2014 MIMS Final Project Judges

Track 1: Information Organization and Data Analytics

Òscar Celma
Director of Research, Pandora
Òscar Celma is currently director of research at Pandora, leading a group of scientists to provide the best personalized internet radio experience. From 2011 till 2014 Òscar was a senior research scientist at Gracenote. His work focused on music and video recommendation and discovery. Before that he was co-founder and chief innovation officer at Barcelona Music and Audio Technologies (BMAT). Òscar is the author of the book Music Recommendation and Discovery: The Long Tail, Long Fail, and Long Play in the Digital Music Space (Springer, 2010). Òscar got his Ph.D. in computer science and digital communication from the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain). Òscar holds several patents from his work on the Vocaloid system, a singing voice-synthesizer bought by Yamaha in 2004.

Beril Guvendik Maples
Head of Analytics User Experience, Salesforce.com
Beril is the head of the analytics user experience at Salesforce.com. She manages a team of designers, researchers, and UX engineers who are responsible for the overall experience of Salesforce analytics products such as reports, dashboards and builders. Her journey in technology began at a startup she joined as a community manager right after finishing her master's degree in architecture. She quickly moved into front-end development and then to user experience and interaction design. Her passion is turning complex concepts to simple and delightful experiences for users. Outside of work, she loves reading, dancing and most of all spending time with her family.

David Rolnitzky
Co-founder, MobileWorks, Inc.
MIMS 2011
Dave is co-Founder and chief product officer of MobileWorks, a Y Combinator–backed virtual staffing company with roots in the UC Berkeley School of Information. MobileWorks strives to alleviate unemployment and underemployment by creating fair wage digital work for people worldwide. He leads the product team in creating meaningful experience through design, and oversees the MobileWorks product development and brand. Prior to founding MobileWorks, he worked at Mozilla where he led user acquisition strategy and product marketing initiatives for Firefox. He holds a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley School of Information and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Track 2: Enhancing User Experiences

Kevin Cornish
CIO, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
Kevin Cornish is the chief information officer of  the Haas School of Business. Prior to joining Haas, he led a multi-year, multi-billion dollar initiative to transform the technology foundation for the nation’s largest health care provider, Kaiser Permanente. While there, Kevin’s program delivered sustainable next generation capabilities in the areas of cloud, data centers, converged architectures, networks and collaboration, disaster recovery, and solution resiliency for life-critical applications. Before joining Kaiser Permanente, his career included executive IT leadership roles for a diverse portfolio of companies including consulting and change leadership (DigitalThink), supply chain optimization (Aravo), consumer electronics (Monster Cable), and global architecture, engineering and construction management (Bechtel). Kevin holds a bachelor’s degree in human information processing from the University of California, San Diego, and attributes his success creating innovative strategies, building effective teams, and leading large programs to a simple philosophy: foster a culture where it is easy for people to do the right thing.

Catalina Naranjo-Bock
User Experience Researcher, Google
Catalina Naranjo-Bock is a user experience researcher at Google, where she has the awesome task of conducting UX research with the video creators at YouTube: all the way from short filmmakers to people who create channels and brands that become famous worldwide. With degrees in both UX design and research, Catalina has previously been part of creative teams in the the US, Europe, Canada, and South America at companies like Yahoo!, Intel Corporation, Nickelodeon, and the LEGO Group. She is the author of multiple articles and talks on the user experience field, as well as a student mentor at Stanford University.

Jeff Zych
Product Designer, Optimizely
MIMS 2012
Jeff Zych is a product designer and developer at Optimizely. He works closely with PMs, engineers, and UX researchers to design and build simple user experiences. Before joining Optimizely, he earned his master's in information management and systems from UC Berkeley’s School of Information. In 2007, he earned degrees in graphic communication and computer science from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. He currently resides in San Francisco, where he likes to play tennis and spend time outdoors.

Track 3: Information Sharing and Commerce

Holly Liu
Co-founder and Chief of Staff, Kabam
MIMS 2003
Holly Liu is co-founder and chief of staff of Kabam, the leader in the western world for free-to-play core games. Holly also oversees Kabam’s corporate culture as head of People Operations (“People Ops”), which is responsible for driving Kabam’s vision, mission, and values for its 600 employees across six offices in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Canada. Holly has helped build a world-class human resources team that is responsible for recruiting and retaining top talent and has grown Kabam’s personnel base by 500% in three years. Prior to her role as chief of staff, Holly led the product design for Kabam’s award-winning Kingdoms of Camelot, which has grown into a $200 million franchise in three years. Holly was also an initial designer for the mobile extension Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North, which was the top grossing app on iOS in 2012. Before co-founding Kabam, Holly was senior user interface designer for AOL, where she led design of community web products. She has also worked as a consultant for Arthur Andersen and Accenture. Holly received her master’s in information management & systems from UC Berkeley and her B.A. in mass communications from UCLA. She was named to Forbes’ “Top 10 Women Entrepreneurs to Watch” in 2013.

Scott Clark
Data Scientist, Yelp
Since finishing his Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Cornell University in 2012, Scott has been working on the ad targeting team at Yelp Inc. He has been employing a variety of machine learning and optimization techniques from multi-armed bandits to Bayesian global optimization and beyond to their vast dataset and problems. He has also been trying to lead the charge on academic research outreach within Yelp, including the Yelp Dataset Challenge. Scott enjoys coming up with and implementing new algorithms to solve difficult problems more efficiently with emphasis parallelization, optimization, and mining huge data sets using statistics and machine learning. He also likes to build things in his free time. Check out his website at http://scottclark.io.

Vinay Ganti
Senior Vice President, 2U
Vinay Ganti is currently a senior vice president at 2U and is the general manager for the datascience@berkeley partnership. He is responsible for making sure the I School is properly supported in the launch and day-to-day operations of the Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS) degree that had its inaugural cohort in January 2014. Prior to this role, Vinay was 2U's first content strategist and worked with other partners, including UNC, George Washington, American, and WashU, to help their faculty plan their courses to be taught online. He holds a J.D. and M.B.A. from NYU and a B.A. in international relations from Brown University.