UB - University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

Russ Agrusa is the Founder, President and CEO of Massachusetts-based ICONICS, (www.iconics.com), a world-leading software developer of open standards-based visualization, HMI / SCADA and enterprise solutions for manufacturing and building automation. With more than 250,000 installations worldwide, ICONICS counts 70 percent of Fortune 1,000 companies as its customers. Organizations such as Audi, Disney, Kuka Robotics, Ford, the Pentagon, American Axle, Poste Italiane, Microsoft and London's Heathrow airport depend on ICONICS products for their mission-critical operations.

He started ICONICS in 1986 to create off-the-shelf HMI and SCADA and Visualization software for factory automation. With over 30 years of experience in the development and management of HMI / SCADA and process control software for a wide variety of industries. Russ started his career at Westinghouse Electric Corporation designing software systems for Fossil and Nuclear Power Plant turbine control systems. He then worked at Foxboro Company leading the HMI development of the "IA" Distributed Control System. After Foxboro, Russ then worked at Analog devices to work on control software for real-time PC based applications.

Agrusa is the recipient of the University of Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences highest honor, the 2010 Dean's Award for Achievement for substantial contribution to the practice of engineering, applied sciences and for an exceptional professional career. He has served as a member of the University of Buffalo School Engineering Dean's Advisory Council, and Delta Society since 2005 and is a member of the open standards OPC Foundation Board of Directors. Argusa has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo and has taken graduate classes in Computer Science from Boston University.

Paul Buckley has been president of Applied Sciences Group since 1997, serving in engineering, operations management and strategic development areas. He has a bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering and a master's degree in systems engineering from RPI. Prior to his employment at ASG, Buckley worked in the aerospace and telecommunications industries in various engineering and management capacities. He currently chairs the University at Buffalo's Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (CEL) Alumni Association and is the 2004 CEL Taylor Kew award recipient for entrepreneurial excellence. Buckley is a board member of the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, MedTech, and the CAT Grant Advisory Group for UB's Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics. When not immersed in his work he greatly enjoys amateur photographer, golf, cycling and an occasional Pinot Noir.

Roger E. Choplin worked for Oracle Corporation from 1985 to 2004 in both technical and executive capacities. Choplin last served as Vice President of Data and Systems Technologies, leading the developments in reliability, availability and scalability. Choplin also led key technical partnerships with such companies as Amazon, EBay, Fidelity Investments and Salesforce.com. As a founding member of Oracle's Unix Business Unit, Choplin was instrumental in Oracle's dominance on open systems platforms.

Choplin is currently acting as an independent consultant to various companies in the early startup stage, as well as technical consultant to venture capital firms and angel investors. Prior to joining Oracle, Choplin specialized in operating systems development.

Choplin received a bachelor's degree in computer science cum laude, from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Vinodh Gopal is a Principal Engineer at Intel, and a key architect for the compute acceleration strategy on Intel architecture processors. His pioneering work includes instruction-set extensions for x86 and architectural enhancements, in applications such as cryptography, integrity and compression over a wide range of products. As an example, he architected the AES encryption instructions on processors and drove software enablement into OpenSSL and Linux Kernels.

He leads development of optimized software implementations of critical algorithms. Previously he worked on System-on-chip products where he held lead hardware architect roles for many complex units. Prior to that he designed high-performance chip architectures such as DEC Alpha (ev7) and IA64 Itanium (Tukwila), focusing on execution units of the CPU Core. He has a proven track record of innovation: over 60 pending/filed patents, publications, several key awards (including IEEE best-paper award), managed many R&D projects with Universities, an MS (Computer Science) and is an IEEE Senior Member.

Norman M. Hayes worked for AT & T Bell Laboratories where he served as design engineering on the world's first microprocessor. He was also employed for Sun Microsystems as Senior Microprocessor Architect and is currently employed with Juniper Networks as Director of ASIC Engineering. He received his BSEE from the University at Buffalo and MSEE from Cornell University.

Hayes is actively involved with UB alumni activities that include serving as a charter member of EAS Delta Society and is a EAS building sponsor. He was born and raised in Tonawanda, NY and now resides in Sunnyvale, CA. His hobbies include ice hockey and sailing.

Tao Hong finished his Ph.D. of Computer Science in UB in 1995. Hong joined Baidu, the most popular search engine company in China, in early 2005. He is now a Senior Scientist in Baidu's Silicon Valley R&D Center.

During 1997-2004, he worked for Microsoft, AOL/Tegic, Sightward, and ID Analytics as Software Design Engineer, Senior Engineer, Architect and Senior Scientist. Before leaving Buffalo, he worked as a Research Scientist in CEDAR of UB from 1995 to 1997. His experience and interests include Sponsored Search/Computational Advertising, Search Engine/Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining/Predictive Modeling, and Pattern Recognition.

Dan Magnuszewski is a software/internet entrepreneur from Buffalo, NY, who's focused on building companies, while pushing to consolidate and grow the WNY tech and startup scene. His professional career started at M&T Bank where worked to develop their network monitoring systems. From there, he joined Synacor where he was a developer of their TV Everywhere platform, before leaving to freelance with startups and entrepreneurs. Currently, he is focused full time on a startup that is tackling data organization and search solutions for customers with big data issues. He has served as a tech mentor for UNYstartups.com and the Student Sandbox at the Syracuse Technology Garden. He is a co-organizer of the Buffalo OpenCoffee Club, and member of the WNY Computer Science Teachers Association (which promotes computer science education in grades K-12). He co-founded the WNY OpenData Working Group to make public data more accessible, promote open data, and push for government transparency. A current endeavour underway is consolidating the region's spattering of technology companies in an effort to build a technology corridor downtown. When away from the computer, Dan fills his time speedskating, running, drinking good coffee, and brewing beer. Find him on Twitter at: @magnachef

Brian M. Maouad founded Advance 2000 in 1990 shortly after graduating from the SUNY at Buffalo Electrical Engineering program. He self-funded all his ventures as he began Advance2000 from his basement in Amherst, NY as a build to order high performance workstation manufacturer. His main customers included Steve Jobs's NeXTSTEP Computer Company. Thereafter, he shifted the business to service the SMB market in numerous metropolitan cities with a focus on IT services. Today the Company continues to provide these traditional services while moving its customers to the Advance2000 Cloud &emdash; a set of self-funded "Green" Tier 3 datacenters. Advance 2000 employs nearly 120 and has revenue exceeding $50 Million. As a serial entrepreneur, in 2001 Brian co-founded Classifieds Plus, a leading business process outsourcer for the print media and acted as President and CIO. In 2007 Classifieds Plus's revenue exceeded $80 Million at which time Brian sold his interest and that same year founded Logistics Dynamics a freight management provider were he acts as Chairman and Head of the board with revenue greater than $30 Million. Brian is active in numerous charitable organizations and provides on-demand mentorship as he strongly believe that a CEO is first and foremost a Chief Educational Officer.

Sudip Nag is Vice President of Product & Operations Strategy at Nimsoft, Inc., where he is responsible for product portfolio, go-to-market and growth strategies. Previously, Sudip held executive roles at NetApp, Inc., including Head of Product Management for the Data Protection Software Business, and Global Leader for Sales Strategy and Transformation. Sudip also held management positions in marketing and business development at Cisco, and worked in strategy consulting at Marakon Associates, AT Kearney and Booz & Company. Sudip started his career as a software engineer at IBM's Enterprise Systems Division. Sudip holds an MBA from Wharton, an MS in computer science and engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a Bachelor's in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

D. Sivakumar received his PhD in Computer Science from SUNY Buffalo in 1996. His research interests include a variety of topics in theoretical computer science, information retrieval and discovery on the Web, measurement and modeling for information systems. He has served on the faculty of CS at the University of Houston, and as a research scientist at the IBM Almaden Research Center, and at Google Research. He is currently a Senior Director at Yahoo! Labs, where he leads the Metrics group.