IIT’15 Keynote Speakers

Chair Professor Christian Wagner

Title: Chair Professor and Associate Provost for Quality Assurance

Affiliation: School of Creative Media, City University, Hong Kong

Bio: Christian Wagner has served on CityU’s faculty for over 15 years. He is currently Chair Professor in the School of Creative Media, as well as Associate Provost for Quality Assurance. Professor Wagner started his academic career at the University of Southern California after receiving his PhD in Business Administration from the University of British Columbia in 1989. Professor Wagner specializes in the development and study of creativity support, collective intelligence, knowledge management, and the use of computer games for learning. He is an award-winning author, multiple teaching award winner, experienced administrator, and software entrepreneur. He is most recognized for his research on wikis and their impact on organizational performance.

Dr. Babu Narayanan

Title: Senior Principal Scientist Software & Analytics, GE Software and GE Global Research John F Welch Technology Centre Bangalore 560066 India

Affiliation: General Electrics, India

Bio: Babu Narayanan is a Senior Principal Scientist in the Software & Analytics division at GE Software & GE Global Research. He has been with GE for the last 11 years in various technical and management roles, working closely with the Healthcare and Transportation businesses. His interests are primarily in the area of application of advanced analytics & computing to solve challenging business problems and developing Predictivity Solutions for the Industrial Internet of Things on the Predix platform. Babu has a BS in CS from IIT Madras, and a PhD from the Courant Institute, NYU. Prior to GE, he worked at Qualcomm, Xros and Affymetrix.

Dr. Michael P. Perrone

Title: Program Director, DCS Client Partnerships IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA

Affiliation: IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA

Bio: Dr. Perrone is an IBM Master Inventor with over 20 years of experience in computer science, including high performance computing, seismic imaging, reservoir modeling, business analytics, graph algorithms, network intrusion detection, financial data stream processing, high-speed text indexing, computational fluid dynamics, image processing, carbon sequestration, bioinformatics and statistical machine learning. As the Data Centric Systems Client Partnership Program Director, he contributes to IBM's research strategy, technical activities, business models development, and client collaborations. The teams Michael has led have won the 2009 Platts Global Energy Award for the Commercial Technology of the Year, and the Graph500 competition five times in a row, and have developed ground-breaking computational algorithms. He received his PhD in Physics from Brown University.

Professor and Canberra Fellow and IEEE Fellow Elizabeth Chang

Title: Professor and Canberra Fellow, UNSW@ADFA Chair: IEEE IES Technical Committee on Industrial Informatics Chair: IFIP Working Group 12 Web Semantics.

Affiliation: University of New South Wales UNSW@ Australian Defense Force Academy, Australia

Bio: Professor Elizabeth Chang is Professor and Canberra Fellow in the School of Business, the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA). Her current research focuses on Defence Logistics; Intelligent Transportation, Ambient Security, Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet-of-Things; Trust and Risks, Situation Awareness in Ad-hoc enviornment; Virtual Collaborative Logistics and underlying technologies including data intelligence and real time big data analytics.

In combining IT and Logistics she empowers the research work and professional training in Logistics and Transportation in a way that would not otherwise be possible. She is excellent in working with public and private sector professionals, academics from many fields as well as PhD Students. She is motivated by the idea of “creating value by making connections’ and is looking forward to working with you locally and internationally to help build one of the best research groups in the world in the area of Logistics and Transportation and especially for Defense, public and private sectors, please contact her at elizabeth.chang@unsw.edu.au or e.chang@adfa.edu.au.

Her previous work as CIO/CTO for a multi-national transport logistics corporation in Hong Kong and the last 10 years of successful collaborative research with WA Department of Planning and Infrastructure, WA Department of Transport, Main Roads WA, Fleetwood Corp, Specialised Container Transports, Port Authorities; Blu-logistics and many Road Transport and Logistics Association and Societies, allowed her to acquire a thorough understanding of many issues facing the transportation and logistics industry nationally and globally, and these have provided deep insights and essential foundations for academic research and development and extension to Defence through ‘research and teaching informed by industry experience’.

Her previous academic achievement includes 20 Competitive Research Grants including 10 Australian Research Council (ARC) Grants worth over $11.5 million. She has supervised/co-supervised 38 PhD theses to completion. Her first PhD student, Dr Wenny Rahayu, received the Best Thesis Award from the Australian Association of Computer Science, 4 recent PhD theses have received the Chancellor’s Best Thesis Award, and 4 PhD graduates’ were awarded ARC Post-docs. She has delivered 36 Keynote/Planary speeches largely at major IEEE Conferences and published many scientific work including 6 authored, 8 edited books, 15 book chapters, 90+ International journal papers and over 300 refereed conference papers with an H-Index of 30 (Google Scholar) and has over 5000 citations of her work. Her initial fundamental education in Computer Science and Software Engineering has given her a unique strength in applied and multidisciplinary science, social science and emerging technologies research.

Her previous academic positions include Professor and Director for Tier 1 Institute of Excellence on Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence and CoE for Extended Enterprises and Business Intelligence at Curtin University; A/Professor and Director for Logistics Informatics Research Centre at the University of Newcastle, and Lecturer/Senior Lecturer at La Trobe University while doing her Post-graduates.

She is the Chair elect for IEEE IES Technical Committee on Industrial Informatics (2014-2015) where she will provide leadership in this area in the world by attracting top talent and researchers from around world to help define the future research directions. She is also an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics (since 2007) and Guest Editor on IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (since 2005), Co-editor in chief for International Journal on Engineering Intelligent Systems. She is a member of Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, honorary member of the Australian Logistics and Supply Chain Society, Senior Member of IEEE and she was honoured to be Technical Chair or General chair for over 20 International and IEEE Conferences.

Gary Michael Schneider

Title: CTO & Vice President

Affiliation: Global Technical Leadership

Bio: Gary Schneider has been in the technology industry since 1988, when he joined IBM as a software developer at the IBM Toronto Lab Database as a member of the DB2 development team. He was a member of the initial technology transfer team that first delivered DB2 on the Windows and AIX platforms in the early 90’s, porting the product from OS/2. During that time in Toronto he held positions with progressively increased responsibility within Development, Business Partner Enablement, Marketing and Business Development.

In 1999, he ventured into the entrepreneurial space, leading a startup software company that specialized in digital media distribution using VPN (Virtual Private Networks) technology for targeted in-store advertising, based on real-time, local sales data analytics. The company won the Canadian Venture Fair as the best investment opportunity of the year in 2000.
In April 2001, he returned to IBM US, being named Worldwide Director of Channel De-velopment, responsible for worldwide strategic alliances and technical enablement for IBM’s Information Management (IM) division under IBM Software Group.

In March of 2003, he was named Director of Linux Competitive Technology for IBM’s Information Management business. In this role, his organization had responsibility for IBM Data Management’s business strategy and execution on Linux, including alliances with Novell, Red Hat and other emerging Linux vendors and solutions providers.
In January 2006, he was appointed to the position of Worldwide Director of Field Tech-nical Presales and Sales Enablement for Information Management, responsible for the Field Technical IM community, as well as overall sales training for all IBM seller com-munities on the IM portfolio.

In February 2010, Mr. Schneider accepted the role of CTO & Vice President of Technical Leadership for IBM's Growth Markets Unit, based in Shanghai, China. He was responsi-ble for driving innovation, and technical & professional skills development across emerg-ing market regions including Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Middle East & Africa, Austral-ia and Central & Eastern Europe.
He is currently Vice President of Global Technical Leadership, based in Armonk, New York.
Mr. Schneider has an engineering degree from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and an M.B.A. from the Richard Ivey School of Business at the Univer-sity of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.