The VisTrails Team
The VisTrails leadership team combines expertise in technology leadership, financial management, channel building, commercially-driven R&D, and operations management. VisTrails has successfully assembled a solid core management team to establish a commercially viable company, develop and launch provenance products, and build the necessary marketing, sales and support operations. The team includes Claudio Silva, as Chief Executive Officer; Juliana Freire as the Chief Technology Officer; Kirk Mosher as the Chief Financial Officer; and Steve Callahan as the Chief Software Architect.
All members of the management team have significant industry experience with companies such as IBM, SAP, Lucent, Hughes Aircraft and a variety of smaller firms.
Founder and Chief Executive Officer:Claudio T. Silva, Ph.D.
Dr. Silva is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and a faculty member of the SCI Institute at the University of Utah. Before joining Utah, he worked in industry (IBM and AT\&T), government (Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories), and academia (Stony Brook and OGI). He has co-authored over 100 technical papers and holds 8 patents. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1996. He is an active member of the visualization community, and has recently served as papers co-chair of the IEEE Visualization 2005 and 2006 conferences. He has received multiple awards, including most recently three IBM Faculty Awards (2005, 2006, and 2007), and his research is (or has been) funded by grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Army Research Office, National Institutes of Health, IBM, and the University of Utah. While a research staff member at the above-mentioned companies and labs, he has contributed to a number of successful products. In particular, while at IBM, he was a key contributor to the MPEG-4 3D model coding standard and software. Also, his research has been implemented into leading visualization systems, including VTK and ParaView (both from Kitware).
Drs. Freire and Silva have worked together for a number of years, and have jointly co-developed the key concepts behind VisTrails. Their different perspectives have made the project possible, with Freire bringing a data management and data mining background, and Silva coming from a scientific visualization and scientific computing background. Their industrial perspective, from years of leading complex software projects in industry, has worked well to quickly bring a high quality, fully-functional research prototype to fruition. The two of them have assembled an extremely talented team of students working on VisTrails, which consists of two post-doctoral researchers, seven PhD students, and one undergraduate student.
Founder and Chief Technology Officer: Juliana Freire, Ph.D.
Dr. Freire is an Associate Professor of Computer Science. She joined the faculty of the School of Computing at the University of Utah in 2005. Previously, she was member of technical staff at the Database Systems Research Department at Bell Laboratories (Lucent Technologies) and an Assistant Professor at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. Dr. Freire's research has focused on extending traditional database technology and developing techniques to address new data management problems introduced by emerging applications. She is best know for her work on large-scale information integration, XML data management, and more recently provenance for workflow systems. She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1997. She is an active member of the database community, having co-authored over 80 technical papers, 2 books, and holding 4 patents. She has also participated as a program committee member in over 40 events; served as vice-chair for WWW2008, ICDE2007, WWW2005; and co-chaired WebDB2003. She co-organized the Second Provenance Challenge and she is the co-chair for the International Provenance and Annotation Workshop (IPAW 2008). Eight active grants from the National Science Foundation and one from the University of Utah fund her research. At Bell Labs, she was a key member of the MetaComm project, a meta-directory that integrates information from multiple telecomm devices. The MetaComm research prototype was successfully transitioned from a research prototype into a product, and it is now part of Avaya's product portfolio. Dr. Freire has also led the development of several open-source packages, and two software packages distributed by MIT Press.
Chief Financial Officer: Kirk Mosher, MBA
Mr. Mosher has extensive experience in financial, contract and operations management. He received his MBA from the University of Arizona in 1985. After six years at Hughes Aircraft Company in Tucson, AZ as a financial analyst and contract manager. Mr. Mosher became CFO and Treasurer for Benchmark Environmental Corporation in Albuquerque, NM. At Benchmark, an environmental and consulting company, Mr. Mosher was responsible for all corporate finance, purchasing, contract, budgeting and accounting functions including; cash management, financial planning, auditing, and budgeting. Mr. Mosher recently served as chief financial officer of Visual Influence a software company spun out of the University of Utah. Visual Influence was recently acquired by Numira Biosciences.
Founder and Chief Software Architect: Steve Callahan, Ph.D.
Immediately prior to joining VisTrails, Inc., Dr. Callahan was part of the team that originally developed the VisTrails codebase at the University of Utah, where he received his Ph.D. in computing in 2008. He has co-authored over 20 technical papers and has served as the PI of VisTrails' NSF phase I and IB SBIRs and the DOE Phase I SBIR. In addition to this experience, Dr. Callahan spent a significant time in industry as a software developer for Parametric Technology Company (PTC) and as a technical scholar at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Dr. Callahan recently led the completion of the prototype ParaView and VisIt Provenance Explorer plug-in's and also led the development team in the recent release of the Beta version of Provenance Explorer for Autodesk's Maya, recently named a winner of a 2009 Utah Innovation Award.
Senior Software Engineer: John Schreiner, Ph.D.
John Schreiner received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in early 2009, where he focused on meshing techniques in computer graphics and scientific visualization. He received a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2002. Before joining VisTrails, John worked as a systems engineer at Prediction Company, in Santa Fe, NM.
VisTrails inc. | 85 South Fort Douglas |
Salt Lake City, Utah 84113 USA
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