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Dina Bitton is an expert in the area of high-performance database management and a successful entrepreneur. She held faculty positions at Cornell University and at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

After achieving recognition in her academic career, she founded three successful software companies, where she defined new markets such as Data Profiling and Enterprise Information Integration. She recently sold her third startup, Callixa, to SAP, where she held the position of Vice President of Technology until 2007.

Dina serves on the advisory board of several technology startups. She was a founding member and Chairman of the Board of the Women's Technology Cluster in San Francisco, a business incubator for women-led technology companies. She is also Chairman of the Board of Digital Divide Data, an internationally acclaimed non-profit that uses a sustainable, private-sector business model to break the cycle of poverty in the developing world.

Dina holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Mathematics from the Technion Institute in Israel, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin.

Rakesh Agrawal is a Microsoft Technical Fellow at the newly founded Search Labs. He is the recipient of the ACM-SIGKDD First Innovation Award, ACM-SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, ACM-SIGMOD Test of Time Award, VLDB 10-Yr Most Influential Paper Award, and the Computerworld First Horizon Award. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of ACM, and a Fellow of IEEE. Scientific American named him to the list of 50 top scientists and technologists in 2003.

Prior to joining Microsoft in March 2006, Rakesh was an IBM Fellow and led the Quest group at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Earlier, he was with the Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill from 1983 to 1989. He also worked for 3 years at India's premier company, the Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd.

He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1983. He also holds a B.E. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from IIT-Roorkee, and a two-year Post Graduate Diploma in Industrial Engineering from the National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Bombay.

Rakesh is well-known for developing fundamental data mining concepts and technologies and pioneering key concepts in data privacy, including Hippocratic Database, Sovereign Information Sharing, and Privacy-Preserving Data Mining. IBM's commercial data mining product, Intelligent Miner, grew out of his work. His research has been incorporated into other IBM products, including DB2 Mining Extender, DB2 OLAP Server and WebSphere Commerce Server, and has influenced several other commercial and academic products, prototypes and applications. His other technical contributions include Polyglot object-oriented type system, Alert active database system, Ode (Object database and environment), Alpha (extension of relational databases with generalized transitive closure), Nest distributed system, transaction management, and database machines.

Rakesh has been granted more than 55 patents. He has published more than 150 research papers, many of them considered seminal. He has written the 1st as well as 2nd highest cited of all papers in the fields of databases and data mining (13th and 15th most cited across all computer science as of Februray 2007 in CiteSeer). Wikipedia lists one of his papers as one of the most influential database papers. His papers have been cited more than 6500 times, with more than 15 of them receiving more than 100 citations each. He is the most cited author in the field of database systems. His work has been featured in New York Times Year in Review, New York Times Science section, and several other publications.

Rakesh's new quest is to use Internet to bring the benefits of computing to the underserved.

Judith R. Faulkner is CEO and founder of Epic Systems Corporation. With a BS in Mathematics from Dickinson College and MS in Computer Science from University of Wisconsin, she taught computer science for several years in the UW system and then worked as a software developer, creating one of the first databases organized around a patient record. She founded Epic in 1979 and has guided it from its modest beginnings as a clinical database company to its current place as a leading provider of integrated healthcare software.

Matt Korn is an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience building and operating critical portions of the Internet for consumers, businesses, government, and academia.

From 1993 to 2006, Korn served as Executive Vice President, Network and Data Center Operations at America Online, with responsibility for the operation of the network and systems that supported AOL's interactive media products. Korn led the scaling of AOL service operations from 2,000 concurrent users to more than 3.3 million concurrent users. He recruited and managed a staff of over 1,200 network engineers and programmers worldwide who managed the data centers, systems, and network operations underlying AOL, CompuServe, AIM, ICQ, AOL.com, Netscape, and MapQuest, as well as most of the Time Warner web properties.

Korn attended the Bronx High School of Science. He earned a bachelor of arts in computer science at Yale University in 1980. He began his career at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center as a systems engineer and was awarded an IBM Resident Study Fellowship in 1982 to pursue a graduate education in the Computer Sciences department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to his dissertation research in 3-D computer vision, Korn also became heavily involved in the development of early Internet e-mail systems. Korn was awarded a master of science degree in 1984.

Korn returned to the IBM Research Division in 1987 and held a variety of management positions in which he was responsible for the development and operations of NSFnet, which was the major U.S. Internet backbone.

In 1992, he was elected to the Board of Trustees of CREN, the not-for-profit Corporation for Research and Educational Networking, which operated the national BITNET network. From 2001 to 2006 he served on the Board of Directors of the Greater Reston (Virginia) Chamber of Commerce, and also served on the Board of IneedMD, a medical start-up looking to facilitate physician-patient interactions through the Internet.

Korn was pleased to return to the University of Wisconsin in 2005 as a Distinguished Fellow of the E-Business Institute. In 2006 he was invited to join the newly formed Board of Visitors of the Computer Sciences department, and is enjoying the opportunity to reconnect with faculty, alumni, and to meet with new students.

Korn lives in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC with his wife, Cindy, and their three children (when they are not away at college). Their son is studying Psychology at the University of Miami (in Florida) and their oldest daughter is studying Psychology at Virginia Tech. Cindy received a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1987.

Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President, Corporate Resources Mike Lehman holds management responsibilities for Sun's finance, information technology, and global business services functions. He also oversees Sun's real-estate functions, Sun's corporate planning and strategy group, and its public policy efforts. He reports directly to Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's chief executive officer and president.

Lehman's credentials include a long and successful association with Sun, both as an executive and, most recently, as a board member. He served on Sun's board in various capacities from 2002 until rejoining the company as CFO in February 2006.

Prior to serving on the board of directors, Lehman was an employee of Sun for 15 years. He was vice president and corporate controller of Sun, responsible for the preparation of the company's public financial information, overseeing Sun's financial staff, and coordinating the company's outlook and budgeting processes. Before this, Lehman was the director of finance and administration for Sun's Asian subsidiaries based in Hong Kong.

Before his career at Sun, Lehman was a certified public accountant with Price Waterhouse and worked in the Milwaukee and San Francisco offices. Lehman serves on the board of directors of the University of Wisconsin Foundation and is former chair of the Dean's Advisory Board of the school of business at Madison. He is also on the board of MGIC Investment Corporation.

Lehman holds a bachelor's degree in business administration, with a major in accounting from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Viggy is the Executive Vice President of Sales and Client Services for the Enterprise Business Unit of Envestnet Asset Management, Inc. Envestnet, a privately-held firm, is a leading provider of wealth management solutions for fee-based advisors and financial institutions. Viggy was one of the co-founders of Oberon Financial Technology, Inc., a firm that used emerging web technologies to efficiently scale the delivery of financial advice to investors.

Prior to Oberon, Viggy was with SpecialtyMD.com, a firm that specialized in helping specialty physicians with the complex process of competitive materials and device procurement using rational data-based selection processes.

Viggy received his MS in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in December 1983. His undergraduate degree, BE (Hons), was in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, India. After completing his MS, Viggy worked at Hewlett Packard, on the then emerging Hewlett Packard Precision Architecture. Subsequently, he worked in various business management roles at Silicon Graphics, Inc., where was the product line manager for high-end computer systems.

During his free time, Viggy likes to read and stay abreast of global news and politics, and tries to stay fit by distance running. Viggy and his family live in Los Altos Hills, CA.

Pavan is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor who enjoys working on great ideas with great teams. His investments include Neoteris (acquired by Juniper), myCFO (acquired by Harris), Sigaba (acquired by Proofpoint), Benu, Infoaxe and Trackle (where he was the founding CEO). Previously, he was the Chairman and CEO of Cendura Corporation which he co-founded in 2002. He grew the company into one of the market leaders for data center automation software with an installed base that included several Fortune 500 companies. Cendura was acquired by CA (formerly Computer Associates) in 2006.

Prior to that, he co-founded Healtheon (now WebMD [WBMD]) in 1996 along with Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics & Netscape Communications, and served as its Chief Technology Officer and General Manager/EVP of its Internet Operations. In his General Management role, he was responsible for WebMD’s entire suite of products including its Internet-based ehealth services. During his tenure, Pavan led the company’s transformation from a concept to the worlds largest e-health company approaching a billion dollars in annual revenues, over eight thousand employees and several billion in market capitalization. Pavan’s role was extensively profiled in the bestseller The New New Thing by Michael Lewis.

Prior to WebMD, Pavan worked at Silicon Graphics, where he was the General Manager for the company’s Interactive Media Group and was responsible for deploying Time Warner, Inc.’s Interactive TV project in Orlando, Florida. The Time Warner project is widely recognized as the most prominent and sophisticated ITV system ever created and has been the foundation of several advanced technologies and companies (eg. Tivo).

Prior to that, he was employed by Intel Corporation where he led several microprocessor software teams.

Pavan holds a B.S.E.E. from the Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur) and an M.S.C.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Pavan serves on several Corporate Boards and Advisory Boards. He also served on the board of the US India Business Council from 1999-2009 and is currently on the Board of Visitors at the University of Wisconsin (CS).

He is a member of the Band of Angels and TIE Angels. He is the founder of the Badger Entrepreneurship Forum which includes Silicon Valley founders, executives, venture capitalists, investment bankers and attorneys who are UW alumni.

Pavan is also involved with many community initiatives and is on the board of the Mountain View Police Activities League. He is the Advisory Chairman of the Kick, Lead and Dream Soccer Group and he also founded the Computer Learning Center for underprivileged children in Kanpur, India.

He was a recipient of the Silicon India Leadership Award (1999), IITK (West Coast) Distinguished Alumni Award, and University of Wisconsin Distinguished Fellow (E-Business).

Peter Spiro is a Technical Fellow working in the Platforms and Services Division at Microsoft. He is currently focused on defining Microsoft's future storage platform, spanning from devices to desktops to enterprises to cloud storage. He is considered one of the world's foremost experts in database internals.

Spiro joined Microsoft in 1994 as a change agent targeted at expanding Microsoft's presence in the commercial database industry. He was one of the principal architects of SQL Server 7.0, which required significant re-architecture to implement its major advances in ease-of-use and automatic tuning. Spiro was also the leader for the WinFS effort, which has evolved into the Integrated Storage vision for the database group.

Spiro worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, as the Technical Director for DEC Rdb and DEC DBMS before coming to Microsoft. He was one of the key contributors to a unique database kernel used as the storage platform for relational database, and Codasyl database systems. He was also a key contributor to the cross-company transition to the Alpha architecture at DEC.

Spiro has a bachelor's degree in Natural Resources Management from Colorado State University and two Master's degrees--Forestry and Computer Science--from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He holds a number of patents related to storage technology.

Before he went to graduate school, Spiro worked for the Peace Corps as a charcoal maker in Mali, West Africa. An avid traveler and hiker, Spiro also serves on the board of the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust.

Steve Scott is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for NVIDIA's Tesla™ business unit and is responsible for the Tesla roadmap and architecture. Tesla is rapidly becoming a fundamental technology in accelerated high performance computing and is expected to be the cornerstone in the race to exascale. Previously, Steve served 19 years at Cray, including the last six as senior vice president and CTO, with responsibility for defining Cray's technology and system architecture roadmap. Steve was one of the architects of the groundbreaking Cray T3E multiprocessor, focussing on the interconnect and on synchronization and communication mechanisms. He was the chief archtiect of the GigaRing system area network used in all Cray systems in the late 1990s. More recently, Steve was the chief architect of the Cray X1/X1E supercomputers, which combined high performance vector processors with a scalable, globally-addressable system architecture. He was also the chief architect of the next generation Cray “BlackWidow” system, and the architect of the router used in Cray XT3 MPP and the follow-on Baker system.

Steve received his PhD in computer architecture from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1992, where he was a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and Hertz Foundation Fellow. He holds 27 US patents, has served on numerous program committees, and has served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. Steve’s interests lie in the areas of procesor architecture, memory system design, synchronization and communication mechanisms, and interconnection networks. Steve was the recipient of the 2005 Maurice Wilkes Award, given by the Association for Computing Machinery, and the 2005 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, given by the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Norm Koo is the Vice President and General Manager, Greater China AOL Time Warner. At Time Warner, Koo is responsible for emerging technologies for large-scale data center information technology infrastructure and associated consumer and home networking devices. He was also responsible for their introduction and deployment into the Time Warner family of business divisions such as AOL, Time Inc., HBO, CNN and Turner Broadcasting System.

Koo joined Time-Warner in 2001. Previously, he held a variety of senior management positions at Sun Microsystems, Inc., including senior director of e-business implementation in the Global Program Office. In 2000 Koo was awarded Sun's President Award. He was instrumental in growing the company's Asia-Pacific revenues to more than $1 billion. He served as senior director in the chief technology office, responsible for the technology program in support of business development of Sun's strategic accounts such as Motorola, Toshiba, Siemens, DaimlerChrysler, Shell, Commerzbank and Deutsch Bank. In addition, he held the distinction of designing and executing the world's very first worldwide web application for a mass sporting event, the 1994 WorldCup Soccer Games, in which he served as head of computer information systems.

Koo enjoys sharing his knowledge and experience and is invited to do so at business and information technology conferences. In 2002, he was an invited speaker at the Ohio State University College of Business. In 1999, he was a speaker and panelist at the Harvard China Review Conference.

In 1995, Koo served as founder and CEO for OpenTV, a Sun-Thomson joint venture. He led the company public with a $3 billion-plus market capitalization.

Koo received an MBA from the University of Santa Clara, an MS in nuclear engineering and a PhD in nuclear engineering/electrical engineering from Iowa State University. In 1970 he earned a BS in nuclear engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He and his wife, Sandy Newman Koo, have two children. They enjoy travel, sightseeing and skiing.

Brian Pinkerton is Chief Architect at Lucid Imagination, an open-source search firm. Until recently, he was Vice President, Engineering at Scout Labs, a social media analysis firm. Scout Labs acquired Minimal Loop, a search technology startup that he co-founded in 2007. Prior to that, Pinkerton held the position of Director of Search at Technorati and was responsible for Technorati's blog search product. Pinkerton held the positions of Senior Architect, Chief Scientist, and Vice President of Engineering at Excite@Home. He created WebCrawler, the first Internet search engine, while working on his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 1994. WebCrawler quickly became a popular resource on the Net, and Pinkerton sold it to AOL in 1995. Prior to the development of WebCrawler, he spent four years in NeXT's highly regarded software group, where he led the system performance effort and was instrumental in several key projects. Dr. Pinkerton holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

Tom Rudkin is a retired software development engineer & manager whose career spanned Intel, Bell Northern Research, VisiCorp, Control Data, Forethought and Microsoft. While at Forethought, Rudkin was one of two developers who wrote the initial version of PowerPoint (running on a Macintosh), released in 1987. Forethought was acquired by Microsoft shortly thereafter, and Rudkin continued to develop PowerPoint at Microsoft for 8 years. He was the development manager for the first Windows version of PowerPoint and of Microsoft Draw.

Rudkin received a B.A. in Math (with Highest Distinction and Honors in Math) from the University of Kansas in 1973, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976. Since 1976 Rudkin has lived with his wife Jann in the Santa Clara Valley (aka Silicon Valley) in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Tom and Jann Rudkin keep active by volunteering with several organizations, most particularly with the American Youth Soccer Organization, as a soccer referee, referee instructor and referee assessor, and with their undergraduate alma mater the University of Kansas. Rudkin was awarded a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2008 by KU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He also tries to stay current in various technical areas within computer science, earth sciences and biological sciences.

Daisy Wong earned a B.S. in Computer Science and an M.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She worked as both a software engineer and technical manager for companies that include Perkin-Elmer and 3M. After 13 years in industry, she chose to return to college and earned a master and a PhD in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Her research specialization focused on computer-based Collaborative Interpreting for Knowledge Discovery.

After earning her PhD, she became the Director of Clinical Systems Engineering and then Vice President of Information Technology for MedMined, a Birmingham start-up that applied data mining technology to identify unsuspected trends of hospital acquired infections and bacterial antimicrobial resistance for detection, intervention, and prevention. She helped shepherd the company through its growth and the acquisition by Cardinal Health, and later as the spinoff company Carefusion. Currently, she is the Chief Quality Officer for MedSnap Operating Company, LLC, a healthcare-analytics firm. She is also an Adjunct Faculty of the Computer and Information Sciences Department at UAB. She works to increase interest in technology careers among young people. As an active supporter of the UAB’s Outreach program, she teaches computer summer camp for middle and high school students.

Ramu is currently leading mobile video deployments for carriers at Skype. Ramu is the founding CEO of Qik – the world leader in mobile video sharing. Skype acquired Qik in January 2011 for $150 million. Ramu started Qik in his garage, built the team, raised venture money and brought the disruptive technology to market by leveraging the Internet and reaching out to the consumers directly, formed alliances with mobile phone OEMs and Carriers to make Qik the leader in mobile video sharing. Prior to Qik, Ramu started the Oracle's Real-Time Collaboration Products division, and was also a member of the Oracle Architecture Review Board. Also at Oracle, Ramu started the Oracle Database Grid division and built the organization to several hundred developers and product managers, and annual license revenue of over $500 million. Prior to Oracle, Ramu worked in Digital's Relational Database Division and built the worlds first 64 bit RDBMs for Alpha/OSF-1 systems. Ramu has an MBA from Boston University, an MS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a bachelors degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India.

Dale R. Smith, Executive Vice President, is the Manager of U.S. Bank Trust Technology & Support Services headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Smith began his career with Firstar Information Services in 1982, progressing through systems analyst and project manager roles before being named Team Manager for Time Deposit & Government Reporting Systems in 1988. In 1991, he was named Manager of Automation Customer Services supporting banking systems outsourcing to more than 900 correspondent banks.

He joined Firstar Corporation in 1995 as a consultant to the Firstar Forward corporate restructuring project, remaining with the Implementation Team until 1997. He joined Firstar Trust Company in April 1997 as Director of Technology and was elected to the Board of Directors. In October 1997, he assumed responsibility for the Trust Support Services division which provided operational support to the Trust, Custody, Brokerage and Treasury businesses. He managed the Star/Firstar, Firstar/Mercantile, and Firstar/U.S. Bank acquisitions for Trust.

Following the acquisition of U.S. Bank in October 2001, Smith was named Executive Vice President of U.S. Bancorp and Manager of Trust Technology & Support Services for U.S. Bank. He has since managed the conversions of the Corporate Trust acquisitions from State Street, National City Bank, Wachovia Bank, SunTrust, LaSalle Bank and Bank of America. He is a member of U.S. Bank’s Leadership Group, Trust Risk Management Committee, and Information Security Steering Committee.

He earned Bachelor of Science degrees with Distinction in Computer Science and History from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1982, having been elected Phi Beta Kappa during his junior year in 1981. He was elected to the Iron Cross Society in 1981. He has held the designation of Certified Trust Operations Professional (CSOP) since 2001. He has lectured on technology, operations and risk management to associations including the American Bankers Association, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Financial Services Technology Network.

Smith serves as Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Directors for the American Heart Association of Southeastern Wisconsin, a Director for the Academy of Information Technology within the Milwaukee Public Schools, and member of The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation Operations Advisory Committee. He previously served as Director-At-Large and President of the Board of Directors of the Financial Services Technology Network. He and his wife, Allison, reside in Jackson, Wisconsin.

You can quickly and easily contribute to the important CS initiatives and projects below. For more information, please contact us.

To double the impact, please check if your employer will match your gift.

Your gift is tax deductible. You will receive a gift receipt from the UW Foundation.

You can quickly and easily contribute to the important CS initiatives and projects below. For more information, please contact us.

To double the impact, please check if your employer will match your gift.

Your gift is tax deductible. You will receive a gift receipt from the UW Foundation.

You can quickly and easily contribute to the important CS initiatives and projects below. For more information, please contact us.

To double the impact, please check if your employer will match your gift.

Your gift is tax deductible. You will receive a gift receipt from the UW Foundation.