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Dr. Walden Rhines, Chairman & CEO, Mentor Graphics, USA
Prior to joining Mentor Graphics in October 1993, Wally was executive vice president of Texas Instruments' (TI) Semiconductor Group directly responsible for TI's worldwide semiconductor business. He served as chairman of the Semiconductor Technical Advisory Committee of the Department of Commerce, as an executive committee member of the board of directors of the Corporation for Open Systems and as a board member of the Computer and Business Equipment Manufacturers' Association (CBEMA), SEMI-Sematech/SISA, Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDAC), University of Michigan national Advisory Council and Sematech. He served three two-year terms as Chairman of the Electronic Design Automation Consortium and is currently Vice-Chairman. He is also currently a Board member of the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the Global Semiconductor Alliance, the Portland Classic Wine Auction and Lewis and Clark College. Wally holds a bachelor of science degree in metallurgical engineering from the University of Michigan, a master of science and Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Stanford University, a master's of business administration from Southern Methodist University and an Honorary Doctor of Technology degree from Nottingham Trent University. |
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Rich Goldman, Vice President, Corporate Marketing, Synopsys, USA
Rich Goldman is the vice president of Corporate Marketing and Strategic Alliances for Synopsys and CEO of Synopsys Armenia. His current responsibilities include Marketing Communications, Public Relations, Market Research, Executive Speaking placement, Strategic Alliances, University Programs, Standards, and Industry Relations.
He is the Chairman of the Board of the Synopsys Outreach Foundation and of the Synopsys Charitable Foundation for Armenia, a guest Professor at the Chinese Academy of Science and an honorary Professor at Moscow Institute of Electronic Technologies. He is a trustee of the State Engineering University of Armenia and the SEUA Foundation and recently was awarded the Gold Medal, for his contributions to technology education in Armenia and in 2009 was presented the Award of the President of Armenia. Rich currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Silicon Valley Technical Institute and the board of editors of ‘Economics’ Magazine.
Prior to joining Synopsys, Rich managed the design support software group at Texas Instruments for 10 years and worked at IBM prior to that.
Rich earned a BSCS from Syracuse University, an MBA and MS Engineering Management from The University of Dallas, and an honorary Doctorate from The State Engineering University of Armenia. |
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Husni Khuffash, Regional Manager, Google
Husni Khuffash is Google’s Country Business Development Manager for the UAE, Lower Gulf and Levant. He is responsible for developing and exploring strategic and operational initiatives in the region as well as to provide market expertise to identify growth opportunities for the region. Before joining Google as a consultant, Husni founded his own enterprise – CommYOUnity, a specialized consultancy focusing in business development, sales structuring, e-marketing and online strategies. Prior to that he worked as Regional Manager for maktoob.com. Husni was awarded the Best Marketing Campaign in 2009 and one of the top 20 individuals in MENA shaping the region's digital media 2010 |
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John Waclawsky, Chief Architect, Motorola Inc., USA
Dr. Waclawsky is a consultant and valued organizational change agent. Dr. Waclawsky joined Motorola in 2005 as the Chief Software Architect for the Motorola Software Technology Groups.
Dr. Waclawsky has prior tenure at IBM and Cisco where he defined the next generation IOS software for Cisco Systems and served as a technical leader for the Mobile Wireless Group. Before joining Cisco, Dr. Waclawsky spent more than 20 years at IBM. Dr. Waclawsky was the Technical Plenary Chair of the Mobile Wireless Internet Forum and a member of the Open Mobile Alliance board as well as editor of the WiMAX Network Working Group.
John holds a Ph.D. and a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, a Master's degree in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelors degree in Mathematics from Drexel University (Philadelphia). |
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Nizar Cheniour , Director, Entrepreneurship Development, Khalifa Fund, UAE
Is in charge of Entrepreneurship Development Department with the main objectives of creating an entrepreneurship culture through facilitating the establishment of new innovative Small and Medium Enterprises and enhance the growth of existing SME’s, offering a platform of services including idea generation, training potential entrepreneurs, counseling them, processing their applications and providing appropriate financial support. He is also in charge of developing innovation programs and incubator networking strategy with different entities and Universities in Abu Dhabi in order to develop high impact generation of entrepreneurs in the Emirate.
Prior to his current position, Mr. Cheniour was with the United Nations Industrial Organization (UNIDO) as Investment promotion expert promoting industrial projects in Tunisia, France and Italy. He worked in several regional initiatives related to Entrepreneurship training, investment promotion, SMEs growth and networking.
Mr. Nizar holds several degrees from different prestigious Universities in France and Tunisia in the fields of Law, Finance, Administration and IT applied to Finance. |
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Omar Hamarneh, CEO, El Hassan Science city, Jordan
Omar Hamarneh is Chief Executive Officer of El Hassan Science City, Jordan’s first Science City entrusted with supporting the development of Jordan’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship ecosystem.Omar is directly involved with establishing and growing entrepreneurship development programs, Incubation centers for technology based startups, Technology Transfer & commercialization services and supporting the establishment of VC and Angles Investor networks. Prior to his current position, Omar established and managed iPARK, Jordan’s first technology focused incubator while also serving at the Higher Council for Science and Technology as Director of International Cooperation and Development sector. Omar Hamrneh also serves on the Board of Trustees of Princess Sumaya University for Technology, and as Steering Committee member of The Licensing Executive Society – Arab Countries. |
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Dr. Abdelhakim Hammach, Senior Advisor, Investment, Riyadh Techno Valley, KSA
Is a senior advisor with the investment team of Riyadh Techno Valley (RTV). Before joining RTV, he was a senior strategy consultant with Accenture, where he advised leading global organizations in the US and Europe on issues of growth strategy. Before joining Accenture, Dr. Hammach was a Venture Capital Investment Consultant with Aurora Funds in the North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, USA. Prior to this, Dr. Hammach was a Principal Scientist with Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals (BIPI), in Connecticut, USA. He has been actively involved in formulating The national policy of incubation in KSA and mentoring local and regional entrepreneurs. Dr. Hammach served as a Postdoctoral fellow at the chemistry department of the University of Pennsylvania after having earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Vermont. He also holds a MBA from Duke University, and a B.S. in Chemistry from the University Moulay Ismail of Meknes Morocco. He is an inventor with over 17 US patentsand has co-authored numerous scientific articles in leading international scientific journals. |
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Robert Ayan, Managing Director, Cambridge Advisors, USA
Robert Ayan is Founder and Managing Partner of Cambridge Advisors LLC, an international strategic advisory firm specializing in socio-economic development. Currently, Robert is serving as Chief Strategist to El Hassan Science City in Amman, Jordan, where he is developing an innovation ecosystem to support knowledge based entrepreneurship. Robert is also the former Program Manager of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he helped entrepreneurs commercialize their emerging technologies and supported the launch of technology entrepreneurship initiatives across the MENA region. Robert is also a Senior Advisor to the Queen Rania Centre for Entrepreneurship at Princess Sumaya University of Technology where he has been actively supporting entrepreneurship programs. Robert earned his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he was awarded the Carroll L. Wilson Fellowship Robert also earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the Boston University School of Management, where he studied Management Information Systems and Computer Science |
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Simon Edward, CEO, Mowgli Foundation, UK
Simon Edwards is a business and social entrepreneur. After service in the British Army, he set up a restaurant business before moving into management consultancy and business coaching. He founded a charity, Believe, to inspire change amongst the socially excluded, including young and adult offenders. He is a passionate believer in the power of mentoring which has lead to his current role establishing an international business mentoring programme |
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Sami Issa, Executive Director, ATIC, UAE
Sami Issa is the Executive Director leading the Abu Dhabi Ecosystem Development unit of ATIC. Sami is a veteran of the semiconductor industry where he has held diverse leadership positions with industry leaders such as Intel Corporation, Texas Instruments, and Broadcom Corporation.
Prior to joining ATIC, he was a director at Intel Corporation and elected top 1% of Intel's technical community, where he played an instrumental role in the vision, strategy and development of Intel's x86 based ultra mobile product line and Intel's ARM based Xscale product line.
Whilst at Intel, he co-founded Intel's power management business unit and worked closely with Intel capital on multitude of investments focused on power management. Sami founded a series of small businesses in the Middle East focused on consumer electronics devices and associated services.
Sami holds a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University and has over 50 US patents. He is also a graduate of the Harvard Business School, General Manager Program, and is co-founder and vice president of the Harvard Business School Club of the UAE |
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Daniel Durn, Executive Director, Acquisitions and Portfolio Management, ATIC, UAE
Daniel Durn is the Executive Director leading the Acquisitions and Portfolio Management business unit of ATIC. Prior to joining ATIC, Daniel was an investment banker and a member of the Merger Leadership Group at Goldman Sachs. He has extensive M&A deal experience in a variety of technology-related sectors including semiconductors, electronic manufacturing services, IT services, software and cable. At Goldman Sachs, he specialized in the execution of complex transactions including cross-border situations, joint ventures, divestitures and anti-raid / raid defense advisory assignments. Whilst at Goldman Sachs, Daniel played a key role in a number of semiconductor transactions including sale of Artisan Components to ARM Holdings, sale of Avago to Silver Lake / KKR consortium, Agilent's IPO divestiture of Verigy, acquisition of PortalPlayer by Nvidia, sale of Agere to LSI Logic, sale of Genesis Micro to ST Micro, sale of AMI Semiconductor to ON Semiconductor, raid defense advisory for Mentor Graphics as well as several others. Daniel holds a Master's of Business Administration degree from Columbia University in New York, New York, and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. |
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Dr. Ussama Fayyad, Executive Chairman, Oasis 500, USA
An Executive Chairman of OASIS-500, Chairman of D1G.com.and CEO of Open Insights, LLC, a data strategy, technology and consulting firm he founded to help enterprises understand data strategy and deploy data-driven solutions. He was the Chief Data Officer and Executive Vice President of Research & Strategic Data Solutions at Yahoo!
Prior to joining Yahoo!, Fayyad co-founded the DMX Group, a data mining and data strategy consulting and technology company that was acquired by Yahoo! in 2004. He co-founded and served as CEO of Revenue Science, Inc.(digiMine, Inc.), a data analysis and data mining company Fayyad held a leadership role at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where his work in the analysis and exploration of scientific databases which garnered him a U.S. Government medal from NASA.
Fayyad earned his Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1991), and also holds BSE's in both electrical and computer engineering (1984); MSE in computer science and engineering (1986); and M.Sc. in mathematics (1989). |
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Mr. Mohammed Barig Siraj, CEO, ICT Ventures, KSA
Currently leading ICT Ventures, an investment company acting as a Venture capital fund focused on the Information and Communication Technology sector in the Middle East North Africa region. Mr. Siraj is a serial entrepreneur, worked as an IT professional in the private sector in Banking, Broadcasting, Airline and online businesses in notable institutes such as Saudia, Dallah AlBaraka, Arab Radio and Television, and Arabia.com. He also served Saudi Governmental entities notably the Traffic Directorate of the Ministry of Interior, in addition to the Aviation [GACA] and Telecom [CITC] regulators. He holds a Masters degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California in 1987 |
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Ahmed Gomma, CEO, Ideavelopers, Egypt
Responsible for overseeing the management of the Technology Development Fund (TDF) and the fund's portfolio of companies. Mr. Gomaa has fine tuned his ability to pick the radical ideas that will shape tomorrow's Egyptian CIT market. Prior to joining Ideavelopers, Mr. Gomaa was part of the Technology Team in CIIC where he was Business Development Director to Egypt's Cyber Center, where he helped grow the company into a success. Mr. Gomaa holds a B.A., in Political Science from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. |
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Ghazi Ben Othman, General Partner, MINAH Ventures, Tunisia
Ghazi brings more than 16 years of experience in the technology industry. He has worked as a business development executive in the semiconductor space, as a corporate strategist in the computer industry, as a research analyst on Wall Street, and as an early stage venture capitalist. As an investor, Ghazi was responsible for the deployment of more than US70,000,000 in early stage technology investments and for the deployment of more than US$3 Billion in technology M&A.
In addition to his investing role, Ghazi served as President and co-founder of TechWadi, the leading professional association of Arab American technology executives. In this role, Ghazi spends significant time advising and mentoring emerging entrepreneurs looking to launch their first startup. Ghazi received his Masters in Computer Engineering from USC. |
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Dr. Hazem El Tahawy, Managing Director of Mentor Graphics Egypt
Graduated from Cairo University, faculty of Engineering (Electronics and Communication) in 1976, he got his Master and PhD Degrees, Microelectronics specialization in 1982 and 1987 respectively from National Polytechnic Institute, Grenoble France. Dr. El Tahawy was a co-founder of Anacad (a company specialized in Analog Design and AD tools). Mentor Graphics acquired Anacad in 1994, where he became the WW AMS Engineering Director as well as Anacad General Manager. In 1998 he returned back to Egypt and got the overall responsibility of Mentor Graphics Egypt as a Headquarter to Arab countries and North Africa. |
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Sam Alkharrat, Managing Director, Public Sector, Emerging Markets, Cisco Systems
Sam is the Managing Director of Cisco Gulf and Pakistan, also the executive sponsor for Cisco's Middle East Diversity and Inclusion (MEDI) initiative and chairs Cisco's Real Estate board which is responsible for driving the development of Cisco's real estate solutions business on a worldwide level. Throughout his 14-year career with Cisco, Sam held a variety of sales, engineering and general manager positions. He started his career as a support engineer in San Jose California. He then became a field systems engineer in 1996 where he attained his CCIEs certification, after which he developed his role to become a Technical Consultant. In 1998, Sam moved to Dubai where he was Cisco's first Systems Engineering Leader in the Middle East Region. In that role, he built a strong technical organization until he assumed a Sales Leadership role in 2002. Sam earned his Computer Engineering degree from the University of Toledo in the United States and a Global Executive MBA at Duke University. |
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Majied Qasem, Managing Director, d1g.com, Jordan
Is the co-founder of d1g.com. A leading regional portal focused on providing a range of media rich and socially enabled services. Prior to d1g.com, Majied was the Director for the Jordan Education Initiative (JEI) focusing on creating a replicable model for Education Reform through Public Private Partnerships. Majied is the Founder and Managing Director of RAZORView Advisors providing strategic advice and support in the areas of Investments and concept development. Majied was also a founding partner and director of Estarta Solutions, a leading technology company providing advanced technology services that successfully attracted investments from Microsoft . Majied also help found ONEWORLD Solutions, Arabia.com and Injaz |
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Ray Milhem, CTO, Dubai Silicon Oasis, UAE
Is a Hi-Tech Executive based in Silicon Valley, California. Before joing DSO, Ray was a VP/GM at Motorola and held other Executive positions at Nokia, Cisco and AT&T. Mr.Milhem is a co-founder of "TechWadi". He is also Chairman of the Board @ AdvancedIO in Vancouver, Canada and on the Board of COE College in IOWA. Mr.Milhem is a Venture Partner @ Arab Seed Ventures and is involved in various Technology and Business initiatives between the US and the MENA region. |
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Jihad (Jay) Srage, Vice President, Business Development MENA, Qualcomm, UAE
Jay Srage serves as the vice president of business development for Qualcomm’s Middle East operations. In this role, he leads Qualcomm’s business operations in the region and manages the Company’s strategic relationships with regional customers. Prior to joining Qualcomm, Mr. Srage was with Texas Instruments (TI) overseeing marketing operations for TI’s wireless terminals business unit. He also co-managed TI Ventures, the company’s venture finance fund, where he directed TI’s investments in start-up companies Mr. Srage earned an MBA from the University of Chicago, a MS in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, and a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the American University of Beirut. |
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Mohammed Alzubi, Business Development Manager, Dubai Silicon Oasis, UAE
Prior to his current position at DSO, Mohammed worked for a wide range of customers, including Cisco, Sun and American Express,He is an Angel investor and member of Sand Hill Angels, an Advisory Board member of LinkSV, Advisory Board member of kyube.com, a founding Board member of Techwadi, and a member of the GLG counsel. Mohammed has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Brigham Young University. |
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