Keynote Speakers
This conference is proud to have the following three keynote speakers:
Nora Denzel
Senior Vice President, Big Data, Social Design and Marketing
Intuit
Nora Denzel is Intuit's senior vice president leading the company's big data and social design initiatives, and the central marketing organization. "Big data" is the emerging science of creating, organizing and analyzing very large datasets to gain new insights and use information efficiently.
Appointed to this role in August 2011, she is responsible for establishing, directing and implementing Intuit's data strategy, and quickly converting information into a competitive advantage through the company's social design and central marketing programs.
Denzel joined Intuit in 2008, serving as senior vice president and general manager of the company's Employee Management Solutions Business Unit which provides easy-to-use payroll and employee benefits services to more than one million small businesses.
Previously, she was senior vice president of Hewlett-Packard's global software business, where she led the division to double-digit growth and profitability. Earlier, Denzel served as senior vice president of product operations at Legato Systems Inc., now a division of EMC. She began her career as an engineer at IBM and advanced quickly to executive positions during her 13-year tenure with the company.
She serves on the board of directors for Overland Storage Inc. and the Anita Borg Institute, which provides resources and programs to help industry, academia, and government recruit, retain, and develop women leaders in high-tech fields. Denzel earned her bachelor's degree in computer science from the State University of New York and a master's in business administration from Santa Clara University.
Crista Lopes
Associate Professor,
University of California - Irvine
Crista Lopes is Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics, Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to being in Academia, she worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (1995-2001), where she helped shape the concept of Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and the community around it. She has taken that research thread into the field of Information Retrieval. Her software engineering research work has always been driven by the development of large-scale systems. Recently, she has been working on MMO virtual worlds and their applications beyond gaming. She is a core contributor to the OpenSimulator project, a virtual world platform. She is the recipient of several NSF grants, including a CAREER Award. She is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, a Senior Member of IEEE, and Ohloh Kudos Rank 9. Dr. Lopes has a PhD from Northeastern University, and MS and BS degrees from Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugal.
Ashley Stroupe
Engineer,
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Ashley W. Stroupe is a senior engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. She works as a "Rover Driver" for the Mars Exploration Rover, building command sequences to drive the rovers and deploy science instruments and developing strategic plans for long-term goals. In addition to her flight work, Dr. Stroupe does research focusing on multi-robot teams in complex environments and behavior-based control, with applications to exploration and mapping, dynamic target observation, and cooperative manipulation. At JPL, she has worked on autonomous construction of structures and autonomous exploration with robot teams. Dr. Stroupe has published multiple conference papers, book chapters, and journal articles in robotics and is an active participant in multiple education and outreach programs. She received a B.S. in physics from Harvey Mudd College in 1990, an M.S. in electrical engineering from George Mason University in 1998, an M.S. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2001, and a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. She joined JPL in 2003.