Doctoral Candidate, Research Assistant at Washington State's College of Veterinary Medicine

Chad is an early explorer of major new technology trends, specialzing in video coding and neuroscience. His deep industry insight is employed by three Silicon Valley venture firms. He has contracted for TiVo, Pixim, VUDU, Sony, and Silicon Image, and frequently consults in large-organization intellectual property matters.

In 1991, he was architect of the only full-rate video JPEG codec for OKI Semiconductor. He served as editor of several MPEG specifications, including MPEG-2 Video. Chad became a DSP developer and architect at Chromatic Research (acquired by ATI), which created a programmable graphics controller enabling the first PC platform DVD player. He served as C-Cube Microsystem's representative during the H.263 and early H.264 projects. With Gary Sullivan, he co-authored the Microsoft DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) specification now used in most graphics cards. The video processing company he founded in 2001 pioneered film grain synthesis and scalable video coding (SVC) for high-definition on DVD.

Chad has been conducting his Ph.D research in low-level brain mechanics. He believes attention plays a key computational role in cortical pattern recognition, giving biology an unmatched advantage over modern computing engines. He is an organizing proponent of "H.265" | HVC – a hopeful next-generation standard following H.264 | AVC within 5 years. 

Chief Technology Officer at Highwinds

Josh Gagliardi oversees all aspects of software development, including direct management of the development staff, for the Highwinds suite of NNTP and other carrier-class Internet protocol servers. He is responsible for maintaining and extending the technological advantages of the company's products and leveraging those advantages for entry into new markets. Mr. Gagliardi managed all aspects of software development and quality assurance during the creation of Highwinds' Cyclone and Typhoon products as well as the Twister discussion server.

Prior to joining Highwinds, Mr. Gagliardi worked as a software engineer with Language Engineering Corporation, and with BBN Systems and Technologies, where he helped develop content aggregation and filtering technology for an early news aggregator. 

Mr. Gagliardi received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Senior Vice President of Technology at Vibrant Media

Bob Hammond is the SVP of technology for Vibrant Media. Bob joined Vibrant from Yahoo! where he was the VP of engineering for the Video Syndication Platform Group, overseeing a large, fast-moving engineering team and managing the design & development of Yahoo's video publishing platform. His career spans senior technology positions at Maven (Acquired by Yahoo!), Mirror Image Internet and Hewlett Packard amongst others.

Bob is responsible for managing Vibrant's technology teams which include Adserver Development, Business Systems, Database Administration, Operations and Quality Assurance. He is also responsible for managing Vibrant's Product Management group which develops product strategies and roadmaps for the company.