Olayele Adelakun is an Associate professor of MIS at DePaul University Chicago, Illinois, College of Computing and Digital Media (CDM). His research focuses on IT Outsourcing, ERP systems implementation, and Information Systems Quality, IT Evaluation and Emotional Intelligence among IT Leaders.

Dwayne specializes in global delivery model design and implementation with functional skills in organization design, shared services implementation, outsourcing advisory and robotic process automation. Mr. Prosko earned his MBA at the University of Chicago with a concentration in Finance and Strategy.

Dennis Boecker is VP, Global Lead IT Innovation, at Bosch, where he is responsible for the global IT innovation team that fosters the IoT initiative within Bosch. Using lean startup practices and design thinking approaches, the IT innovation organization facilitates company-wide IoT innovation within Bosch.

Khalifeh AlJadda holds Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Georgia (UGA), with a specialization in machine learning. He has experience implementing large scale, distributed machine learning algorithms to solve challenging problems in domains ranging from Bioinformatics to search and recommendation engines. He is the lead data scientist on the search data science team at CareerBuilder. He leads the data science projects to improve search relevancy and build a new recommendation engine leveraging AI, Machine Learning, and Big Data frameworks. He is also the founder and chairman of the Southern Data Science Conference (www.southerndatascience.com) which is the first data science conference in Atlanta that hosts prominent speakers to promote data science in the Southern community.

Mr. Bayas is currently the Chief Technology Officer at Navistar. He has been with Navistar for almost 15 years and held variety of roles in his IT career and has had responsibility for a wide range of activities, including the planning, design, development, operations, and support functions for projects in Manufacturing, Engineering, Vehicle Electronics and Enterprise Architecture. In addition to Manufacturing he has also worked in Healthcare and Education markets. He has a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Wright State University.

Steve Pyke leads the Financial Shared Services operation at W.W. Grainger, Inc. overseeing financial transaction processing for the U.S. and Canada businesses. He also has responsibility for the Real Estate and Facilities Maintenance organizations within Grainger. Prior to joining W.W. Grainger, Inc. Steve held a number of positions of increasing responsibility at Kraft and Alliant Foodservice, including Vice President, Finance and Strategy – Northeast Division. Steve graduated from Loyola University with a bachelor’s degree in Finance and received his MBA from the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

Ross Freedman is Co-founder of Rightpoint – a national Chicago-based customer experience agency with technology at its core. Whether the focus is on increasing customer engagement to build brand advocacy or creating a more connected company with engaged employees to drive higher internal productivity, Rightpoint drives innovation and digital transformation for clients to solve business problems in areas such as web, mobile, social, CRM, cloud, collaboration, business intelligence and analytics. In 2015, Ross received the prestigious Midwest Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Martin is a Senior Executive - Engine Technology for General Electric.

Royce Heaney is the Chief Information Officer for Berlin Packaging, and has held senior technology leadership roles in manufacturing and distribution companies including ACCO Brands Corporation and Solo Cup Company. His varied career path has evolved through commercial diving, drafting and process equipment design, CAD, computer infrastructure and strategy consulting giving him a unique perspective on the effectiveness of technology in industrial organizations. Royce graduated from Roosevelt University and currently resides in Glenview, IL.

Shima Dastgheib received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Georgia and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University, School of Medicine. Her research interests include semantic technologies, knowledge representation and visualization, with a focus on biomedical and healthcare domain. She has more than 6 years of experience in developing knowledge bases for scientific discoveries. Dr. Dastgheib is currently a data scientist at NuMedii, a California-based startup company, translating Big Data into drug discovery.

Dr. Bamshad Mobasher is a professor of Computer Science and the director of the Center for Web Intelligence at DePaul University College of Computing and Digital Media in Chicago. He is also the co-founder and the director of the Center for Data Mining and Predictive Analytics at DePaul University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Iowa State University in 1994. His general research areas include artificial intelligence and data mining. In particular, he is considered one of the leading authorities in Web mining, Web personalization, and recommender systems. He has published 5 edited books and approximately 200 scientific articles. As the director of the Center for Web Intelligence, he directs research in these areas and regularly works with the industry on various joint projects. He serves in leadership positions of several international conferences, including the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, and the ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization. He has been an organizer of several long-running and highly regarded workshop series on Web mining and personalization, including the WebKDD series of workshops on Knowledge Discovery on the Web, the Workshop on Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization, and the Workshop on Recommender Systems for the Social Web. These workshops have been held regularly at conferences such as ACM KDD, IJCAI, UMAP, RecSys, and AAAI. Dr. Mobasher serves as an associate editor for the ACM Transactions on the Web, the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology and the ACM Transactions on Intelligent Interactive Systems. He has also served on the editorial boards of several other prominent computing journals, including User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, and the Journal of Web Semantics.

Patrick is the founder of DragonSpears, Inc. – A Midwest based software excellence consulting firm that partners with their clients to enable them to bring new digital products to market faster, respond to changing client’s needs sooner, while leveraging the newest technologies such as cloud. In addition to founding DragonSpears, he also founded the Chicago Innovation Roundtable, a non-profit focused on connecting senior leadership of various organizations to increase innovation adoption. He also is very proud of his work with Mercy Home for Boys and Girls as well as Project RELO, a non-profit that assists our military veterans in transitioning to civilian life. Patrick is a lifelong Chicagoan and a proud father of 5 children, and makes time to coach baseball and lacrosse. Patrick is extremely fortunate and proud of his 16 years of Catholic education.

Robert Nendorf is a data scientist at Allstate where he has played an integral part in the transformation of a small rate-making group into a mature data science and analytics organization. After developing analytics solutions in claims, underwriting, and pricing in prior roles he now leads a team building analytics deployment products driving proliferation of predictive modeling throughout the enterprise.

Simon is currently the Chief Data Scientist at Dice.com, the technology professional recruiting site. He is also a PhD candidate at DePaul university, studying a PhD in machine learning and natural language processing. At Dice, he has developed multiple recommender engines for matching job seekers with jobs, as well as optimized the accuracy and relevancy of Dice.com's job and candidates search, and more recently worked on our Career Path Explorer, and Salary Prediction tools (under 'career explorer' on www.dice.com).

Jim was a Former Chief Innovation Officer at Morningstar. James holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. He founded Wall Street on Demand, a very successful company that was acquired by UK-based Markit.

Monali Shah is the Director of Global Intelligent Transportation at HERE. HERE, the Open Location Platform company, enables rich, real-time location applications and experiences for consumers, vehicles, enterprises and cities. During her fourteen years at HERE, Ms. Shah has spearheaded product innovation and management in digital maps, real-time data, and other location based products. She currently leads the company’s work with transportation agencies in the areas of connected and automated driving, smart cities, traffic operations, planning and performance management. Ms. Shah is a sought-after expert on transportation and mobility. She serves as an advisor to transportation commissioners, has been quoted extensively in the media, and has served as a plenary speaker at industry events across the world, including the most recent ITE Annual Conference and ITS World Congress. Ms. Shah has a degree in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Michigan and holds an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Mr. McGillen is a 24-year veteran of the technology industry, with leadership experience across five continents working in some of the most dynamic regions of the world.  As the founder and CEO of Practically Digital, Mr. McGillen leads a strategy consulting firm which specializes in digital transformation, innovative technology solutions, cognitive and artificial intelligence platforms, and IT due diligence / merger support. Prior to founding Practically Digital, over 18 years Rob held a series of technology leadership roles at Grant Thornton LLP, including 6 years as Global Head of Technology and CIO. As Global CIO, Mr. McGillen led the worldwide technology organization providing IT shared services and enterprise platforms to 40,000 employees in 130 countries, while supporting business transformation through mergers in over 50 countries. Rob is a board member of the Society of Information Management (SIM) Chicago Chapter, where he chairs the marketing efforts engaging 200+ member CIO’s and technology executives in Chicago. A noted speaker, blogger, and author on digital innovation and future trends, Mr. McGillen brings practical insights from around the world to companies seeking digital transformation.

Alex Luttschyn is the Head of Global Sales for Pivotal Labs and Cloud Native Services. He is a 17 year sales veteran responsible for growing the overall Labs business and ensuring that Startups and Enterprises make a successful transformation into agile digital organizations. In addition to running Pivotal Labs global software development business, Alex is responsible for the growing portfolio of strategic Pivotal Cloud Foundry Services as part of Pivotal's commitment to customer success. He has held numerous sales leadership positions within Pivotal since the company was founded including creating the Data Science Sales team. He was a charter sales leader at Greenplum Software during the acquisition by EMC and also had an 8 year sales career at Sun Microsystems.