Speaker Details

Kyriakos Baxevanidis - Deputy Head of the GÉANT and e-Infrastructures Unit, Directorate General Information Society and Media (INFSO) European Commission

Mr. Kyriakos Baxevanidis is the Deputy Head of the GÉANT and e-Infrastructures Unit, Directorate General Information Society and Media (INFSO) of the European Commission. The Unit supports the provision of computer, communication, and data infrastructures of the highest quality and performance to Europe's researchers, namely by establishing a high-capacity and high-speed communications network for all researchers in Europe (GÉANT) and specific high performance computing and data-intensive advanced infrastructures (e.g. EGEE, DEISA, DRIVER), exploiting the benefits of a strong co-ordination between the Research Infrastructures and the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Programmes of the European Commission, and an enlarged co-operation with relevant national and international initiatives.

Mr. Baxevanidis holds also the position of the Vice-Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Open Grid Forum (OGF), the international standardisation body on distributed computing - grids. He previously served in the areas of Services Engineering, Communications Management and Security of ICT and of previous EU-Research programmes.

Before joining the Commission, he worked for several years in Siemens in the field of telecommunication systems as an engineer and leader, later, of a development group.  He holds degrees in engineering from the Aristotle University of Greece and from Carnegie-Mellon University, US.


Francesco Catara - University of Catania Professor and President of the Consortium COMETA

Francesco Catara was born in Catania. He has been a full professor of Theoretical Physics since 1986. Research activity mainly in the fields of Quantum Many Body Theories and Nuclear Reaction Theories. Author of 100 scientific papers published in international journals. Has given invited talks in numerous Workshops and Conferences. Many lecture courses, both at under graduated and post graduated level. Referee of the journals: Physical Review, Physical Review Letters and Nuclear Physics A.

Director of the Catania branch of INFN in the years 1977-1983 and 2001-2007. Presently President of the Consortium COMETA, born from the gathering of the 3 Sicilian Universities and 3 national research institutes operating in Sicily in the fields of Astrophysics (INAF), Nuclear and Subnuclear Physics (INFN), Geology and Volcanology (INVG). The goal of COMETA is to create a grid infrastructure in Sicily, connected to the Italian and international grids. This has been achieved and the Sicilian grid is fully operating.

Peter Coffee - Director of Platform Research, salesforce.com

Peter Coffee, former Technology Editor of enterprise IT journals PC Week and eWEEK, works with corporate and commercial application developers to build a community based on Force.com: the salesforce.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). He has 26 years' experience in guiding the adoption and management of innovative information technologies and practices as a developer, consultant, educator, and internationally published author. He has provided expert analysis of IT industry issues and events including Internet security, the Microsoft antitrust case and the HP/Compaq acquisition for major news publications and broadcast media; he has been a keynote speaker, workshop leader, moderator or presenter at IT events throughout the U.S. as well as in England, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, China, Singapore, India and Australia.

Peter was previously the first manager of PC planning at The Aerospace Corporation, and before that was a Senior Engineer in arctic project management and chemical facility construction for several divisions of Exxon Corporation. He holds an engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from Pepperdine University, and has been a faculty member at Pepperdine and also at UCLA (computer science) and Chapman College (business analytics). He is the author of two books, How to Program Java and Peter Coffee Teaches PCs.

Vangelis Floros - EGEE User Forum Programme Chair

Vangelis Floros holds a BSc and an MSc in Computer Science from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has long years experience in grid computing and distributed systems in general, being involved with all aspects  of the discipline, from basic research to middleware development, grid site installation and administration, training, user support and application porting. He has participated in numerous European grid projects and he has been an active member of EGEE since the first phase of the project. In EGEE-III he is holding the position of NA4 deputy activity leader, helping coordinate and manage the project’s user communities and application support activities.  From this post, he is also responsible for organizing the scientific part of the annual EGEE User Forum and chairing the Programme Committee.

Bob Jones - EGEE Director

Dr. Jones is the Project Director of the European Commission co-financed EGEE project, which provides a production grid facility for e-Science in Europe.
Following a B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science from Staffordshire University, Jones joined the European organisation for high energy physics (CERN) in 1986 as a software developer with the information technology department providing support for the physics experiments running on the Large Electron Positron (LEP) particle accelerator. 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 Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator. 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 Commission in its 5th Framework Programme.

He is a member of the advisory board for several grid related European and national projects as well as Associate editor for the FGCS grid computing journal.

Craig Lee - OGF President

Dr. Craig A. Lee is a Senior Scientist in the Computer Systems Research Department of The Aerospace Corporation (a non-profit, federally funded R&D center). He has worked in the area of parallel and distributed computing for the last 25 years. Dr. Lee has conducted DARPA and NSF sponsored research in the areas of grid computing, optimistic models of computation, active networks, and distributed simulations, in collaboration with USC, UCLA, Caltech, ANL, and the College of William and Mary. This work has led naturally to Dr. Lee's involvement in the Open Grid Forum (www.ogf.org) where he is serving as President until September 2010. Dr. Lee has published over 60 technical works, including 4 book chapters and 7 edited volumes and issues, and is an associate editor of Future Generation Computing Systems (Elsevier). He is a steering committee co-chair for the ACM/IEEE Grid XY and CCGrid conferences, has served as a panelist for the NSF, NASA, DOE and INRIA, and reviews for many journals, conference, and workshops. Dr. Lee is also a member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society, and has lectured undergraduate computer science courses at UCLA.



Ludek Matyska - EGI_DS Project Director

Ludek Matyska is an Associate Professor in Informatics at Faculty of Informatics, and he also serves as a vice-director of Institute of Computer Science, both at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, in parallel with his position as a senior researcher at CESNET, the Czech NREN. He leads the METACentrum, the National Grid Initiative, being part of CESNET activities. Since July 2008 he is a Project Director of the EU EGI_DS project. He is also Project Management Board member of EGEE III, representing there Central Europe, and also member of the EUAsiaGRID Management Board. His research interests lie in the area of large distributed computing and storage systems, with a specific emphasis on their management and security. He also works in high speed network applications, with a specific emphasis on collaborative work support.

Mirco Mazzucato - INFN Research Manager

  • INFN-Grid Project Manager
  • INFN CNAF-TIER1 Director
  • INFN delegate and member of the Management Board in the (W)LCG
  • Member of the Project Management Board and coordinator of the Italian Federation in the FP7 European project EGEE-III
  • Italian Grid Infrastructure (IGI) Joint Research Unit Manager.
  • INFN’s delegate in the European Projects’ Management Boards: e-NMR, EGI_DS, OGF-Europe.
  • MIUR Italian delegate in the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group to define the roadmap and policies for the  development of the e-Infrastructure in Europe


Silvana Muscella - OGF-Europe Technical Coordinator

Silvana is the Managing Director of Trust-IT Services Ltd. Since founding the company in 2002, she has been shaping strategic vision and market positioning for the organisation while directly contributing to the growth of the team's competences. With a passion for marketing, internationalisation and business development challenges related to leading edge ICT technologies, Silvana has over 15 years of experience in communication initiatives with an international breadth. She has authored various ICT initiatives between Europe and International Co-operation Partner countries to help create collaboration opportunities resulting in sustainable co-operations. She has elaborated and delivered training programmes for organisations since 1998 and since 2002 has been a frequent, external expert for the EC programmes.  She was the Italian National Contact Point NCP assistant of the EC IST programme for more than ten years. She is currently the co-founder and director of the European Chapter of the Open Grid Forum and serves as a director at large on the OGF Board of Directors. Silvana holds a BA Hons in Languages and Economics from Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge (UK).

Stefano Nativi - Coordinator of the Earth and Space Science Informatics Laboratory - Italian National Research Council (CNR-IMAA)

He received a 1st and 2nd (Laurea) degree and a Ph.D from the University of Florence (IT). He had a PDRA grant from the University of Bristol (UK). He is President of the Earth and Space Sciences Informatics (ESSI) division of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). He is co-leader of GEOSS IP3 (Interoperability Process Pilot Project), co-chair of the Climate Change & Biodiversity WG of GEOSS AIP-2 (Architecture Implementation Pilot – phase 2), and member of the core GEOSS Standards and Interoperability Forum (SIF). He is member of the “Metadata Core Drafting Team” for the Implementing Rules of the INSPIRE initiative. He coordinates the ESSI Laboratory of the Institute of Methodologies Environmental Analysis of the Italian National Research Council (CNR - IMAA). He is member of the National Inter-university Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT) Scientific Committee. He is professor of “Web services management” (University of Florence - Faculty of Electronic and Telecommunications Engineering, Information Engineering 1st degree). He is professor of “Systems for land management” (University of Padua -Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics 2nd degree). He is Co-PI of the OGC GALEON (Geo-interface to Atmosphere, Land, Earth, Ocean netCDF) IE.

Steven Newhouse - EGEE Technical Director

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 modeling of underwater acoustics using high performance computing resources.

Piero Poccianti - Competence & Innovation Center Leader, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena

Piero Poccianti has  been involved in Information Technology projects since 1976. From 1980 to 1999 he has been working as IT manager in Banca Toscana, having in charge  the following main topics:

  • Office Automation Projects (1990-1994)
  • Evolution and renewal of the Branch Architecture for “Banca Toscana” and  “Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena”  banks within MPS Group (1995-1999).

Since 1999 up to 2001 he has been involved in “Consorzio Operativo Gruppo MPS” (the company providing information system services for all the companies inside the MPS Group). In his role he has guided the design and development phases of the new banks’ Multichannel Architecture. He currently has the role of Competence & Innovation Center Leader as Director within the Consorzio MPS. In his current position he has the responsibility of all research activities within the MPS Group. Identifying new paradigms and promising/innovative technologies for the evolution of Information Systems of  the Group are the main  goals of the Competence Center Team. The Competence Center Group, currently named “Osservatorio Tecnologico” is in the staff  of the General Manager of the Consorzio MPS. Piero Poccianti is also member of the Council of Artificial Intelligence Italian Association.

Benny Rochwerger - IBM/RESERVOIR Project

Benny Rochwerger has a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.  In his current position in IBM, he is the lead architect of RESERVOIR - a EU funded project investigating and developing technologies for the next generation infrastructure for services; previously he has worked in projects in virtualization management, autonomic computing, event processing, grid computing, distributed graphics and networking.  As part of his work in grid computing he contributed to the definition of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) specification.  Before joining IBM, Mr. Rochwerger worked at Avaya, Data General, Legent Corporation and Fidelity Medical.

Jamie Shiers - Head of Grid Support group - IT department CERN

Jamie Shiers currently leads the Grid Support group in CERN’s IT department. This group plays a leading role in the overall Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) project, acting in many ways as a bridge between sites, services and the experiments, with a strong focus on service and operations.

He has worked on many aspects of LHC computing since the early 1990s, moving to the Grid service area in 2005 when he led two major “Service Challenges” designed to help bring the service up to the level required for LHC data taking and analysis. He has been a member of both EGEE and EGI_DS projects and is a member of the Management Board of WLCG. He has authored numerous articles on Grid computing, including comparisons with Clouds from both technical and non-technical viewpoints.

Dr. Shiers received a PhD in physics from the University of Liverpool in 1981, following a degree in physics obtained at the University of London (Imperial College) in 1978. He has worked in the IT department at CERN for the past 25 years in a wide variety of positions, including operations, application development and support, databases and data management, as well as various project leadership roles. Prior to this he worked as a research physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, Germany and as a guest physicist at CERN.