Listen to experts from our corporate partners and within Topcoder as they lead engaging discussions about crowdsourcing, open innovation platforms, and advancements in the field such as Gartner’s concept of adaptive sourcing.

Speakers

Robin Smith

COO & Co-Founder at WeGoLook

Robin N. Smith is the COO and Co-Founder of WeGoLook.com. She has been with WeGoLook since inception in 2009. Her current responsibilities include onboarding new Enterprise Clients, ensuring internal cultural growth, assisting with Looker data, planning future mobile technology projects and more.Robin has served on the board for United Way and Columbus-Lowndes Economic Development. A few of her awards include the President’s Club for The Washington Post (twice) and Hugh O’Brian Youth Foundation International Recipient (current alumni). She currently coaches a 14U boys basketball team and is a registered basketball official for the state of Oklahoma.

Scott Jelinsky

Principal Research Scientist at Pfizer Inc.

Scott Jelinsky is a Senior Principle Scientist at Pfizer. He has a background in genomics and genetics and has worked the pharmaceutical industry for the past 15 years. He is interested in using big data and genetics to develop personalized medicine approaches.

Bill Bodin

Distinguished Engineer and CTO Mobility, Enterprise On Demand Transformation at IBM.

Bill Bodin, CTO of Mobility for IBM’s CIO Office, is both a Distinguished Engineer and a recognized Master Inventor. He holds over 160 issued US and International Patents, with over 100 additional patents pending, in domains including Operating Systems, Mobility, Media, Telematics, Consumer Electronics and Healthcare. He leads the internal mobile strategy efforts for IBM’s CIO Office and is a core team member of the Global Mobile Project Office (GMPO). He focuses on mobile and wireless technologies, defines and contributes to numerous pilots and innovations, and consistently brings new and transformational capabilities to IBMers and IBM’s valued customers.In his past assignments, Bill has led the device architecture areas for IBM Operating Systems, created IBM’s first commercial portal to take IBM’s developer tools to the external development community, and created the Pervasive Computing Advanced Technology Lab in Austin. Bill’s experience in Pervasive Computing is illustrative of his extensive experience in mobile computing. Bill led the creation of the WhirlWind Enterprise Mobile App Store (a CIO 100 Award winner in 2011) which is now deployed into production in the w3 Workplace. He also led the creation of n.Fluent, he leads the technical architecture for Media Library as Chief Architect, and is continually bringing new services and capabilities to the mobile platform.Bill’s current focus is on the creation and deployment of IBM’s comprehensive mobile ecosystem, delivering mobile capabilities to our employees, increasing client intimacy and productivity, and creating a reference implementation of IBM products and services which will place IBM within industry analyst leadership quadrants as a Mobile Enterprise Platform provider. Bill is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and Academy Leadership Team. He also represents the CIO organization in the Center for Innovation Leadership (CIL), championing Innovation and Invention in the IBM Corporation. Bill holds B.S. and Graduate Degrees from the University of Georgia and Florida Atlantic University respectively.

Sam Marrazzo

Business Architect for Solutions for North America at Praxair

Among his greatest accomplishments at Praxair, Sam Marrazzo has leveraged crowdsourcing to introduce creativity and innovation to help the company achieve its vision of being the best-performing global industrial gases company in the eyes of their customers, employees, and shareholders. As a champion for change, he has lead the company-wide direction to shift business paradigms to support technology innovation as a key driver for business growth. As the Business Architect for Solutions for North America, Sam is credited with changing the culture of the team to maximize development velocity, embrace test-driven development, and adopt Agile methodologies with broad-based career wins across accounting and supply chain systems, logistics, sales, and transportation. He has delivered key wins at Praxair across enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, supply chain management, business intelligence, GIS, productivity improvement, ALM, sales force and field service automation, RFID, enterprise knowledge management, and big data management.

Nic Perez

Lead Cloud Architect at Booz Allen Hamilton

Nic Perez is Booz Allen Hamilton’s lead cloud architect and has over 24 years of technology experience. As a solutions architect, architecting and implementing large-scale software solutions for both commercial and federal clients. He is currently a lead Cloud Strategy SME assisting clients with infrastructure transformation, infrastructure and architecture strategy development, business and technical case analysis for change, technical evaluations, recommendations and alternatives analysis primarily leveraging public cloud architectures.Nic is the technical relationship manager within Booz Allen for Appirio and his team leads the innovation and crowdsourcing center of excellence, CSquared. Nic has been working with Topcoder since 2006 and has direct experience with every facet of the crowdsourcing delivery lifecycle.

Karl Becker

CoECI Business and Innovation Architect at NASA

Karl Becker has been working at NASA Headquarters for four years, first supporting the Space Operations Chief Technologist, then for NASA’s Advanced Exploration Division. There, he helped establish the NASA Tournament Lab to acquire crowdsourced open innovation solutions to NASA problems, and NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation, to help bring open innovation to other Federal Government Agencies. Previously, Karl had 25 years of experience in the Aerospace and related fields. Karl is a passionate supporter of STEM education, mentoring several robotics competition teams (Zero Robotics, FIRST Robotics, and upcoming MATE robotics) and helped found Northern Virginia’s first ever Engineering and Technology Explorer post.

Kevin Hague

VP Developer Community and Programs at Harman

Silicon Valley based technologist, Kevin is focused on helping 3rd party Harman developers create successful and immersive entertainment products using the latest Harman technologies. Building a community & program to connect 3rd party developers to SDKs, Technical & Marketing support and providing general advice is a core part of Kevin’s mission.Kevin has experience co-founding three startups, and has held key leadership positions with leading tech companies such as Palm, HP and recently in the office of the CTO at Nokia.

The Moderator

Dr. Robert C. Ford, PhD

Professor Emeritus of Management, UCF College of Business Administration

Robert C. Ford (PhD – Arizona State University)is professor emeritus of management at the University of Central Florida where his teaching and research focused on managing service organizations. He has authored or coauthored many publications in both top research and practitioner journals and several books including, The Fun Minute Manage; Achieving Service Excellence: Strategies for Healthcare; Managing Quality Service in Hospitality; and HR at Your Service. He was editor of the Academy of Management Executive and is Chair of the Academy’s Ethics Adjudication Committee, and co-founder of the Community of Academy Senior Scholars. He has also been active in the Southern Management Association (SMA) which he served as president, awarded its Distinguished Service Award, and elected as a SMA Fellow. He is a founding member and past Chair of the Accreditation Commission for Programs in Hospitality Administration.