Patrick Butler is a senior Senior Research Associate at Virginia Tech. At Virginia Tech, he is a member of the Discovery Analytics Center, a university-wide effort that brings together researchers from computer science, statistics, mathematics, and electrical and computer engineering to tackle knowledge discovery problems in important areas of national interest, including intelligence analysis, sustainability, and electronic medical records. The main thrust of his research focuses on the IARPA funded EMBERS project that uses open source indicators such as tweets, news, blog, weather, etc to forecast population level events such as civil unrest, elections, and epidemics.
Patrick graduated with his PhD in Computer Science from Virginia tech in 2014 during which time he was awarded a SMART Fellowship. His dissertation was in the area of using knowledge discovery for intelligence analysis.
Gary Shiffman is an expert in the economics of national security, and he is passionate about using social science and cutting-edge network and data analysis to protect the world from illicit actors. His goal is to make it more difficult for criminals and terrorists to accomplish their goals. In order to do this, Dr. Shiffman focuses on understanding institutions and individuals engaged in the non-random production of violence, and then on creating innovative ways to undermine these activities and networks.
In addition to his work as the founder and CEO of Giant Oak, Dr. Shiffman has been a professor at Georgetown University since 2002. His past professional experiences have positioned him as an expert in the unique intersection between the social sciences, big data, business, and national security concerns. These include service as Managing Director of the Chertoff Group, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Risk Management Solutions business unit at L-3 Communications, and Chief of Staff at U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
He has worked on anti-terrorism and homeland defense issues at an international law firm, advised US Senators as a National Security and Senior Policy Adviser to the US Senate Leadership, and served in policy, planning, and operational positions in the U.S. Department of Defense.
Gary proudly served his country and is a decorated US Navy Gulf War veteran.
Gary earned his Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University, his MA from Georgetown University in Security Studies and his BA in Psychology from the University of Colorado.
Nicholas Espinoza is an engineer who works in the defense and information security space. He has spent his time trying to understand the world’s toughest problems, building the next generation of threat analysis platforms, and training analysts at a range of law enforcement, intel, and commercial organizations. Espinoza now tinkers at Recorded Future after time in the intelligence community and Palantir Technologies.
Danielle Forsyth is a Co-Founder at Thetus Corporation, a semantic modeling and collaborative analysis software company in Portland, Oregon. For 12 years, she served as the company CEO. Prior to Thetus, Danielle worked in a range of engineering, marketing and leadership roles in 3D modeling, animation and visualization. She has degrees in Math, Computer Science and Business.
Mr Rajan has been with SDL Government since Feb 2015. He is a Lean 6 Sigma Blackbelt, with 26 years of experience within the Defense and Intelligence community managing programs and operations; leading the development, maturation and deployment of innovative solutions and advanced software products for customers on a global level.
Prior to joining SDL Government, Mr. Rajan was the director of Airborne and Emerging offerings at Exelis, Inc, where he managed a diverse portfolio that included airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance solutions, persistent surveillance systems, on-board processing products and multimodal capabilities. Mr. Rajan was also the director of Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) at ITT Geospatial Systems, delivering integrated software and hardware solutions for the national security, defense and commercial remote sensing communities.
Previous to joining industry in 2000, Mr. Rajan spent 14 years in government service, with his last position at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (now the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency), as a branch chief within the archive and dissemination organization of the Acquisition Directorate. Mr. Rajan was also a program manager at the Central Imagery Office and a Project engineer for the Department of the U.S. Navy at the Naval Air Warfare Center in Warminster, Pa., developing solutions for the U.S. Navy’s tactical reconnaissance programs.
Mr. Rajan holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University and a Master of Science in Computer and Electrical Engineering from Villanova University.
Susan Kapr is a senior technologist at Booz Allen Hamilton supporting the Defense Intelligence Information Enterprise (DI2E). She leads teams at military Mashup and Hackathon coding competitions designed to show interoperability and reuse of enterprise services, software and data. This year her teams are focused on the creation and use of enterprise language translation web services in support of the warfighter. Susan has been involved in software development projects for DoD and IC customers for over 30 years, and is an Agile trainer and coach.
As Vice President of Product Management at Basis Technology, Mr. Stewart helps to drive company strategy and ensure that the company’s offerings stay ahead of the curve. Previously Mr. Stewart was the CTO of a storage services startup and a strategy consultant. He holds a Masters in Natural Language Processing from the University of Edinburgh, a BA in PPE from the University of Oxford, and a Masters from the London School of Economics.
Amanda Mason is the Director, Strategic Programs for the Intelligence Community (IC) and Department of Defense (DoD). Prior to joining MarkLogic, Amanda served in the US Air Force in the Intelligence Community for over 19 years. Amanda has held various positions that include Arabic and Spanish linguist, Senior Intelligence Analyst and Signals Intelligence and Cyber Policy Subject Matter Expert. Amanda has worked at SOCOM, FBI, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, NSA and US Cyber Command. Amanda graduated from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies with a Master’s of Arts in International Policy, Concentration in Terrorism Studies.
Evan is the founder and CEO of Prattle, a text analytics company specializing in developing novel financial market data. Prattle’s core data products examine complex, nuanced central bank communications and yield quantitative data based on the sentiment of those communications. Prattle also offers comparable data on individual equity sentiment and a variety of data science tools. Evan holds a PhD from Harvard University and is widely published in economics and finance.