The following speakers are confirmed for the Global Graph Summit 2021. Want to join us as a presenter? Visit our proposals page for details.
Jans Aasman (SF Bay)
Jans Aasman (Wikipedia / LinkedIn) is a Ph.D. psychologist and expert in Cognitive Science - as well as CEO of Franz Inc., an early innovator in Artificial Intelligence and provider of the graph database, AllegroGraph. As both a scientist and CEO, Dr. Aasman continues to break ground in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Graphs as he works hand-in- hand with numerous Fortune 500 organizations as well as US and Foreign governments. Jans recently authored an IEEE article on “Enterprise Knowledge Graphs”.
Dr. Aasman spent a large part of his professional life in telecommunications research, specializing in applied Artificial Intelligence projects and intelligent user interfaces. He gathered patents in the areas of speech technology, multimodal user interaction, recommendation engines while developing precursor technology for tablets and personal assistants. He was also a professor in the Industrial Design department of the Technical University of Delft. Dr. Aasman is a noted conference speaker at such events as Smart Data, NoSQL Now, International Semantic Web Conference, GeoWeb, AAAI, Enterprise Data World, Text Analytics, and TTI Vanguard to name a few.
Dave Bechberger (Houston) @bechbd
Dave Bechberger has extensive experience using graph databases as a product architect and a consultant. He’s spent his career leveraging cutting-edge technologies to build software in complex data domains such as bioinformatics, oil and gas, and supply chain management. He’s an active member of the graph community and has presented on a wide variety of graph-related topics at national and international conferences, including NDC Oslo, NDC London, and the GraphDay conferences in Texas, San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle. Dave is co-author of Graph Databases in Action, published by Manning Publications.
Matthias Broecheler (Seattle) @mbroecheler
Dr. Matthias Broecheler (linkedin), Chief Technologist at DataStax, is known as an industry expert in graph databases, relational machine learning, and big data analysis in general. Matthias is the inventor of the Titan graph database. He also developed the Probabilistic Similarity Logic (PSL) machine learning framework to analyze and reason about multi-relational data. Matthias holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, and is co-author of The Practitioner's Guide to Graph Data published by O'Reilly Media.
Dr. Denise Koessler Gosnell (Charleston) @DeniseKGosnell
As Chief Data Officer of DataStax, Dr. Denise Gosnell, applies her experiences from within the graph and machine learning industries to drive more informed decisions with data. Prior to this role, Dr. Gosnell joined DataStax to create and lead the Global Graph Practice, a team that builds some of the largest distributed graph applications in the world.
Dr. Gosnell's career centers on her passion for examining, applying, and advocating the applications of graph data. She has patented, built, published, and spoken on dozens of topics related to graph theory, graph algorithms, graph databases, and applications of graph data across all industry verticals (many of those talks were created for the DataDay and GraphDay audiences right here in Austin!).
Prior to her role with DataStax, Gosnell worked in the healthcare industry, where she contributed to software solutions for permissioned blockchains, machine learning applications of graph analytics, and data science. Dr. Gosnell earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee as an NSF Fellow. Her research coined the concept "social fingerprinting" by applying graph algorithms to predict user identity from social media interactions.
Josh Perryman (Bryan / College Station) @joshperryman
Josh Perryman likes to play with data. Oftentimes this is implementing proprietary algorithms closer to the data for performance or scale. Sometimes it is ad-hoc investigation and analysis, a sort of exploratory querying. A few times he’s been able to leverage his experience with data engines for dramatic performance improvements. But the real joy is designing a schema for both functionality and performance, one which increases the productivity of other developers and enables a technology to solve new problems or deliver new value to the business.
Technology isn't just data, and Josh does more than just play with data. He’s worked with high performance computing (HPC) environments, taking computations from hours to minutes or seconds. He has built visualizations which deliver new insights into complex data domains. He’s managed technology personnel, both directly and indirectly, to deliver technology solutions. Josh has put together more types of technology components, software and hardware, than can be counted, because one of his fortes is solving problems by building sustainable systems. Josh is currently Director of Product Development, Graph Solutions at VeracityID.
Dr. Juan Sequeda is the co-founder of Capsenta, a spin-off from his research, and the Senior Director of Capsenta Labs. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests are on the intersection of Logic and Data and in particular between the Semantic Web and Relational Databases for data integration, ontology based data access and semantic/graph data management. Juan is the recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, received 2nd Place in the 2013 Semantic Web Challenge for his work on ConstituteProject.org, Best Student Research Paper at the 2014 International Semantic Web Conference and the 2015 Best Transfer and Innovation Project awarded by Institute for Applied Informatics. Juan is the General Chair of AMW 2018, was the PC chair of the ISWC 2017 In-Use track, is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Web Semantics, member of multiple program committees (ISWC, ESWC, WWW, AAAI, IJCAI) and co-creator of the Consuming Linked Data Workshop series. Juan is a member of the Graph Query Languages task force of the Linked Data Benchmark Council (LDBC) and has also been an invited expert member and standards editor at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Joshua Shinavier (San Francisco) @joshsh
Joshua Shinavier is a primordial being of the graph database domain. As a co-founder of what is now Apache TinkerPop, he contributed to the first common APIs for graph databases, the original TinkerPop query language which influenced Gremlin, and the first tools which aligned the property graph and RDF data models, starting with neo4j-rdf-sail in 2008. At Uber, he leads the company-wide effort to unify data models and schemas across RPC, streaming, and storage. The scope of this effort includes developing standardized schemas, propagating standardized schemas throughout the company's infrastructure, developing mappings to integrate data across languages and environments, and getting as much as possible of Uber's data connected in the form of a graph of entities and relationships, facilitating data discovery and automated query planning. Joshua holds a PhD in computer science from RPI's Tetherless World Constellation, where he took the opportunity to explore the strange no man's land between graphs, cognition, and augmented reality. He feels, now as always, that the research, business, and open source communities have a lot to learn from each other with respect to graphs and knowledge representation.
Josh will present the following TinkerPop Keynote: TinkerPop 2020.
Michael Uschold (Seattle, WA ) @UscholdM
Michael Uschold, Senior Ontology Consultant at Semantic Arts, has over twenty-five years’ experience in developing and transitioning semantic technology from academia to industry. He pioneered the field of ontology engineering, co-authoring the first paper and giving the first tutorial on the topic in 1995 in the UK.
As a senior ontology consultant at Semantic Arts since October 2010, Michael trains and guides clients to better understand and leverage semantic technology using knowledge graphs. He has built commercial enterprise ontologies in digital asset management, finance, healthcare, legal research, consumer products, electrical devices, manufacturing and corporation registration. More recently he has focused on semantic application development using SPARQL for application code and R2RML for converting relational data into a knowledge graph.
During 2008-2009, Uschold worked at Reinvent on a team that developed a semantic advertising platform that substantially increased revenue. As a research scientist at Boeing from 1997-2008 he defined, led and participated in numerous projects applying semantic technology to enterprise challenges. He is a frequent invited speaker and panelist at national and international events, and serves on the editorial board of the Applied Ontology Journal. He received his Ph.D. in AI from Edinburgh University in 1991 and an MSc. from Rutgers University in Computer Science in 1982.
