Where I express personal thoughts in words
Bob Van Luijt is the CEO and co-founder of Weaviate, the business created around the open-source vector database Weaviate. Besides Weaviate, Bob frequently speaks on open-source, digital technology, software business, and business philosophy. He has spoken at 100s of events on the topics mentioned above all over the world, including a TEDx talk.
Cindi Howson, the Chief Data Strategy Officer at ThoughtSpot, is an analytics and Business Intelligence expert with more than 20 years of experience and a flair for bridging business needs with technology.
Cindi was previously the Vice President in data and analytics at Gartner, where she was the lead author of the Analytics and BI Magic Quadrant. Additionally, she led the data and analytics maturity model, as well as research initiatives in data and AI for good, NLP/BI Search, and augmented analytics.
Prior to this, she was the founder of BI Scorecard, a contributor to Information Week, and the author of several books, including (1) Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data and (2) SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0: The Complete Reference. She has an MBA from Rice University and a BA from the University of Maryland.
Chris Mattmann is the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at NASA JPL. He is also JPL's first Principal Scientist in the area of Data Science. He has over 19 years of experience at JPL and has conceived, realized, and delivered the architecture for the next generation of reusable science data processing systems for NASA's space and earth science missions.
He contributes to open source and was a former Director at the Apache Software Foundation (2013-18).
Finally, he is the Director of the Information Retrieval & Data Science (IRDS) group at USC and Adjunct Associate Professor.
There have been significant advances in recent years in the areas of neuroscience, cognitive science, and physiology related to how humans process information. This semester, I’m taking a graduate course called Bio-Inspired Intelligent Systems. It provides broad exposure to the current research in several disciplines that relate to computer science, including computational neuroscience, cognitive science, biology, and evolutionary-inspired computational methods.
