Keynote Speakers

Patricia Florissi

Keynote #1

Patricia Florissi is Vice President and Global Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Sales. As Global CTO for Sales, Patricia helps define mid and long term technology strategy, representing the needs of the broader Dell EMC ecosystem in strategic initiatives. Patricia also acts as the liaison between Dell EMC and our customers and partners, to foster stronger alliances and deliver higher value.

Patricia is a Dell EMC Distinguished Engineer, holds a Ph. D. in Computer Science from Columbia University in New York, graduated valedictorian with an MBA at the Stern Business School in New York University, holds multiple patents, and has published in periodicals including Computer Networks and IEEE Proceedings.

John Cole

Keynote #2

Prior to founding and leading skyTran as CEO, John was the CEO of AeroGen Power and a consultant in the renewable energy industry. John’s brings over 20 years of experience in leading engineering teams in the energy, aerospace and medical device industries. At AeroGen John led a team of engineers in the development of a new type of direct-drive wind turbine. At Affymetrix John led a team in the development of synthesizers for making DNA microarrays. At Fisher& Paykel and Puritan-Bennett, John developed various medical devices and high volume production lines for their manufacture. At Loral John worked on the development of advanced experimental missile guidance systems. John started his career as a military officer after graduating from West point, where he served in a variety of leadership positions in worldwide locations.

David Atienza

Keynote #3

David Atienza is Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and leads the Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at EPFL, Switzerland. He received his MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from UCM (Spain) and IMEC (Belgium). His research interests focus on system-level design methodologies for energy-efficient multi-processor system-on-chip architectures (MPSoC) and next-generation smart embedded systems (particularly wearables) for the Internet of Things (IoT) era. In these fields, he is co-author of more than 300 publications, seven patents, and has received several best paper awards in top conferences. He was the Technical Program Chair of DATE 2015 and General Chair of DATE 2017. Dr. Atienza has received the DAC Under-40 Innovators Award in 2018, IEEE TCCPS Mid-Career Award in 2018, an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016, the IEEE CEDA Early Career Award in 2013, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2012, and a Faculty Award from Sun Labs at Oracle in 2011. He is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Member, and the President (period 2018-2019) of IEEE CEDA.