Speakers
Chris Johnson
Chris Johnson is Senior Vice President of the Geospatial Training and Application Center (GTAC) at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center and is responsible for management and operations associated with GTAC and the Geospatial Technology programs. She has served as Principal Investigator for U.S. Department of Agriculture, NASA, Department of the Army, Department of Conservation Natural Resources and Department of Homeland Security grant programs. Ms. Johnson is responsible for the development of and is the Program Manager for the Virtual Alabama Program which currently provides situational awareness and operational support to over 6,000 users representing over 1,450 government agencies. Currently, Ms. Johnson is working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to develop a concept of operations for Virtual USA to enhance interstate situational awareness and information sharing. Under Ms. Johnson’s direction, the Virtual Alabama program has been awarded 5 National Awards for technology innovation.. They include the National Governors’ Association 2008 Public/Private Partnership Award, the American Council for Technology 2008 Intergovernmental Solutions Award, the Google Superstar Award (first time ever awarded to a government agency), the Council of State Governments 2008 Innovations Award, and the Government Computer News Outstanding Information Technology Achievement in Government Award. In May 2009, Virtual Alabama was featured in a Gartner Research Case Study: How Alabama Dares to Defend Itself.
Ms. Johnson has over 18 years of experience in systems design; systems development and testing: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) development; Relational database systems development; Network engineering; Global Positioning Systems (GPS) development, Remote Sensing (RS) and communications. She has served as a consultant to the Department of Defense, Department of the Army, Defense Intelligence Agency, Space and Missile Defense Command, NASA, USDA, National Guard Bureau Counter Drug, Criminal Justice Information Center, Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Homeland Security, and state and local agencies on issues related to system development and the use of GPS, GIS, Remote Sensing and communication systems. Further, Ms. Johnson is a member of the National Guard Bureau Counter Drug Technology Consortium and currently chairs the Alabama GIS Advisory Committee.
Ms. Johnson has more than 28 years experience in the area of business development and management. In 1980, she began the first of six successful start-up companies and is currently a 50% owner of two businesses.
Byron Reeves
Bill Murphy Distinguished Speaker
Byron Reeves received a B.F.A. in graphic design from Southern Methodist University and his M.A. and a Ph.D. in communication from Michigan State University.
Prior to joining Stanford in 1985, he taught at the University of Wisconsin where he was director of graduate studies and associate chair of the Mass Communication Research Center.
He teaches courses in mass communication theory and research, with particular emphasis on psychological processing of interactive media. His research includes message processing, social cognition, and social and emotion responses to media, and has been published in books of collected studies as well as such journals as Human Communication Research, Journal of Social Issues, Journal of Broadcasting, and Journalism Quarterly. He is co-author of The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places (Cambridge University Press).
His research has been the basis for a number of new media products for companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, in the areas of voice interfaces, automated dialogue systems and conversational agents. He is currently working on the applications of multi-player game technology to learning and the conduct of serious work.
Jacob Farmer
Jacob Farmer is an industry-recognized expert on storage networking and data protection technologies. He has authored numerous papers and is a regular speaker at major industry events such as Storage Networking World, VMWorld, Interop, and the Usenix conferences. Jacob’s no-nonsense, fast paced presentation style has won him many accolades. Most recently Jacob was honored as the top-rated speaker at Storage Networking World, the preeminent conference for the data storage industry. Jacob is a regular lecturer at many of the nation’s leading colleges and universities. Of recent he has given invited talks at institutions such as Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Harvard, and Yale. Inside the data storage industry, Jacob is best known for having authored best practices for designing and optimizing enterprise backup systems and for his expertise in the marketplace for emerging storage networking technologies. He has served on the advisory boards of many of the most successful storage technology startups. Jacob is a graduate of Yale. Follow him on Twitter @JacobAFarmer.