Lukas Biewald is Chairman and Founder of CrowdFlower, an enterprise crowdsourcing company that breaks large digital projects into small tasks and distributes them to workers around the world. In a little over three years, Biewald has grown the company from two employees to nearly 70, guiding it through two successful funding rounds. CrowdFlower engages a workforce of more than two million people to complete more than 1 million microtasks every day on behalf of a range of Fortune 50 companies. It has garnered coverage in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, The Atlantic, Fox Business, and has placed as a TechCrunch50 finalist.

Rich Brown is Head of Elektron Analytics at Thomson Reuters. In his role, Rich oversees the strategy and financial success of the firm's quantitative trading and historical market and economic data solutions including news, market data capture, trading analytics, visualization and analysis tools. An expert in the machine readable news space, Rich's experience encompasses analysis of unstructured data and natural language processing techniques to uncover alpha generating and risk mitigating strategies.

Prior to joining Thomson Reuters, Rich co-founded and was the Chief Operating Officer at Foresight Research Solutions, LLC, a New York-based independent research firm and member of the NASD and SIPC. Before Foresight, Rich was a senior client manager for IBM in New York.

He holds a Bachelor's degree in Management and International Business from The Pennsylvania State University and an MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business.

Kent founded Dialogue Earth in 2009, a program focused on developing strategies to explain science-based issues to general audiences.He formerly served as the Midwest liaison for Climate Central, a nonprofit science and media organization with a goal of providing clear and objective information aboutclimate change and its potential solutions to general audiences. His science communication experience began with an eight-year stint at the Heinz Center in D.C., where he hada leadership role in a project focused on measuring the condition and use of U.S. ecosystems. Kent holds degrees from Cornell, Stanford and MIT.

As part of Kraft Foods's CIS (Consumer Insight and Strategy Group), Frank Cotignola leads the group's Community Management/Knowledge Management and social media listening/consulting efforts. He helped develop the Community Intelligence Portal, which is the largest single community at Kraft Foods. He also authors "Randomness," which is the top blog at the company. His efforts to develop both free and paid listening platforms and insights have led to the integration and usage of such research into traditional "asking" research and shopper insights. Cotignola has 19+ years of analytic research experience across a number of well-known suppliers and manufacturers.

Christopher Frank is vice president at American Express, where he is responsible for advertising, brand and business-to-business research. Prior to joining American Express, he spent ten years at Microsoft as senior director in market research. Chris has won industry awards for his accomplishments in analyzing the swing voter consumer, developing a framework for effective branding and building a social media analytics system. He is a recipient of the Wall Street Journal Achievement Award.

Andera is an online enthusiast. Her Internet career started early in 1995 when she set up one of the first 30 commercial webservers in Germany in a student project. Her passion for online research started off in 1996 with her empirical thesis about purchase behavior on the WWW (Germany vs US). In 1999 she founded Dialego, a research agency focussing on online research. She has won several awards since then honoring the innovative power of her ideas and tools. She has 3 kids and just recently started to catch up with her PhD project on text mining in innovation processes.

Seth Grimes is an analytics strategist with Washington DC based Alta Plana Corporation. He is contributing editor at TechWeb's InformationWeek, founding chair of the Text Analytics Summit, Sentiment Analysis Symposium, and Smart Content conference, and text analytics channel expert for TechTarget's BeyeNETWORK.com. He is the leading industry analyst covering text analytics. Seth consults, writes, and speaks on business intelligence, data management and analysis systems, text mining, visualization, and related topics.

Carol Haney is vice president of product marketing at market-research firm Toluna. She formerly led the development of Harris Interactive's Research Lifestreaming, a panelist-based approach to social media monitoring. At Harris, Carol was VP of Public Affairs & Policy and developed solutions for clients such as the CDC, HHS, and others. At CDC, she helped reduce critical cycle time by 60% for outbreak data collection. She has held management postions at SPSS and NORC at the University of Chicago. At NORC, she developed a speedy mechanism for pulling and marking area probability sample from the national U.S. Census frame. Carol is an expert reviewer for CASRO's social media privacy guidelines.

Sobhan Hota is a data scientist, focusing in identifying a business problem and provides solution using information extraction, text classification, data mining, natural language processing (NLP), data warehousing and database technologies. He has published and presented informational content from un-structured, semi-structured and structured data in various conferences (ie DH-ACH, MCLC, DHCS) and also utilize data to build production based systems. In the past and now, engaged in procuring business requirement and provided data centric decision making solutions, which helps business users to make timely decisions. He has provided solutions in data modeling, data warehouse design/development, application development through custom driven techniques and also through many vendor specific tools. He has been involved in various roles (Principal Consultant, Principal Data Architect) for financial, manufacturing, distribution, education domains with clients from USA. He is graduated (concentrating text mining, NLP, data mining) from Illinois Institute of Technology, USA (MS-CS) and University of Hyderabad (MTech-CS), India.

Dana built and launched the social media insights program across Yahoo! in January, 2011. She currently manages the program and is in the process of deploying the program globally. Previously, Dana managed Yahoo! Global Customer Satisfaction Tracking (CSAT) program. Dana has 18 years experience in primary and secondary research, both on the client side and the agency side. She has received numerous corporate awards for excellence in market research and social media insights.

Bing Liu is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include opinion mining or sentiment analysis, and data mining. He has given more than 20 keynote and invited talks on opinion mining and has served as program chair of numerous academic conferences.

Paul Magnone is vice president of business development and alliances at Openet Telecom, a global telecommunications software and consulting firm, where he is responsible for executive leadership of Openet's global partner initiatives.

He was previously with IBM for 21 years driving growth programs including the launch of several new global consulting businesses. He has been recognized for his ability to build and manage strategic alliances with Fortune 100 organizations, startups and with US, European, and Israeli venture capital firms.

Romi Mahajan is chief marketing officer at Metavana. Before joining Metavana, Mr. Mahajan was WW Director of Sales and Strategy for the Digital Marketing & Search team at Microsoft Corporation. In this role, Romi focused on growing the Digital Marketing business for the company as well as helping define Microsoft's increasing role in Internet Business.

Before this stint at Microsoft, Romi Mahajan was founder- President of KKM Group, an Advisory company focused solely on Strategy and Marketing in the Technology, Media, Agency, and Luxury Goods sectors. Prior to founding KKM, Romi was Chief Marketing Officer of Ascentium Corporation, a leading digital agency with 96M in Sales in 2008.

A well-known speaker on the technology and media circuit, Mahajan serves on a variety of Advisory Boards and speaks at over a dozen industry events per year. In addition, he has been published prolifically in the Technology press.

Jan Wiebe is a professor of computer science and Director of the Intelligent Systems Program at the University of Pittsburgh. Previously, she was a faculty member at New Mexico State University and, before that, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. She has worked in discourse processing, pragmatics, word-sense disambiguation, and probabilistic classification in NLP. Her most recent work investigates automatically recognizing opinionated and evaluative language to support NLP applications such as question answering, information extraction, text categorization, and summarization. Her previous and current professional roles include ACL-AFNLP 2009 program chair, NAACL Program Committee Chair, NAACL Executive Board member, Computational Linguistics and Language Resources and Evaluation Editorial Board member, AAAI Workshop Co-Chair, ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART) Vice-Chair, and ACM-SIGART/AAAI Doctoral Consortium Chair.

Max Yankelevich is a serial entrepreneur, having started and exited several successful companies. Max is a Founder/CEO at CrowdControl Software – a company that combines Artificial Intelligence and Crowdsourcing to build high-value datasets.

Mr. Yankelevich is an expert on the rise of high-value customized data sets in the role of crowdsourcing and how it impacts the business experience. He is the authority on the industry and an evangelist for the power of how dramatic data output yields quality improvements and cost savings for companies and organizations of all sizes. Yankelevich has changed the perception of crowdsourcing for many decision makers and his expertise has led the industry to latch on to the next version – accessible, saleable and accountable crowdsourcing.

Yankelevich is a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer science program; he is a seasoned technology entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience in large scale cloud computing and start-up technology companies with a focus on business.

Max Yankelevich is also Founder/Chief Architect at Freedom OSS.

Dr. Stuart W. Shulman is the founder and CEO of Texifter, LLC and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the founder of the Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) at the University of Pittsburgh and the current Director of QDAP-UMass. Dr. Shulman is the Associate Director of the National Center for Digital Government and Editor Emeritus of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics.

Matt Sommer is CTO and co-founder of MarketChorus, a technology company that applies text analysis to real-time news in the financial and marketing spaces. Matt has more than fifteen years of experience leading the R&D efforts of both public and private companies in the field of information retrieval and text analysis. Matt received a Bachelor of Arts from The University of Texas at Austin and a MS in Applied Neuroscience from The University of Texas at Dallas.

Michael Tupanjanin is President & CEO of Metavana. Prior to joining Metavana, Mr. Tupanjanin served as a General Manager at Microsoft. In his role, he was responsible for the firm's Digital Marketing and Search group where he led strategic planning, global sales, and business development. Michael joined Microsoft as a result of its acquisition of FAST Search & Transfer. At FAST (and later as a Microsoft subsidiary), Michael was Executive Vice President of Global Operations and was responsible for a 500 person sales, consulting services, and business development organization. During this period, Mr. Tupanjanin was responsible for growing revenues at the company from an early stage business to a market leader in search and ultimately being acquired by Microsoft for $1.4 billion in 2008.

Earlier in his career, Michael held positions in general management, business development, marketing, and sales at both start ups and established companies. These included Centra Software (IPO in 2000; $1 billion market valuation), CMP Media (IPO in 1997; acquired by United Business Media for $1 billion) and Ziff Davis (leading digital media company focused on the technology market).