varga has over a hundred publications and is co-inventor of seven patents.

Andrew Wade, Simon Fraser UniversityCase Study Panel

Andrew Wade is on the verge of completing his MSc. in Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Canada. His thesis research is focused on the paired analysis method for collecting data about the use of Visual Analytics tools in the field. Andrew applied the paired analysis method during an internship at Boeing in the Airplane Safety Engineering group (2010). Utilizing knowledge of Visual Analytics tools and techniques and working with a subject matter expert at Boeing (Roger Nicholson), Andrew helped influence design decisions on the 777, 747-8 and 737 / P8-A aircraft. In addition, Andrew’s knowledge of visual analytics has aided Boeing with analysis of various other safety issues, including runway excursions and incursions, pitot probe icing/unreliable airspeed and pilot responses to bird strikes. In addition to aircraft design decisions, these analyses have helped influence pilot training manuals. Andrew completed his undergrad at the University of British Columbia and holds a B.A. in Cognitive Systems, an interdisciplinary field integrating cognitive science, computer science, linguistics and philosophy. Andrew has extensive knowledge of data visualization techniques and the cognitive science behind Visual Analytics software. While working as a research assistant at Simon Fraser University, Andrew gained experience using Visual Analytics tools on many types of data, including news feeds and business intelligence.

Dave WellsCapstone Speaker

Dave Wells is an Information Management and Business Intelligence consultant and mentor. He focuses on strategies to maximize value of data and technology investments, architecture that is needed to execute strategies, and resources for objective and fact-based strategy and architecture decisions. He is a frequent speaker at information management conferences and a regular contributor to IM publications. Dave’s career of more than 40 years includes roles in both business management and IT management. With depth of experience as both a provider and a consumer of information he understands both the challenges and the importance of getting it right.

Kirsten Whitley, U.S. GovernmentVisual Analytics for Cyber Security Panel

A computer scientist, Kirsten Whitley works in the Department of Defense, researching issues in computer security. Her current research focuses on the information needs of computer network defense analysts. Dr. Whitley is responsible for projects involving cognitive task analyses of computer network defense expertise and the design of next-generation visualization tools to support those cognitive tasks. She strives to bring the best technology solutions for situation awareness and sensemaking in the face of Internet speed and complexity. Dr. Whitley is the recipient of a Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Fellows Award for achievement in science and technology. She completed her PhD in computer science at Vanderbilt University.