The Advisory Board of the Section on Finance shall consist of between five (5) and twelve (12) leaders in the field of Financial Services, Analytics, and Technology, to provide advice on the development of the INFORMS Finance Section. Serving on the advisory board is a recognition of the individual’s leadership and accomplishments in the field. The board will overview the operation of the Section, provide advice on various activities, and support Section officers to run the Section effectively and efficiently.
Nitin Gaur, currently serves as a Founder and Director of IBM WW Digital Asset Labs - serving to device industry standards, use cases and working towards making blockchain for enterprise a reality. Nitin is also a acting CTO of IBM World Wire - a cross border payment solution utilizing digital assets. Nitin also Founded IBM Blockchain Labs and led the effort in establishing blockchain practice for the enterprise. Prior to this role he was working in capacity of CTO, IBM Mobile Payments and Enterprise Mobile Solutions. Nitin lead the Application Infrastructure Portfolio of IBM Middleware before taking on MobileFirst Solution portfolio. In his 20 years with IBM he has achieved various industry-recognized certifications. As a technical leader Nitin has been involved in many enterprise project implementations and technical paper presentations at internal and external conferences . The range of the topics presented by him span from software architectures to improvement of management processes. Nitin, has been focused on staying close to customer and providing IBM clients with Solution to realize Enterprise Digital Strategy.
Nitin holds MS in Management Information systems and MBA in Finance from University of Maryland. Nitin is also appointed as an IBM Distinguished Engineer and is an IBM Master Inventor with a rich patent portfolio.
Reza Ghanadan is a senior manger at Google AI and the head of public sector AI R&D. He has initiated and led several cross disciplinary programs in AI research and its applications to finance, machine perception, healthcare, e-commerce, education and transportation. Prior to joining Google, Reza served as a program manager at DARPA where he managed 5 large-scale 120M+ multidisciplinary R&D programs in AI, autonomy, data science and a range of real-world applications, for which he was awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Medal. He was a Boeing Technical Fellow at Boeing Research and Technology, Engineering Fellow and Director of information processing department at BAE Systems, founding team member of Flarion Technologies (acquired by Qualcomm), and a member of technical staff group leader at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Reza has initiated and led a number of high profile R&D programs in AI and Autonomy where his work has been featured in several media (e.g. the Washington Post, NBC News, Science, Analytics India). Reza received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from University of Maryland College Park. He also holds an Executive MBA from NYU, M.S. in EE, and two B.S. degrees in EE and in Physics (both Summa Cum Laude).
Gideon Mann is the head of Data Science in the Office of the CTO at Bloomberg LP. At Bloomberg, he guides corporate strategy for machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval. He has over 30 publications and more than 20 patents in machine learning and NLP. He’s served as a founding member of both the Data for Good Exchange (D4GX), an annual conference on data science applications for social good, and the Shift Commission on Work, Workers and Technology. Before joining Bloomberg in 2014, he worked at Google Research NY, where his team carried out basic research, as well as developing machine learning products such as Colaboratory. He holds a Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University.
Spyros Schismenos is an Executive Director in the Quantitative Research team at JPMorgan, focusing on mathematical modelling and computational techniques for Counterparty Credit Risk. He has been with JPMorgan since graduating from Cornell University with a PhD in Operations Research in 2009. Spyros is not a stranger to INFORMS, having attended Annual Meetings in the past, as well as being a Nicholson Competition finalist.
Mark S. Squillante is a Distinguished Research Staff Member and the Manager of Foundations of Probability, Dynamics and Control within Mathematical Sciences at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center (Yorktown Heights, NY). He has been an adjunct faculty member in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell Tech (New York, NY) and the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University (New York, NY), and a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories (Murray Hill, NJ). He received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Washington (Seattle, WA). Mark is an elected Fellow of ACM, IEEE and INFORMS, and his research contributions have been recognized through The Daniel H. Wagner Prize (INFORMS), 9 best paper awards, 17 keynote/plenary presentations, 23 major IBM technical awards, and 31 IBM invention awards. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Stochastic Models and serves on the editorial/advisory board of ACM ToMPECS and Performance Evaluation. His research interests broadly concern mathematical foundations of the analysis, modeling and optimization of the design and control of complex systems under uncertainty.