Mike Stonebraker

Dr. Stonebraker has been a pioneer of data base research and technology for more than a quarter of a century. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, and the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES. These prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science for twenty five years. More recently at M.I.T. he was a co-architect of the Aurora/Borealis stream processing engine, the C-Store column-oriented DBMS, and the H-Store transaction processing engine. Currently, he is working on science-oriented DBMSs and search engines for accessing the deep web. He is the founder of six venture-capital backed startups, which commercialized these prototypes. Presently he serves as Chief Technology Officer of Vertica Systems and Byledge Corporation.

Professor Stonebraker is the author of scores of research papers on data base technology, operating systems and the architecture of system software services. He was awarded the IEEE John Von Neumann award in 2005, and is presently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at M.I.T. Mike was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997, and was awarded the first annual Innovation award by the ACM SIGMOD special interest group in 1994. He was awarded the ACM System Software Award in 1992, for his work on INGRES.

Andy Palmer

With a track record of 7 successful startups in the last 15 years, Andy is a specialist at accelerating the foundation and growth of innovative early stage companies. Andy's unique blend of strategic perspective and disciplined tactical execution is suited to environments where uncertainty is the rule rather than the exception.

In early 2005, Andy partnered with Dr. Michael Stonebraker to co-found Vertica Systems — a company which has developed a revolutionary database engine specifically designed for data warehousing and cloud computing. As CEO of Vertica, Andy recruited a world-class team (including BOD, COE and Chairman), created the strategy/business plan to effectively penetrate a $15B industry, managed the development of the first release product, drove dramatic revenue growth, and raised $23M+ from leading venture capital firms — New Enterprise Associates, Kleiner Perkins, Highland Capital & Bessemer Venture Partners. Prior to co-founding Vertica, Andy served as the Senior Vice President of Operations and Chief Information Officer at Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI) where he was a member of the initial startup executive team and responsible for information technology, informatics, operations, finance, human resources, and organizational development as the company raised over $140M, grew to over 150 employees and put its' first compound into the clinic for the treatment of Cancer. At Infinity Andy was recognized by Infoweek as one of the world's top 100 CIOs. Before joining Infinity, as a member of the startup team and Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Bowstreet (acquired by IBM), he led the development and execution of all early sales, marketing, and professional services initiatives as the company grew from 3 to over 300 employees. Previous to Bowstreet, Andy was the first Vice President of Marketing at pcOrder.com (acquired by Trilogy) where he was directly responsible for dramatic revenue growth and rapid customer acquisition in preparation for a successful initial public offering as the company grew from 5 to over 250 employees.

Andy currently sits on the Board of Directors of the following innovative early stage companies: CloudSwitch, ByLedge, Vertica Systems, BlueFin Labs, CaseSight, N-of-One, VoltDB, VeroSound and SciLink.

Andy obtained his BA from Bowdoin College (1988) in English, History with a minor in Computer Science and received his MBA from the Tuck School of Business (1994) with a focus on innovation and entrepreneurship.

David DeWitt

David J. DeWitt joined the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin in September 1976 after receiving his Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan. He served as department chair from July 1999 to July 2004. He held the title John P. Morgridge Professor of Computer Sciences when he retired from the University of Wisconsin and joined Microsoft as a Technical Fellow in 2008.

Professor DeWitt is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1998), a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007), and an ACM Fellow (1995). He received the 1995 SIGMOD Innovations Award for his contributions to the database systems field.

While a professor at Wisconsin his research program has focused on the design and implementation of database management systems including parallel, object-oriented, and object-relational database systems. In the late 1980s his Gamma parallel database system project produced many of key pieces of technology that form the basis for today's generation of large parallel database systems including products from IBM, NCR/Teradata, Netezza, Tandem, and Oracle. Throughout his career he has also been interested in database system performance evaluation. He developed the first relational database system benchmark in the early 1980s, which became known as the Wisconsin benchmark. More recently, his research program has focused on the design and implementation of distributed database techniques for executing complex queries against the content of the Internet.

Professor DeWitt has authored over 120 technical publications and served on numerous program committees and NSF Review Panels. He was a member of the NSF CISE Advisor Committee from 2000–2003, the CSTB from 2005–2007, and has served on several NRC and DARPA study panels. He was the program chair of the 1983 SIGMOD conference, program co-chair of the 1988 VLDB conference, and general chair of the 2002 SIGMOD Conference. He has graduated thirty-three Ph.D. students.

Dr. DeWitt has served as a consultant to numerous companies including IBM, NCR, Informix, Tandem, and Microsoft on a variety of technical issues regarding the design and implementation of database systems.

Kian-Tat Lim

Dr. Lim's passion is building tools that allow non-techies to take advantage of the power of parallel processing to analyze immense data sets. For more than 20 years, in settings ranging from molecular dynamics simulations to retail and financial data to Internet data to astronomical data, he has constructed databases, data warehouses, and associated mining, analytics, and query engines that operate at scales at and beyond the current state of the art.

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1995 from the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Lim helped start up HyperParallel, Inc., as employee #5. Four years later, that parallel data mining company was sold to Yahoo!, Inc. Dr. Lim then helped establish Yahoo!'s Strategic Data Solutions group and became its chief architect. After more than a decade in industry, he returned to the scientific world, joining the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in 2007 to help design and build the petabyte-scale data management systems for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

Jacek Becla

Jacek Becla has spent over ten years working with different scientific communities ranging from high energy physics, through astronomy to photon sciences, helping them use database technology for managing and analyzing their massive data sets. He was one of the key people that designed and built world's largest database for BaBar, and he now leads the design of the 100 petabyte database for the next generation astronomical survey — LSST. Prior to joining SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory / Stanford University back in 1997, he worked at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland on researching database technologies for the LHC experiment.

Jacek is very active in trying to bridge the gap between science and industry. He initiated a series of Extremely Large Databases (XLDB) workshops to stimulate collaboration between scientific and industrial users, database vendors and academia. He authored many papers, mainly on managing large scientific data sets. He served on several review committees for large database and IT projects. Jacek received a M.Sc. in Electronic Engineering from the University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland.