Business Track Speakers

Alexis Arragon is working at Darkworks on Technological Partnerships. He worked in the past as a developer for the videogame industry as well as for the leader in Product Lifecycle Management software. Now he is strongly committed to identify and leverage strategic opportunities for Darkworks, a French independent game development studio which released in the past well received titles such as "Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare" and "Cold Fear" on various console platforms. Their work is now focused on next-generation platforms.
Darkworks is a contractant of edutain@grid, the IST 034601 FP6 project supported by European Commission, bridging the gap between Grid technology and real-time online interactive applications and digital distribution.

Prof. Roberto Barbera was born in Catania (Italy) in October 1963. He graduated in Physics "cum laude" at the University of Catania in 1986 and since 1990 he holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the same University. Since beginning of 2005 he is Associated Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Catania University. Since his graduation his main research activity has been done in the realm of Experimental Nuclear and Particle Physics. He has been involved in many experiments in France, Russia, United States and Sweden to study nuclear matter properties in heavy ion collisions at intermediate energies. He is author of more than 70 scientific papers published on international journals and more than 100 proceedings of international conferences. He is also referee of Journal of Grid Computing and Future Generation Computer Systems.
Since 1997 he is involved in the NA57 Experiment at CERN SPS and in the ALICE Experiment at CERN LHC. Within ALICE, he has been the coordinator of the Off-line software of the Inner Tracking System detector and member of the Off-line Board. Since late 1999 he is interested in Grid Computing. He is a member of the Executive Board of the Italian INFN Grid Project and holds the coordination of the dissemination and training activities.
At Italian level, he is also the Director of two big Grid Projects (TriGrid VL and PI2S2) funded by the Sicilian Regional Government and by the Ministry of University and Research, respectively.
At European level, he is the Technical Coordinator of the EC funded EELA and EUMEDGRID Projects and has several responsibilities in other EC Grid Projects such as EGEE-II, EUChinaGRID, EU-IndiaGrid, and ICEAGE.
Since 2002 he is the responsible of the GENIUS grid portal project and, in 2004, he created the international GILDA grid infrastructure for training and dissemination that he coordinates since the beginning.

Stefano Beco heads the Innovation and Advanced Applications Group of Defense, Space and Environment Division at ElsagDatamat spa. He is coordinating all ElsagDatamat R&D activities related to Grid technology, Space and Environment.
He has in his background quite a lot of experience of space and ground systems, thanks to his participation to projects awarded by European Space Agency since 1993.
He is involved in Grid research since 2000, trying to exploit results also in fields like Earth Observation and Collaborative Environments.

Mike Boniface joined IT Innovation in 2000 after several years at Nortel Networks developing infrastructure to support telecommunications interoperability testing. His roles at IT Innovation include technical leadership, project management and business development in collaborative R&D. He has considerable experience of designing, developing and implementing distributed systems using Semantic Web, Grid and SOA technologies. He has led IT Innovation's contributions to various projects focusing on the uptake of information technology by industry and commerce. In EU IST SIMDAT, Mike is the architect responsible for the development and deployment of Grid infrastructure technologies to diverse application sectors including aerospace, automotive, pharmaceuticals and meteorology. Mike leads IT Innovation's contributions to EU IST BRIDGE, developing interoperable European and Chinese Grid middleware to support distributed industrial workflows. In EU IST ARTEMIS, he led the development of security
infrastructure for the inter-domain sharing of medical records using semantic web services. He led the architecture and implementation of a steel modelling workbench, which IT Innovation developed under a commercial contract for a consortium of European steel companies, to provide a flexible and high-performance way of integrating and coordinating a variety of distributed legacy sub-systems. Mike has a BEng in multimedia communications.

Alex Efimov has a Masters degree in Physics from the Moscow Engineering and Physics University (MEPhI), a postgraduate diploma in Patent Engineering from the Moscow Institute of Industrial Property and Innovation and an MBA from the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Alex also holds a certificate in project management (PRINCE2). After five years developing and commercialising systems for satellite networks at the Moscow institute for Radio Technologies he became development director of the resulting spinout company. He later joined KB Impuls Group in Germany, where he managed new business development in Eastern Europe and the CIS region. In 2004 Alex
relocated to the UK to take up a scholarship MBA at the Judge Institute, the University of Cambridge.
Alex joined Research Councils UK in 2005 as the Innovation Advisor and the UK CERN Technology Transfer Officer and currently works for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) helping to commercialise technologies developed by STFC funded scientists and create partnerships between industry and academic community.

Daniel Fey, Nokia Siemens, Hungary

Daniel Fey obtained his MsC degree in computer science in 2001 from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He joined Nokia Research Center in 2000 and he was working on various internal research projects in the field of product line engineering, domain specific languages, communication and service frameworks for embedded devices, safe application termination and resource management in multi-application runtimes and high-availability frameworks for telecommunication systems. He was representing Nokia Corporation in the Expert Group of JSR-278 and JSR-284 Java Specification Requests. After announcing the formation of Nokia Siemens Networks in 2006 he became a senior researcher in the Research, Technology and Platforms unit of the new company. Currently his research work is focused on the application of the Grid technology in telecommunication systems and services and he is contributing to NESSI-Grid support action helping the NESSI European Technology Platform.


Silvina Grad-Freilich, Mathworks, U.S.A

Silvina Grad-Freilich is the Manager for Parallel Computing products at The MathWorks. Previously, Silvina worked at Scitex Corporation (acquired by Kodak) for 10 years where she was a senior R&D manager and led the development of new software products for digital imaging. Silvina holds both B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from the National University of La Plata in Argentina and a M.Sc. in Management degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Dr. Robert Harakaly is a member of the EGEE SA3 activity and also a member of the EGEE Industry Forum Steering Committee. He has more than 10 years experience in IT and 7 years in grid technologies. He participated in some of the biggest European grid projects such as EDG and EGEE. His research is focused on high performance grid networks, grid middleware instrumentation and usage of virtualisation technologies in the grid environment. He leads the IFSC special focus group on gLite adoption. Robert also acts as an European Commission expert for ICT project evaluation for FP6 and FP7.

Dr. Jones is the project director of the European Union financed EGEE project, which provides a production Grid facility for e-Science in Europe. Previous experience in the Grid arena includes his mandate as technical coordinator and then deputy project leader for the EU DataGrid project (2001-2004), the flagship Grid project of the European Union in its 5th Framework Programme.
Following a B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science from Staffordshire University, Bob joined CERN in 1986 as a software developer with the information technology department providing support for the LEP experiments. He completed his PhD thesis in Computer Science at Sunderland University while working at CERN and has been involved in several research projects for the future LHC accelerator.
He is a member of the ATLAS physics experiment collaboration and has previously been responsible for the online software group. Dr. Jones has lectured on software engineering related subjects at events such as the CERN School of computing.

Serafim Kotrotsos, Exis I.T., Greece

Yannick Legre, CNRS, France

David Manset, Maat-G, Spain

David Manset, Director of Biomedical Applications at Maat Gknowledge and France Company Director. Working in the field of HealthGrids for the last 5 years, his main
research interests are: Grid technologies Services-Oriented Architectures and Model-Driven Software Engineering. Technical Coordinator of International collaboration Mammogrid+, Team Leader in FP6 Health-e-Child and FP7 neuGRID projects.

Jose M. Dana is leader of Tycoon at CERN, where he is a Fellow at the CERN openlab working on Grid deployment and virtualisation related themes. Jose M. Dana holds an M.Sc degree in Computer Science from Almeria University (Spain) where he worked for two years in the Department of Computer Architecture and Electronics. He has been a member of "Supercomputing-Algorithms" research group (Almeria University) since 2004 and he has authored a number of papers on scalable image and video coding. In the past he has worked on compiler optimisation related tasks at the CERN openlab.

Pawel’s international software engineering experience includes CERN, British Telecommunications and Argonne National Laboratory.
Having earned his M.Sc in Computer Science from AGH University of Science and Technology, he later worked for the Globus Project, fundamental for the Grid computing movement. In 2003, Pawel founded GridwiseTech to work for the early adopters of scalable systems involving Grids, SOA and virtualisation technologies. Under Pawel's leadership, the company worked for customers such as Turner Broadcasting, Ricoh and Philips, and led numerous research efforts for international consortia.
Pawel is the author of numerous articles and tutorials, as well as the book "Grid Computing: The Savvy Manager's Guide", explaining Grid computing in business terms.

Bernhard Schott is the EU-Research Program Manager at Platform Computing and is in charge of collaborations with EGEE, DEISA, QosCosGrid, MediGrid and several other projects and research initiatives. He holds degree in physics from University Frankfurt and has 15 years experience in distributed computing and 7 years Grid computing.

Raffaele Sgherri works for Avanade from over 6 years, is a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer and its part of the CTO Team within Avanade, specializing in Grid, Service Oriented Architectures and Software Factories. He's one of the Architects of Avanade Grid Architecture platform and responsible for his maintenance and evolution.

Michael Turner is a Senior Scientist at BAE Systems Advanced Technology Center. He works in the Mathematical Modelling department and has a particular interest in technologies that can be used to improve and support computation modelling techniques in particular within the fields of CFD (Computation Fluid Dynamics) and EM (Electromagnetics). This includes CAD repair, meshing, visualisation and high performance computing technologies. He has been working with Grid computing for the past 5 years in a variety of projects and now manages BAE's contribution to the EU funded SIMDAT project looking at the application of Grid technologies to industrial design problems.

Chief Executive Officer, NICE Cofounder. He was previously acting as advanced technology and ICT Consultant, after working careers in main IT Companies like HP (as District Mgr.), Apollo Computer (as Sales/Marketing Mgr.), HP again (as Sales Development Mgr.), Thinking Machines (as Country Mgr..) and in other successful roles. He was officer in the Army during the military service and Professor assistant at University of Pavia before. Doctor in Electronic Engineering at Politecnico of Milano in 1971, with some postdoctoral courses.

Ronald van Driel joined Philips Research in 1978 to work on IC-designs. In a later stage he moved into the area of Computer Aided Design (CAD). As application and systems programmer he obtained broad experience on a large variety of operating systems. He is now a senior technologist at the Research ICT department with more than 25 years experience in designing and building IT infrastructures for R&D environments.

Dr Adam Vile is a senior consultant and head of the Grid and HPC practice at Excelian, a consultancy that focuses on financial markets professional services. He has spent many years in investment banking, as a developer, project manager and architect in both front and back office. Before joining Excelian he was senior Grid and HPC architect at Barclays Capital. Prior to joining investment banking, Adam spent a number of years lecturing in IT and mathematics at a UK University and maintains links with academia through lectures, research and through validation and steering of postgraduate courses. He is a chartered mathematician and was the conference chair of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications first conference in computational Finance.

After his graduation in the computer science, Walter Wirch gained a lot of experience in the designing of grid based systems in the industrial environments. The areas of interest in his professional work are SOA, Semantic Web and Grids. In the SIMDAT project Walter works together with scientists and industrial developers on creation of loosely coupled services in order to support Virtual Product Development (VPD) -process in the engineering domains.

Falk Zimmermann studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Bonn in Germany, and achieved a Master degree in computer science in 1993.
He has worked as a Research Scientist in the area of compiler construction for parallel and vector supercomputers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Scientific Computing and Algorithms in Sankt Augustin, Germany from 1993 to 1996. Currently he holds the position of a Senior Principal Researcher at NEC Laboratories Europe in Sankt Augustin, Germany. His research interests lay in the areas of Grid middleware architectures and the design and implementation of resource management systems. Since 2005 he coordinates the pharmaceutical application activity in the FP6 project SIMDAT.

Master of Science in Business and Management Consulting in 2003 at the University of Pécs Faculty of Business and Economics (Hungary). Bachelor of Science in International Business and Management studies in 2000 at the Budapest Business School College of International Management and Business Studies (Hungary).
Relevant experience in international business development especially in the areas of IT and business consulting. Joined Atos Origin’s Research and Innovation Department (Spain) in 2006. She works in the area of Software and Services as business consultant. Currently she is involved in several EU-funded projects such as BEinGRID, EchoGRID, Challengers, among others.