2011 Final Project Judges

Track 1: Analysis of Information Systems

Alison Billings
MIMS 2005
VP of Product Development, Mobile Accord
Alison Billings is currently the vice-president of product development at Mobile Accord, the leading mobile platforms provider dedicated to driving social change through the mobile phone. Prior to joining Mobile Accord, Alison managed the off portal content business at T-Mobile USA for three years, during which time she more than doubled the size of the business . Before joining T-Mobile, Alison was the director of products and services at mobile content startup Blue Frog Media. During that time she managed cross-functional product teams located in the Philippines, Mexico, and the United States. Alison has over twelve years of experience in the telecommunications/wireless industry, more than half of which was spent developing technology solutions for non-profit organization in the Bay Area. Alison holds a MIMS degree from the UC Berkeley School of Information and is the co-chair of the Mobile Marketing Association’s consumer best practices committee.

Dominique Philippine
COO, "The Sims", Electronic Arts
Dominique is the COO for The Sims studio at Electronic Arts and a 23-year veteran of the game industry. He started his career as a software engineer working for a startup in Cupertino building productivity titles for the Apple IIGS and the Macintosh before joining EA in 1988. During his years at EA, Dominique went from building tools for engineers to managing the teams of creative artists and developers on such games as Soviet Strike, NCAA Basketball, Knockout Kings, NASCAR Racing, and The Sims Online. Dominique also served as CTO for the Maxis studio for 2 years and more recently worked on several console versions of the Sims games. Dominique graduated from the Ecole Supérieure d’Electricité (SUPELEC) near Paris in 1984. When he’s not working on the best selling PC games of all times, Dominique enjoys spending time with his family, watching movies or skiing. He is also on the board of the McCullum Youth Court, an Oakland based non-profit focusing on offering a second chance to youth offenders.

Luigi Semenzato
Google
Luigi Semenzato is an engineer in the Chrome project at Google, working on the next generation of cloud-based devices (Chrome Notebooks). His work focuses on delivering simple, secure and inexpensive devices that will redefine personal computing. He worked at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and VMware, Inc. and is an investor in early-stage companies offering cloud services. Luigi holds a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley and taught classes at the University of Padua and Mills College. He lives in Oakland with his family.

Track 2: Design of Information Systems

Adam Carlson
Chief Security Officer, Residential & Student Services, UC Berkeley
Adam Carlson is currently the chief security officer of the Residential and Student Services department of UC Berkeley, which manages student services such as the Housing and Dining Departments, the Office of Student Development, the Early Childhood Education Program, and the Conference Services department. In this role, Adam is responsible for maintaining the security of the department's critical business systems as well as the security and policies of the residence hall networks, which provide Internet services to over 7000 residents. Prior to joining RSSP, Adam worked as a senior security engineer at a small security firm which provided a variety of security consulting services to about one-third of the banks in California as well as some Fortune 500 customers. These involved both very technical security reviews focused on identifying system level issues as well as risk management planning with top-level executives. Adam received a bachelor's and master's degree in computer science from UC Davis, where his master's research focused on policy modeling and the use of honeypots to detect attacks directed at university networks.  

Steve Kafka
MIMS 2002
Senior Program Manager Lead, Microsoft
Steve has been at Microsoft for nearly eight years and currently works on Windows Live Hotmail. Prior to that he worked at Innovative Interfaces, for our own Kevin Heard, and in a prior life as a research statistician. His final project was eDecisions (eD), which he hopes has improved the quality of Thirsty Thursdays for many students. He also holds a B.A. in history and economics from the University of Michigan.

Kim Norlen
MIMS 2001
Operations Program Manager, Twitter
Kim Norlen is operations program manager at Twitter. Her work is to scale systems to meet the demands of steep and rapid growth with projects that span engineering teams, including tools, operations, security, network, hardware and datacenter. Her focus is on driving tools and processes that enable diverse teams to collaborate and execute more effectively. In previous roles she has been an engineering program manager for startups IFILM and Zazzle, and a search developer and analyst at Kaiser Permanente.

Track 3: Information Research

Brad Andrews
MIMS 2007
Site Reliability Engineering Manager, Google
Brad is a manager in Google's site reliability engineering group — a team dedicated to the 24x7 availability of Google's products and services. Brad currently works on the reliability of Google Apps, particularly Gmail, but has also worked on other internal and external services at Google including distributed data storage and user accounts management. Prior to Google, Brad worked for 9 years in information systems management in higher education, including systems engineering and management roles at UC Berkeley and Stanford. Brad has a broad range of interests at the intersection of people and technology including: technology management, information economics, distributed systems, and human-computer interaction. Brad also enjoys teaching others about technology; he spent a year full-time teaching computer literacy fundamentals to middle school students in the Bay Area. Brad graduated with a B.A. in psychology from Stanford and with a MIMS from the I School in 2007.

Alissa Black
Code for America
Alissa Black is the government relations director for Code for America. She works closely with cities to identify opportunities for the Code for America fellows to develop solutions that will help cities cut costs, work smarter, and engage more with their citizens. She is passionate about leveraging technology to make government work better. Alissa has extensive experience as a manager, policy analyst, and leader in local government. In the New York City’s mayor’s office, she coordinated the policy portfolios of multiple departments to ensure progress and execution of the city's agenda, and later she managed a development and design team that supported New York's 311 Citizen Service Center — the most highly used 311 service in the country. While working in the City of San Francisco’s emerging technologies team, she led the development and deployment of Open311, the leading national standard for citizen reporting. Alissa graduated from New York University in 2003 with a master’s in urban planning.

Nancy Philippine
Chief Operating Officer, 3PO Inc.
Nancy has over 20 years of experience leading the development of complex projects. She currently directs the development of a revolutionary approach to multilingual communication at 3PO, Inc., a San Francisco based start-up. Prior to this Nancy worked for over 18 years in the video game industry, most of it at Electronic Arts, leading development teams of major games, such as Sims 2, The Godfather and Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf. As CEO of Runbot, she also explored the possibilities of applying video games basic concepts to the world of robots. What Nancy enjoys most in her job is facilitating right brain/left brain communication, getting technology to meet creativity. Nancy is a French native and holds a graduate engineer degree from the Ecole Speciale des Travaux Publics in France.