And the Winner is…
We’ve had an amazing time during the course of launching and coordinating #ProtoComp2015 in partnership with Unisys. Week 3’s Crash Courses and prototyping work sessions are set to begin tomorrow evening, and we wanted to take a moment to announce our Judging Panel that will assess the teams final product on May 13th.
Christina Watters – Christina is a Consulting Engineer in the Forward/ClearPath Forward Engineering organization at Unisys Corporation in Malvern, PA. Christina is responsible for business and engineering process architecture including the selection of open source tools that facilitate software development, build, release, and test, supporting Agile environments. She was instrumental in engineering the framework for open source technology compliance and is currently driving the software distribution model.
Christina has been with Unisys for over 37 years. During this time she has managed geographically diverse software and hardware professionals and provided leadership in process design for ASIC’s, printed circuit boards and hardware and software projects. Christina has a BS in Legal Studies from Kaplan University, holds three process patents and is a certified SCRUM Master and Agile Product Owner.
Jim Thompson – Jim is the Chief Engineer and Vice President of Engineering and Supply Chain at Unisys. In this role, Jim is responsible for the design, development and manufacture of technology products that align with the Unisys’ strategy and marketplace needs.
Jim’s career with Unisys spans 27 years in various customer facing and engineering roles. He is also responsible for creating the vision and architecture for Unisys’ modern mission critical products such as ClearPath, Stealth and Forward! Prior to joining Unisys, Jim held various technical positions in financial institutions and commercial firms, as well as being an independent consultant.
Jim holds technology patents in the areas of operating systems, storage and banking. In 2015, in recognition of driving innovation at Unisys, Jim was awarded the prestigious Corporate Innovation Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Philadelphia Section.
Michael Salsburg – Michael is the Chief Architect for Unisys cloud solutions. He’s been fascinated by computing and automation since he was 14 and has been in business for well over forty years.
Michael’s career at Unisys has taken a lot of twists and turns. He admits to being somewhat of a recidivist. He worked for Unisys from 1982 to 1990, and then left Unisys to create his own company called Performance and Modeling. As a consultant, he worked with Unisys and other companies to model computer performance and predict its impact on application service level objectives.
Before leaving, Michael was the architect for all Unisys performance products. His company was bought by a rising star in Silicon Valley, for whom he served as CTO and corporate officer.
In 2002, Michael returned to Unisys and have continued pursuing the idea that computing should be focused on optimal delivery of services to the business. Infrastructure based on cloud concepts provides the foundation to achieve this goal. He’s written over 60 papers on these concepts and presented them throughout the world.
Chris Dima – Chris launched Walnut St. Labs in December 2013 with the help of a community of innovators in the area. He leads strategic development at Walnut St. Labs, including the overall model, the incubator and partnerships.
Walnut St. Labs is an innovation lab in downtown West Chester, PA. It’s provides co-working space, a robust events calendar, including two weekly events, and an early stage incubator. Walnut St. Labs is focused on developing its new model that will more efficiently productize and commercialize early-stage innovation — assisting innovators getting new ideas to market.
Chris drives strategy and business development for MongoSluice, cutting-edge big data tool. MongoSluice dynamically creates schema from unstructured data in NoSQL and then streams strongly-typed data to any RDBMS datastore.
Peter LoBue – Peter‘s educational background was driven by his passion to learn about how computers work. Research in Human Computer Interaction and Design Thinking has since attracted my attention to caring more about how people work and how technology influences their behavior.
As an Experience Designer, Peter has had the pleasure of solving human problems, making use of my technology skills and collaborating with all types of personalities and roles. His most recent employment provided him with experience in a wide range of projects, from the more technical sides of design (usability, interaction design) to more strategic (service design, web strategy) facets.
Peter led #ProtoComp2015’s Week One Crash Course on rapid prototyping and showed the contestants how to create an effective user interface design, including how to test assumptions with potential users and incorporate findings into the design process. Rapid prototyping is the activity of tweaking your prototype over time to get the desired feedback, while also visually documenting your findings. He discussed the process in detail and presented some killer examples.