Speaker Profiles

William Fellows - The 451 Group, UK

As Principal Analyst at The 451 Group, William created and drives 451’s user research program with IT early adopters and innovators across a range of vertical markets, including the Grid Adoption Research Service (GARS). In addition to published research and survey reports, the program convenes strategic technology summits and chairs discussion groups for IT decision makers, especially in the financial services sector. William’s team leads 451’s research activities within European Commission Framework Program projects and works directly with industrial and community partners. William also covers innovation in enterprise IT - wherever it is occurring - for 451’s vendor research programs and provides strategic counsel.

William is a regular speaker and moderator at industry and 451 conferences and sits on numerous advisory boards and planning committees for industry bodies including OGF and the UK DTI’s GCN. William’s opinions are regularly sought and cited in newspapers such as the New York Times, Financial Times, magazines and trade publications.

As a co-founder of The 451 Group, William assumed management of business development, recruitment and editorial activities at company formation in 1999, lead development of technical infrastructures – specifically mobile operations – and worked with investors, partners and suppliers to launch the company on time and on budget in April 2000.

Before starting 451, William worked for 11 years in technology and business journalism, building an extensive knowledge of European and U.S. technology markets, financial models and its business leaders. William joined ComputerWire in London 1988, developing its coverage of the open systems sector and founded company subsidiaries in the former Soviet Union (1990) and the US (1992). Based in New York, he built and managed an editorial team across several US locations and edited the influential Unix industry newsletter Unigram.X.

William has an MSc in Information Systems & Theory from Portsmouth Polytechnic and a BA Hons Government & Sociology from the University of Essex.

Fabrizio Gagliardi - Microsoft Research

Fabrizio Gagliardi is the director of Microsoft’s Technical Computing Initiative in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Latin America within Microsoft Research.

Before this, Fabrizio Gagliardi worked for several years at CERN where he was involved with designing real-time data acquisition systems, pioneering Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge based systems. In the early ‘90s he was responsible for the data management services of the CERN central computer centre while in the mid ‘90s he promoted the move towards parallel computing and the EU funded project, GPMIMD2, which designed one of the most advanced supercomputers of the time. The system interconnect of this system (Elan/Elite) is one of the most performing systems in the market and used in several of the TOP500 supercomputers.

Fabrizio then became became involved with Grid computing with the EU-DataGrid and EGEE projects, of which he was Principal Investigator and Director from 2000 till 2005. In 2004-2005, he contributed to the incubation and launch of more than 10 other EU Grid projects all inspired and supported by the EU lag-ship project, EGEE, which obtained a total funding of more than €70 million from the EU.

Fabrizio Gagliardi has authored and co-authored many publications in HPC applied to science. He is an expert in computing at the Commission of the EU and member of several scientific advisory committees, conference and journal editorial boards.

Francesco Giacomini - INFN, Italy / EGEE-III

Francesco Giacomini has worked on Grid technologies since 2000, when he joined INFN. Before he worked on the data acquisition system of the ATLAS experiment at CERN. He currently leads the Middleware Engineering Activity of the EGEE-III project.

Steven Newhouse - CERN, Switzerland / EGEE-III

Steven Newhouse was appointed Technical Director of the Enabling Grids for e-Science (EGEE) project in November 2008. Previously, he worked as a Program Manager in the High Performance Computing group in the Windows Server division at Microsoft. Based in Redmond, WA where he managed access to the Windows Compute Cluster Server product from non-Windows environments, primarily through the Open Grid Forum's (OGF) High Performance Computing Basic Profile (HPCBP) specification. He is a member of the OGF Standards Council where he is responsible for Application Standards and remains involved in several OGF working groups. Before starting at Microsoft in May 2007 he was Director of the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute UK (OMII-UK), and on the management or supervisory boards of several major centres and projects within the UK e-Science programme. Previously, he was the Sun Lecturer in e-Science in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London and Technical Director of the London e-Science Centre (LeSC) also based at Imperial where he did his early research into the modelling of underwater acoustics using high performance computing resources.

Paul Strong - eBay, USA

Paul Strong is a distinguished engineer at eBay Research Labs. He is focused on enterprise grid architectures and technologies, and is driving the long-term vision and strategy for eBay’s infrastructure and enterprise management within that context. Additionally, Paul is active within the Grid standards community and is currently vice-chair of the Open Grid Forum (OGF) board of directors. Prior to joining eBay, Strong was a systems architect at Sun Microsystems where he focused on Grid standards and the N1 product set. He was part of the original N1 team, and co-authored the book Building N1 Grid Solutions (Prentice Hall, 2004). Strong was chair of the Enterprise Grid Alliance technical steering committee and its reference model working group, where he edited/co-authored the EGA Reference Model. He holds a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Manchester, England.

Annika Thies - European Commission, Belguim

Annika Thies, lawyer, working at the European Commission in Directorate General for Research, Unit for Research Infrastructures, as Seconded National Expert since May 2008, dealing mainly with the Community Legal Framework for European Research Infrastructures. Before this, she has since 2001 been working as a legal advisor for the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), additionally supporting the Brussels Office of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres on legal and financial matters related to the Community Framework Programmes, and especially on Consortium Agreements, from 2005 till 2008. In this function she was also coordinator of the DESCA project.

Stefan Van Overtveldt - BT, Belguim

As VP, Emerging Technology & Innovation in BT Global Services (BTGS), Stefan Van Overtveldt manages BTGS’s investments in new technology areas, including Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service  and Cloud Services.  As part of his role, Stefan also drives a number of Internal IT Projects in those same areas.

Before taking on this current role, Stefan was managing BTGS’s IT Transformation Practice,  heading up a worldwide Team of Consultants and Solution Architects in the areas of Server and Infrastructure Consolidation, Communication & Collaboration, Application Integration and SOA as well as managing the investments for BT's external offerings in these areas.

Stefan has 20 years of experience in the IT Industry, including roles in Development, Technology Strategy, Consulting and Marketing.  Before joining BT in September 2004, Stefan was the worldwide Product Executive in charge of WebSphere Technology for IBM, based in Somers, NY.  In this role, he also started IBM's SOA Consulting Practice. He has a background as an IT Architect with specialization in Application Integration and Financial Services and holds an MBA from University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Martin Antony Walker - Independent Consultant, France

Martin Antony Walker provides independent studies and analyses in high-performance and distributed computing, and related areas. He is a member of the Industry Expert Group advising the EC-funded OGF Europe project, and advises the HP-UNESCO anti brain-drain projects in South East Europe and Africa.

Prior to retirement in July 2008, Martin was responsible for business in the scientific research segment of the high-performance computing market for Hewlett Packard in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). He has served as Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Open Grid Forum.

Starting in 1996, Martin co-led the successful entry of Digital Equipment, then Compaq Computer, into the scientific and technical computing market in Europe, and has helped set strategic marketing and product development directions in high-performance computing for Digital, Compaq, and HP.

From 1991 to 1996, Martin was Director, Parallel Applications, for parallel processor product development, and founding director of the Parallel Applications Technology Program at Cray Research, Inc. He played several key roles in the development and sales of large-scale parallel computer systems at Myrias Research Corporation from 1984 to 1991.

Dr. Walker received a DIC and PhD in mathematics and physics from the University of London in 1970 as a Commonwealth Scholar, and has lectured and published widely in the scientific literature on relativistic gravitational collapse, black holes, gravitational radiation, and related topics. He was a member of scientific staff at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics, Munich, Germany, from 1971 to 1984. During his research career, Dr. Walker held visiting positions at leading universities and research institutions around the world. He has an undergraduate degree from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.