Dr. Charles Forgy graduated from Woodrow Wilson HS in Dallas, received his BS in Mathematics from UT Arlington in 1972, and his Ph.D. in 1979 from CMU, where he met his future wife, Diana Connan, whom he married in 1977. They now have three sons and one daughter-in-law. A student of Allen Newell, he received his Ph.D. based on the Rete Algorithm. Dr. Forgy remained at Carnegie Mellon post-graduation and worked on further improvements to OPS. He was co-principal investigator on a DARPA funded contract to develop parallel hardware for production systems.
In 1983 he formed a company called Production Systems Technologies to develop and sell rule-based software, where he developed "Rete 2", a more efficient successor to Rete. Rete II enabled rulebased programs to run between 50 and 100 times faster than the original Rete algorithm, depending on the complexity of the rules and objects. (The more complex, the faster the comparative results.) Dr Forgy has often described PST as a research-oriented company rather than a vendor of BRMS tools, but he does sell various rulebased tools via PST.
Dr. Forgy was Chief Scientist with Rules Power where he developed Rete III extensions for Rulebased Workflow systems. After Rules Power was bought by Fair Isaac (FICO) he now works on a contract basis with them to extend the power and functionality of the FICO Blaze Advisor algorithm. In addition, he has in the past year or so developed a more advanced algorithm than Rete 2 or Rete III and has written a parallel rulebase that is being used by some of the clients of PST.
Thomas Cooper
Tom received his BS in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and MS Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He has 29 years of software engineering experience, starting in the early days of XCON/R1 and XSEL at Digital Equipment Corporation when he co-authored a book on rule-based programming based on experience as a knowledge engineer at Digital. Since then, Tom has worked mostly on object-oriented systems including process modeling, system integration frameworks, graphics libraries, electronic design automation, middleware, financial straight-through processing, and has been a champion of agile methodologies. As Director of Product Architecture at Workscape, Inc., Tom is focused on highly configurable, scalable architectures for complex HR systems, particularly in the areas of talent management and benefits administration.
Carole Ann Berlioz-Matignon
Carole Ann Berlioz-Matignon is Vice President of Product Management at Fair Isaac. She is responsible for the strategic direction of all the Decision Management tools, including in particular Blaze Advisor business rules management system, predictive analytics and optimization. Carole-Ann has gained over the years a 360-degree experience of the technology business with hands-on implementation of expert and rules systems, strategic consulting, sales and finally product management roles, at Fair Isaac, other rules vendors and consulting firms. During her tenure in Product Management, Carole-Ann has pioneered Enterprise Decision Management. She was instrumental in creating the vision that combines business rules, predictive analytics and optimization for enterprise-class decision problems in Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare, Retail and Telecom. Carole-Ann holds a Masters degree in Applied Mathematics, specialized in Computer Science. Her background is in Life Sciences. She now also blogs at http://edmblog.com.
Greg Barton
Greg Barton has over fifteen years experience in software development, working in areas as diverse as educational software, video on demand, network security, and the airline industry. He currently works in rules development for Southwest Airlines. When not working he spends time with his wife Marci and daughter Ada, works on fun programming projects, and plays the trombone. He earned a BA in Psychology from St Olaf College and an MS in Computer Science from UT Dallas.
Daniel Brookshier
Daniel Brookshier was one of the first users of MagicDraw® and has since joined No Magic Inc. as Chief Architect. Having over 28 years of experience across all aspects of computer engineering, He has taught numerous training courses worldwide and sets the direction for company product development. Mr. Brookshier is also a prolific writer with dozens of articles/blogs on technology and has written several books including “JXTA: Java P2P Programming”. He is currently working with UML, SysML, UPDM/DoDAF all of which he teaches and mentors with his clients. For fun, Daniel juggles various deadly implements of destruction including knives, torches and toilet plungers.
Eric Charpentier
Eric Charpentier holds a B. Eng. degree in Computer Engineering from Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal and an MBA from HEC Montreal. He has over 13 years experience in Software Engineering playing different roles in projects, including over 8 years experience with rule technology as a consultant and
instructor. He is now a consultant for Primatek Consulting and focuses on delivering solutions to customers. His main areas of interest are business rules and business process management.
Jacob Feldman
Dr. Jacob Feldman is the Founder and CTO of OpenRules, Inc., an NJ corporation that created and maintains the popular open source business rules management system “OpenRules”. He has extensive experience in development of decision support software using business rules and optimization technologies for realworld mission-critical applications. Dr. Feldman is also a Senior Researcher at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre.
Manny Gandarillas
Manny Gandarillas received his Executive MBA from Florida International University in 2006, and has BS degrees in English and Mathematics. He has 8 years experience as a business rules analyst, beginning with BIZRULES on a tax minimization project using PegaRULES for a Fortune 10 company. After BIZRULES he worked for MindBox where he was assigned to rules projects onsite at HomeBanc, First Franklin and PHH Mortgage. Then he went to Florida Power and Light, and for the last year and a half he has been at Countrywide (now Bank of America) as Senior Consultant - Applications Programming, developing internal mortgage projects using Haley Expert Rules.
Rolando Hernandez
Rolando Hernandez is the CEO & Chief Rules Architect for BIZRULES. BIZRULES is a leading provider of consulting services and turnkey solutions for Business Rules Management (BRM), Business Process Management (BPM) and Knowledge Management (KM). Rolando developed the VISION methodology that is used by three of the Fortune 10 to document, manage and automate their business rules, processes, and critical knowledge. He helped create Mobil Oil’s Global Knowledge Management Strategy and Global Expert System Strategy. He helped write the business rules for the Government of Canada’s Social Security Modernization Project. Rolando served as IBM’s Business Rules SME on the IRS PRIME CADE Business Systems Modernization Project, a 10-year $15 billion project to modernize the IRS.
He is currently assisting a Fortune 10 firm to document and automate their business rules for Global Statutory & Regulatory Compliance (including Sarbanes-Oxley). Rolando's clients include IBM, EDS, General Electric, CSX, Allstate, CARFAX, Chubb, Penn National Insurance, Burger King, Pepsi-Cola, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Cunard Cruise Lines, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and Canada Social Security Department (ISPR). Rolando studied at the University of Miami, FL, where he received an MS in Computer Information Systems with a Concentration in Artificial Intelligence in 1988, and a BS in Systems Analysis in 1986.
Dr. Richard Hicks
Richard Hicks is the Chief Scientist for A I Developers and the driving force behind EZ-Xpert, which
offers extensive verification and procedural implementations for propositional logic systems. Rick
holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, and is also an Associate Professor of Information Technology at Texas A&M International University. His research has appeared in academic journals such as Decision Support Systems.
David Holz
David Holz has spent the last decade exploring and integrating declarative techniques and practical AI into the software creation pipeline at HRSI, and is the director of its new venture for small-business automation, Grindwork Corporation. He previously worked for General Motors programming assembly line robots, and creating test harnesses for the aerospace electronics industry. David has been able to bring his experience in reverse engineering, knowledge engineering, and visualization together into enhancing programmer productivity with business-domain focus.
Janet Hudnell
Janet Hudnall is the Tax Business Process Manager for General Electric Company Energy Business. General Electric Energy is a leading global supplier of power generation and energy delivery technologies. The responsibility of the tax department is to minimize tax expense of GE Energy operations and investments while fully and efficiently complying with all laws of every geography where GE Energy is doing business and at all times, maintaining the highest standards of integrity and compliance. Currently, Janet is leading the Tax Business Process Management (BPM) team to capture and secure tax-sensitive know-how, expertise, and intellectual capital leveraging business rules, BRE and BPM tools.
Janet received her BS in Computer Science from the University of Central Florida in 1979 and has developed a career in software project management. She has a career history of leading and solving difficult issues; schedule recovery / acceleration for internal and external customers and the ability to plan, schedule, and drive team success.
Dr. Leon A. Kappelman
Leon Kappelman is a Professor of IS, Director Emeritus of the IS Research Center, and a Fellow of the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge in the College of Business at the University of North Texas. He chairs the Society for Information Management’s Enterprise Architecture Working Group, this EA consulting includes the White House and Department of Veterans Affairs, and he has testified before the US Congress on EA and other subjects. The SIM Guide to Enterprise Architecture: Creating the Information Age Enterprise, edited by Professor Kappelman will be published in the Fall of 2009, by CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group, NYC.
Dr. Dan Levine
Daniel S. Levine is Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington. He has been doing research since 1975 on biologically and cognitively relevant neural network models. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the International Neural Network Society (INNS) and was President of INNS in 1998. Hehas written a textbook, Introduction to Neural and Cognitive Modeling (Erlbaum, 2nd ed., 2000) and been senior or junior editor of five other books on neural networks. His research centers on computational modeling of the interacting brain areas involved in cognitive-emotional interactions, executive function, and effects of context on human decision making. Dr. Levine has been an organizer of many international neural network conferences and given talks on the social implications of brain research findings at international and regional conferences in other fields such as socioeconomics, religion, utopian studies, and universal values.
Dr. Hafedh Mili
Hafedh Mili is a professor of computer science at the University of Quebec in Montreal, Montreal, Canada. Throughout his academic career, he worked on a variety of subjects, starting with knowledge representation (1986-1995), object-oriented software engineering (1990 - now), aspect-oriented development (1996 - now), service-oriented computing (2002 - now), and business process engineering (2003 - now). He published more than eighty scholarly articles in a variety of journals and conference proceedings, and has co-authored two books, the first on software reuse (2001, with John Wiley & Sons) with A. Mili, S. Yacoub and E. Addy, and the second on agile business rule development (2009, Springer-Verlg), with J. Boyer from ILOG (an IBM company). H. Mili has been consulting and training with ILOG since late 1996.
Adam Mollenkopf
Adam Mollenkopf is a Strategic Technologist at FedEx Custom Critical where he is responsible for leading research and development, operations research, and architecture activities. He is responsible for creating enterprise solutions that reason over space and time to provide Situational Awareness, Decision Support, and Intelligence for FedEx.
Jason Morris
Jason has more than 14 years in the software engineering field, spanning many application domains and comprising many different functional roles. He is the owner of Morris Technical Solutions LLC, specializing in Java web-application development and rule-engine applications. Jason is also a technical marketing and services consultant for Sandia National Laboratories, where he provides custom training and development services for licensees of Jess, the Java Expert Systems Shell. From 2006-2007, Jason was a GAAN Fellow at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts where he was pursuing a PhD in Computer Science and working on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. He holds a B.S. in Applied Engineering Sciences from Michigan State University, a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University, and a M.S. in Engineering and Technology Management from
Portland State University.
Please feel free to contact him at: consulting@morristechnical-solutions.com.
James Owen
James Owen is the founder of KnowledgeBased Systems Corporation (originally EEEI and now JAN KBSC) in 1984. He received his BS in Electrical Engineering (Computers and Communications) in 1973 from LTU and his MBA (Quantitative Analysis and Forecasting) in 1989 from LSUS. He has written extensively for InfoWorld and other publications including several academic journals. KBSC maintains an extensive list of benchmarks for various rulebased engines and is a global consulting company for such companies as Lockheed, Lloyds, O2, Bell South, Ericsson, Wells Fargo, Houston Light and Power, Norwest Insurance and others. James has been a speaker/teacher at Java MUG, Dallas Rules Group, BR Forum and others on the subject of rulebased system. In addition, James has taught programming at several universities.
Mark Proctor
Mark Proctor received his Beng in Engineer Science and Technology and then his Msc in Business and Information Systems; both from Brunel University, West London. His Msc thesis was in the field of Genetic Algorithms; which is where he first got his interest for anything AI related. Mark became involved in the Drools expert system project at an early stage and soon became its project lead. Mark then joined JBoss (later acquired by RedHat) as an employee when the Drools project was federated into the JBoss JEMS stack. Having developed a powerful expert system, Mark is now turning his attention to other declarative paradigms in an effort to unify them to allow for richer domain modeling environments.
Gary Riley
Now working as a consultant, Gary Riley was a NASA civil servant for over ten years. While at NASA, he was responsible for the design and development of the rule-based portion of CLIPS. Since leaving NASA he has continued to independently develop and maintain CLIPS. Gary received his BS in Computer Science from Texas A&M University in 1984. He is coauthor of the textbook Expert Systems: Principles and Programming.
Carlos Serrano-Morales
Carlos Serrano-Morales is Vice President of Software Development for Enterprise Decision Management Technologies at Fair Isaac. Carlos has over 20 years of experience, and has previously worked with Cap Gemini, Trialog, Renault, the European Space Agency and Neuron Data. Carlos has been involved with Artificial Intelligence, Data Analysis and Decision Management for most of his career and holds a number of patents in those areas. Carlos has been a key driver behind
Nexpert and Blaze Advisor. He is a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole des Mines, Paris , and Universite de Paris-Dauphine.
Fred Simkin
Fred has over twenty years of experience developing Knowledge Based Systems across a wide range of industries utilizing the spectrum of knowledge representation schemas, including rules, case based reasoning, fuzzy logic natural language processing and neural nets. He has developed applications for fortune 100 companies including NYNEX (now Verizon), Metropolitan Life, AT&T, Lehman Brothers, Nabisco, Compaq, GE, GMAC and Merrill Lynch. He joined BIZRULES in 2007. Fred studied computer science at Ripon College and in Houston Texas. He has worked in the United States and Latin America. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife Mary Ellen, son David, dog Taco (Drools proficient) and Gloria the KE Kitty.
Mark Sturdivant
Mark is currently a rules engineer at Southwest Airlines where he has been doing rules development for the past 2 years. He got his start in the technology world by spending 2 years writing data manipulation programs in C to run as batch jobs on a mainframe. After that, he spent the next 8 years in the financial industry developing and maintaining C++ and Java back office applications responsible for real-time and batch money movement between financial entities around the world. When not taking advantage of the travel perks that come with working at an airline, he loves to spend time working in his yard or on his house as well as showering attention upon his two spoiled dachshunds, Sasha and Stoney. Mark is a graduate of the University of Arkansas where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in 1998.
Lawrence Terrill
Lawrence has been professionally developing applications and supporting enterprise
infrastructures for over 30 years with experience in engineering, retail, finance, and technology enabled marketing. In his consulting role at EBDX.COM, Lawrence has promoted the use business rule engines in the systems he has designed, believing that only when we treat business process with at least the same respect and diligence that pay to business data, will we begin to build intelligent systems. Lawrence received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1983.
When he is not working, Lawrence spends time with his wife and daughter in Grand Prairie, TX.
Edson has 10+ years of experience in the Software Development industry, but dedicated his last 5+ years on Specialist Systems development, both as consultant and researcher. Having worked in several different positions and with several different technologies, he is now a Core Developer for the Drools Rules Engine at JBoss and leads the efforts on the CEP support over the Rete kernel. His main areas of interest are A.I., compilers and middleware tools in general.
Abhilash Tiwari is the CEO and Co-Founder of a software product startup Skejulers Inc. Skejulers Inc. is a software product company that provides solutions to common resource allocation problems, primarily scheduling problems. Abhilash holds a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas. His interests include constraint programming, business rules, resource allocation problems and software startups.
Paul Vincent
Paul Vincent is CTO for Business Rules and CEP at TIBCO Software, a medium-sized computer infrastructure company that provides SOA/messaging, BPM, and Business Optimization software. The latter includes providing Operational Intelligence through "Complex Event Processing" as well as Master Data Management, Business Intelligence, and advanced user interfaces. Paul has been involved in rule-based development since graduate work on diagnostic expert systems in the 80s, moving through knowledge-based systems and decision services in the 90s and 00s and thence to complex event processing with rules and other paradigms. He has worked in a wide range of application areas for rules mostly in the US and Europe. He is now a contributor to the Event Processing Technical Society, and to the OMG PRR and W3C RIF standards efforts on rule modeling and interchange, and blogs on CEP topics at tibcoblogs.com/cep.
Luke Voss
Luke Voss began his career at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He spent much of his time at JPL working with the Advanced Concepts Design Team and developing tools to support the space mission design process. After leaving JPL to work at a small software company, he subsequently founded Mindviews Labs to develop software to “automate boring engineering”. His current interest and work is in using rule-based systems to automate the design process for reasonably well understood engineering design problem. He currently lives in Southern California.
Andrew Waterman is a Technical Academic working in the Department of Biodiversity in Agroecosystems at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico. Andrew has worked in enterprise software development and verification for the last 13 years in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. He has written proprietary code and helped test and develop complex systems for several large software firms and start-ups, including BEA Systems, Post Communications and Oracle. He is excited to be working in participatory modeling in Chiapas; and especially happy to be building network games based on rules.
John A. Zachman
John A. Zachman, founder of Zachman International, is the originator of the “Framework for Enterprise Architecture”that is basically a "periodic table" of descriptive representations for Enterprise Architecture. Mr. Zachman is also known for his early contributions to IBM’s Information Strategy methodology (Business Systems Planning) as well as to their Executive team planning techniques (Intensive Planning). Prior to joining IBM (where he retired after 26 years) Mr. Zachman served as a line officer in the United States Navy and is a retired Commander in the U. S. Naval Reserve. He holds a degree in Chemistry from Northwestern University, has taught at Tufts University, has served on the Board of Councilors for the School of Library and Information Management at the University of Southern California, as a Special Advisor to the School of Library and Information Management at Emporia State University, on the Advisory Council to the School of Library and Information Management at Dominican University and on the Advisory Board for the Data Resource Management Program at the University of Washington. He has been a Fellow for the College of Business Administration of the University of North Texas and currently is listed in Cambridge Who’s Who.
Mr. Zachman serves on the Executive Council for Information Management and Technology (ECIMT) of the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO).and on the Advisory Board of the Data Administration Management Association International (DAMA-I) from whom he was awarded the 2002 Lifetime Achievement Award. He was awarded the 2004 Oakland University, Applied Technology in Business (ATIB), Award for IS Excellence and Innovation. He is the author of the book, “The Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture: A Primer on Enterprise Engineering and Manufacturing.” He travels nationally and internationally, teaching and consulting.