2012 Final Project Judges

Track 1: Changing Behaviors

Katherine Falk
MIMS 1999
Web Communications Specialist, University of the Pacific
A member of the I School's class of 1999, back when it was known as SIMS and the students were "Simians", Katherine is a web communications specialist at the University of the Pacific, Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry. This is a fancy way of saying she tries to help staff write clear and concise copy for the web and email as well as create web forms that are easy to use. She also arm-wrestles WordPress a great deal, and recently worked with the in-house design team to develop and launch an online version of the school's alumni magazine. She also has two B.A. degrees from UC Santa Cruz in literature and studio art. You want fries with that?

Maggie Law
MIMS 2003
Director of UI Design, Salesforce.com
Maggie earned a Masters of Information Management & Systems from UC Berkeley in 2003. She has applied her interaction design skills at leading enterprise software companies Peoplesoft, Oracle, SAP, and most recently salesforce.com. Having passed the 6-year mark at Salesforce, Maggie has worked with many teams focused on a variety of product areas, and has led or participated in several key visionary initiatives. Today, she manages a 9-person team of designers and researchers tasked with generating killer designs for the wildly successful Salesforce CRM product suite and the emerging crowd-sourced community site Data.com (formerly Jigsaw). She lives in SF with a pit bull and 3 chickens.

Pamela Walshe
MIMS 1999
Director of Research, AnswerLab
Pamela Walshe is a research director with AnswerLab and is responsible for managing verticals including online media, health care, automotive, and travel. She has 10+ years of experience in user experience and previously managed the UX Research team at Wells Fargo for online and mobile platforms. Pamela earned her BA with high honors from UC Berkeley in anthropology, and her MIMS from the I School. Pamela is also an avid gardener, cook, and dog lover. 

Track 2: Changing Business Processes

Regina Connell
Editor in Chief, Handful of Salt
Regina is a writer, editor, creative director, strategist and connector. She holds a JD from University of California, Hastings College of Law and a B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University

Edd Dumbill
Program Chair, O'Reilly Media
Edd Dumbill has been writing on emerging technology and chairing conferences for over twelve years. He is the founding chair of O'Reilly Media's Strata Conference on data, and the chair of the Open Source Convention. A veteran of two startups and four books, Edd enjoys blending speaking and writing with product development.

Daphne Keller
Legal Director & Associate General Counsel, Google, Inc.
Daphne Keller served most recently as Associate General Counsel and Legal Director for Google. Her team covered issues such as copyright, privacy, defamation, and international legal removals issues for Google's Web Search product. She previously served as the company's legal lead for copyright. Over a seven-year stint with Google, she counseled teams developing products ranging from the Chrome browser to Google News and Google Video, and worked closely with Google's Open Source team. She previously worked as a litigator at the law firm of Munger Tolles and Olson, and taught Internet Law as a Fellow at Duke Law School. Her legal and academic career has included stints in Anchorage, Rangoon, Oxford, and other far-flung locales. She is a graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University.

Track 3: Enhancing Information Systems

Valerie Lanard
MIMS 2001
Valerie is currently in the early stages of building her first start-up, combining her passions for fitness and technology. For the last 11 years since leaving the I School, she has worked at Ask.com, most recently running an engineering team that designs and builds internal tools and processes. Her team's projects range from analytics reporting to automated deployment and publishing tools, with emphasis on distributed processing. Her path to engineering management at Ask started after graduation with a job evaluating search engine relevance, then a period in the QA team where her interest in automation led to a switch into development. She holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in music, marketing, and management, and wistfully imagines returning to the I School for a updated degree every 5 years.

James Reffell
MIMS 2002
Director of User Experience, Webroot Software
James Reffell is a designer at Webroot, where he works with the rest of the Usable Security Systems team (acquired by Webroot in 2010) to make passwords less painful for everyone. He has also worked at Yahoo! and eBay, and has a master's degree from the School of Information, although it was called SIMS when he was there. He lives next to the beach in San Francisco.

Jeannie Yang
MIMS 2005
VP of Product Alchemy, Smule
As VP of Product Alchemy, Jeannie guides Smule's projects from concept through completion. Prior to joining Smule, she worked at Yahoo! where she helped start up their first social media research lab, as well as launched 7 public research prototypes and 3 public web services. At Yahoo! Brickhouse, she assisted in the launch of the first open location brokering platform, Fire Eagle. Jeannie joined Smule in 2010 after realizing her passion lies in startups and helping make things happen with small teams that dream big. Concurrently, Jeannie is a house music DJ. She received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and eanred a Masters of Information Management & Systems from the UC Berkeley School of Information.