Stuart Russell is Professor (and former Chair) of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and holds the Smith--Zadeh Chair in Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley; he is also Adjunct Professor of Neorological Surgery at UCSF. He is a fellow of AAAI and ACM and winner of the Computers and Thought Award and the ACM Karl Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. His book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI. His research covers many areas of artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on machine learning, probabilistic modeling and inference, and planning under uncertainty, with applications to global seismic monitoring and computational physiology.

Jeffrey Heer is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he works on human-computer interaction, visualization, and social computing. His research investigates the perceptual, cognitive, and social factors involved in making sense of large data collections, resulting in new interactive systems for visual analysis and communication.

Alina is a research staff member at the IBM Watson Research Center, working on wide range of theoretical and applied problems in machine learning and algorithms.

Dr. Corn is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Medical School. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Harvard's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, and his fellowship in hematology at Johns Hopkins. Prior to his service at NLM, Dr. Corn served as Professor of Medicine at Georgetown University, where he held a number of leadership positions, including Medical Director of Georgetown University Hospital and Dean of the School of Medicine. He joined NLM in 1990 as Director of the Extramural Programs Division, with responsibility for all aspects of NLM's grant programs. As Deputy Director for Research and Education, he serves as principal medical advisor on research and development and medical education priorities for NLM, and provides direction and advice on the full range of NLM's intramural and extramural research portfolio.

Daniel Crichton is a principal computer scientist, program manager and principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He oversees programs in earth and planetary data systems and serves as JPL's thrust lead in the area of data systems for climate research. He has served as principal investigator of several distributed data system projects for NASA and the NIH. He also led development of a software framework for sharing data that won runner-up for NASA Software of the Year and is now hosted by the Apache Software Foundation as a top-level project. He has published over 60 papers on data intensive systems including four book chapters. He holds an M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and a B.S. degree in Information and Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine.

Dr. John Langford is a Senior Researcher at Yahoo! Research. His work includes research in machine learning, game theory, steganography, and Captchas. He was previously a Research Associate Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute in Chicago. He has worked in the past at IBM's Watson Research Center in Yortown, NY under the Goldstine Fellowship. He earned a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002 and a Physics/Computer Science double major from CalTech in 1997.

Chris A. Mattmann has a wealth of experience in software design, and in the construction of large-scale data-intensive systems. His work has infected a broad set of communities, ranging from helping NASA unlock data from its next generation of earth science system satellites, to assisting graduate students at the University of Southern Calfornia (his alma mater) in the study of software architecture, all the way to helping industry and open source as a member of the Apache Software Foundation. When he's not busy being busy, he's spending time with his lovely wife and son braving the mean streets of Southern California.

For Randall C. Wetzel, the quest focuses on artificial intelligence (AI), specifically, informatics engineering novel database systems to support medical decision-making. It's a passion that has inspired the energies of the chief of the Department of Anesthesiology Critical Care Medicine at Childrens Hospital for years. In 1998, Dr. Wetzel pioneered the Laura P. and Leland K. Whittier Virtual Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, and founded VPS, LLC which streams the world's largest database on pediatric critical care patients. Letting the actual evidence of thousands and thousands of patients inform the care of the next one.

Suchi Saria received her PhD'11 in Computer Science with a machine learning and clinical informatics focus from Stanford University with Daphne Koller as her mentor. Saria is an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University in the departments of Computer Science within the school of Engineering and Health Policy within the Bloomberg school of Public Health. She is also visiting Harvard Medical School as an NSF Computing Innovation fellow this year. She has won various awards including, a Best Student Paper and a Best Student Paper Finalist award, the Rambus Fellowship, the Microsoft full scholarship and the National Science Foundation Computing Innovation Fellowship. Her research interests lie in developing novel machine learning and data-driven solutions for improving health care delivery both at the point of care and for analysis by policy makers. Her thesis work has been featured in national and international press outlets including CBS Radio, France's national newspaper Le Monde and NIH's Medline Plus.

Valerie Florance, PhD, is Director of Extramural Programs (EP) for the National Library of Medicine (NLM). Blending background experience from medical anthropology, medical libraries and biomedical informatics, she is as multi-faceted and leading edge as the NLM division she heads. Extramural Programs provides funding to people and organizations studying how computers and telecommunication technology can improve the way we store, retrieve, access, and share biomedical information. Dr. Florance completed her doctoral studies in information sciences at the University of Maryland. She came to the NLM in 2001. She spoke with NLM in Focus writer Christopher Klose about the NLM grants program.

Prior to joining Cloudera, Jeff conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook. The Data team was responsible for inventing and building powerful data analysis applications on Hadoop. That system is the core data platform at Facebook for improving the user experience and driving revenue. Before he joined Facebook, Jeff worked as a quantitative analyst on Wall Street. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from Harvard University.

Zachary Ives is an Associate Professor and the Markowitz Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and an Associated Faculty Member of the Penn Center for Bioinformatics. He received his B.S. from Sonoma State University and his PhD from the University of Washington. His research interests include data integration, data sharing among autonomous and heterogeneous systems, heterogeneous sensor networks, and information provenance and authoritativeness. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, an alumnus of the DARPA Computer Science Study Panel, and a member of DARPA's Information Science and Technology advisory panel. He has been a co-program chair for the XSym, NTII, and WebDB workshops, and an Area Vice-Chair for ICDE. He is the recipient of the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching. He serves as the undergraduate curriculum chair for Penn's new Singh Program in Market and Social Systems Engineering. His upcoming book, Principles of Data Integration (with Alon Halevy and AnHai Doan) will be available in Summer 2012 from Morgan-Kaufmann.