Jim Cavedo is the Senior Director of Consumer Marketing for International Speedway Corporation, the world’s leading promoter of motorsports entertainment. He is responsible for leading the relationship marketing organization and driving direct to consumer marketing strategies across all twelve of ISC’s track operations and corporate partnerships. Before joining ISC in 2008, Jim was a business strategy consultant focused on helping companies improve sales and marketing operations; he worked with companies in technology, health-care, manufacturing and consumer products industries. He has served in various sales and marketing management roles throughout his career and has been involved in CRM implementations multiple times from vendor, consultant and buyer standpoints. 

Zhihang Chi is the Vice President and General Manager of North America for Air China. Dr. Chi has overseen the growth of Air China's market in North America, particularly in Los Angeles. He oversees more than 90 U.S.-based Air China employees and manages the marketing and operations for the growing 36 flights between North America and China. Before joining Air China in 2004, he was an executive at Northwest Airlines where he worked in a number of areas including marketing, information technology and alliances, where he developed and managed alliances with Chinese air carriers and vendors. Dr. Chi studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned a master's degree and a doctorate in Operations Research. He earned an undergraduate degree and a master's degree at Peking University in Beijing and was a Ford Foundation Economics Training Program scholar at the People's University of China. 

Steve Cohen specializes in the design of research, the analysis of marketing data, and the application of marketing science tools to the solution of business problems. He has conducted studies of consumer and business-to-business products and services around the world.  Before starting In4mation Insights, Steve had his own consulting firm, SHC & Associates.

Steve was recently named the recipient of the American Marketing Association's (AMA) 2011 Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Research Award for lifetime achievement.  He has won numerous other awards in the last decade for his marketing research.  He is particularly proud of the fact that he is one of only three commercial marketing researchers invited to speak at a conference held in May 2002 at the Wharton School of Business which honored Paul E. Green on his 75th birthday and for his forty years of contributions to the fields of marketing and marketing research.

Matt Comstock is the Vice President of Business Intelligence (BI) for Razorfish, where he is responsible for leading the global Business Intelligence practice within Razorfish. The Razorfish BI practice provides advanced analytical applications with the purpose of driving higher ROI for client's marketing initiatives. These applications are provided in a SaaS environment and utilize Big Data technologies.

For three years Matt served as Vice President of Customer Strategy & Insight (CSI), where he led the team that provided strategy and business analysis to clients. They worked closely with the account services teams to provide clients with online business strategies and data-driven marketing insights to help them acquire, develop, and retain customers. CSI drew heavily on extensive market research, state-of-the-art web analytics, business intelligence, and advanced optimization technologies. 

P. K. Kannan is the Ralph J. Tyser Professor of Marketing Science at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, and he is the Chair of the Department of Marketing. His current research stream focuses on new product/service development, design and pricing digital products and product lines, marketing and product development on the Internet, e-service, and customer relationship management (CRM) and customer loyalty.

P.K. has won numerous awards for his marketing research, including the 2009 Donald R. Lehmann Award, awarded by the American Marketing Association Marketing Research SIG for the Best Dissertation-Based Research Article in JMR or JM for the April 2008 Journal of Marketing Research article, “Incorporating Subjective Characteristics in Product Design and Evaluations,” (with Lan Luo and Brian Ratchford); the John D. C. Little Award, for the Best Paper in Marketing Science, for the year 2007, for the paper “New Product Development under Channel Acceptance” (with Lan Luo and Brian Ratchford); and the 2007 INFORMS Society in Marketing Science Practice Prize Award for the paper, “Pricing Digital Content Product Lines: A Model and Application for the National Academies Press,” (with Barbara Kline Pope and Sanjay Jain).

Kathy Koontz is an Assistant Vice President for Customer Information Management at Nationwide Insurance where she manages a team of analysts, information managers and change management professionals responsible for identifying opportunities to strengthen customer relationships.  The team's marketing automation applications and processes identify customers and deliver marketing touchpoints to the sales and servicing teams.  She has experience using, developing and supporting a variety of Campaign Management, CRM, database marketing and data warehouse systems and applications.

Kathy is a recognized thought leader in utilizing customer data to drive corporate performance in both B2B and B2C.  She is a Teradata Certified Master V2R5 (Currently held by approximately 1,000 individuals worldwide). 

Stephanie McReynolds is the senior director for product and technical marketing at Teradata Aster MapReduce Platform.  She is an experienced director of product management and product marketing for big data and business intelligence software.  Her Big Data applications have been in financial services, insurance, click stream, and digital marketing optimization analysis.  In her previous role as Director of Product Marketing as Aster Data Stephanie was the Aster Data product expert and spokesperson at industry, customer, press, and analyst events.

Rafael Mejia works as the Database Marketing Analyst for Barnes & Noble.com. In this position he evaluates, procures and implements analytic and business intelligence solutions and associated vendor relationships. He led the procurement of Tableau which has become the standard reporting tool for B&N's Business Intelligence group and is currently being adopted by numerous other groups. He led requirements gathering, documentation, and development of internal tools aimed at increasing productivity and efficiency for the Email Marketing group resulting in new revenue streams and significant savings in man-hours. Rafael has successfully launched numerous automated marketing campaigns such as the 'NOOK Daily Find' campaign and a new email creation tool that merchandisers use to build email “creatives” and customer lists in minutes, reducing a process that previously took hours or days to minutes. He also assisted in initial evaluation of Borders' intellectual property prior to B&N.com’s acquisition of that information.

Wendy Moe is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Wendy is an expert in the area of online behavior and early sales forecasting. Her research has focused on developing statistical methods and models for Internet clickstream data, online social media/user-generated content and entertainment sales (e.g., sales of music, event tickets, etc).  She served on the Academic Assessment Panel for the U.S. Census Bureau and assisted in the development of the 2010 Census Communications campaign.  She has also worked with several firms to develop and implement state-of-the-art statistical models in the context of web analytics and product forecasting.

Wendy’s research has appeared in numerous leading journals and she serves on the editorial boards for Journal of Marketing and Journal of Interactive Marketing.  Wendy was recognized by the American Marketing Association as the Emergent Female Scholar and Mentor in the field of marketing with the 2010 Erin Anderson Award.

Craig Oldham is the Vice President for Digital Engagement for the American Red Cross.  His background is as a marketing leader building strong digital marketing teams that delivered results for both B2B and B2C organizations. He has experience and international exposure in the development, management and optimization of eCommerce platforms, online user engagement and search marketing.

Craig's leadership experience is in integrated multi-channel marketing efforts, including online application development, search engine optimization, paid search marketing, social networking, online customer engagement, online advertising and new product development. His management experience includes building strong digital marketing teams to lead change in the face of traditional corporate cultures.  He has experience developing game changing products and solutions in the financial services, telecommunications, financial services, broadband, wireless data, and insurance categories. 

Abhishek Pani is a Principal Scientist at Adobe.  Abhishek leads a team of researchers responsible for creating statistical models and optimization algorithms that define Adobe’s core product offering and patent strategy for the Media and Advertising Solutions group. His team focuses on maximizing advertisers’ economic value across online advertising channels including search, social media and display. His current research areas include empirical models for cross-channel attribution, combinatorial algorithms to optimize advertisers’ ROI and data-mining techniques to solve problems related to consumer segmentation, recommendation systems and social network analytics. He, also, provides business insights and strategic guidance to sales, analytics and business development groups at Adobe.

Abhishek received a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of Maryland. He joined Adobe through the acquisition of Efficient Frontier, where he headed the research and algorithms team.

 As Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer, Damon Ragusa shapes the company's strategy and product direction. An accomplished entrepreneur and marketing technologist, Damon has successfully transitioned ThinkVine from a custom solutions consultancy into a software-as-a-service enterprise in the marketing mix optimization space. In early 2009, under Damon's leadership, ThinkVine launched its marketing planning & simulation application leading to triple digit annual growth in software revenue.

A popular speaker known for his domain expertise and thought leadership, Damon is frequently asked to present at such conferences as ad:tech, American Marketing Association (AMA), Advertising Research Foundation and the Institute for International Research. Damon has held partner and senior level positions at management consulting, marketing science and software development firms and holds degrees in Quantitative Studies and Psychology from Bowling Green State University and has conducted advanced studies in both Business Administration and Computer Science.

Bill Rand examines the use of computational modeling techniques, like agent-based modeling, geographic information systems, social network analysis, and machine learning, to help understand and analyze complex systems, such as the diffusion of innovation, organizational learning, and economic markets. Bill serves as the Director of the Center for Complexity in Business, the first academic research center focused solely on the application of complex systems techniques to business applications and management science.

Before coming to Maryland, he was awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship at Northwestern University in the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), where he worked with the NetLogo development team studying agent-based modeling, evolutionary computation and network science.  Over the course of his research experience, Bill has used computer models to help understand a large variety of complex systems, such as the evolution of cooperation, suburban sprawl, traffic patterns, financial systems, land-use and land-change in urban systems, and many other phenomena.

Roland T. Rust is a Distinguished University Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, where he is founder and Executive Director of two research centers: the Center for Excellence in Service and the Center for Complexity in Business. His lifetime achievement honors include Fellow of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science, AMA’s Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award, AMA’s Churchill Award for Lifetime Achievement in Marketing Research, the Distinguished Marketing Educator Award from the Academy of Marketing Science, AMA’s Mahajan Award for Career Contribution to Marketing Strategy, the Outstanding Contributions to Research in Advertising award from the American Academy of Advertising, Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Elsevier Distinguished Marketing Scholar Award from SMA, and two distinguished doctoral alumnus awards from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He has won best article awards for articles in Journal of Marketing (four times), Journal of Marketing Research (twice), Marketing Science, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Advertising, and Journal of Retailing, plus MSI’s Robert D. Buzzell Best Paper Award (twice), as well as the Berry-AMA Book Prize for the best book in marketing. He is the founder and Chair of the annual Frontiers in Service Conference, and was founding Editor of the Journal of Service Research.

Joseph Sexsmith is the Chief Strategy Officer and Founder of Growth Oriented Capital Advisory Practice (“GOCAP”) for Activation Investors/Economics. He is an independent buy and sell side advisor to media and marketing companies and their advertising technology vendors. Joseph began career in general management advisory with niche firms led by alumni of McKinsey & Co. and Boston Consulting Groupm and led KPMG Consulting’s $285-million technology incubation portfolio and the America’s media practice. With the demise of the dot.com period Joseph was charged with winding down the portfolio while continuing to lead the media practice.

In business since 2001, Activation Investors/Economics acts as an intelligent and independent advisor, chief strategy officer stand-in and middleman for a number of prominent data- and technology-vendors, publishers, and marketers. Activation is an acknowledged buy and sell expert for private equity and mergers and acquisitions groups of publishers, marketers and data- and technology-vendors.

Elena Zheleva is a Data Scientist at LivingSocial. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2011. Her research interests lie in data mining and machine learning for social networks and social media, focusing on statistical models for prediction, evolution, and privacy. She has published her research on these topics in a number of top-tier peer-reviewed venues, such as KDD, WWW and TOIS, and served on the Program Committees for KDD, AAAI, and CIKM. She is a co-author of a recently published book on "Privacy in Social Networks."