Dr. Jayant Sharma is Director, Spatial & Graph Product Management at Oracle's New England Development Center. He has over twenty years' experience in databases and spatial information systems. He was responsible for building the spatial product team when he joined Oracle Corporation in 1996. He is currently focused on the product strategy, and design, of spatial & graph components for Oracle's database and analytic cloud and big data solutions. He works closely with Oracle business partners and key customers. He also represents Oracle at the Open Geospatial Consortium's Planning & Technical Committee meetings and its working groups.

Dr. Sharma has a Ph.D. in Spatial Information Engineering from the University of Maine at Orono. While at Orono he was a research assistant at the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis working with Prof. Max J. Egenhofer on spatial reasoning in GIS. He was awarded a joint NSF/ESF Young Scholar's Fellowship for this research.

Dr. Sharma has delivered numerous invited talks, tutorials, and research papers at various academic and industry conferences.

Spatial and Graph analysis is about understanding relationships. As applications and infrastructure evolve, as new technologies and platforms emerge, we find new ways to incorporate and exploit social and location information into business and analytic workflows, creating a new class of applications. The emergence of Internet of Things, Cloud services, mobile tracking, social media, and real time systems creates a new landscape for analytic applications and operational systems. It changes the very nature of what we expect from devices and systems. New platforms and capabilities combine to become business as usual.

This session will discuss advances, trends, and directions in the technology, infrastructure, data, and applications affecting the use of spatial and graph analysis in current and emerging analytic and operational systems, and the new offerings Oracle has introduced to address these new developments.

Dr Vanessa Lawrence CB is currently working internationally as a senior advisor to governments, inter-governmental organisations and large private sector organisations.

In addition, she is a Director of Location International Ltd which provides strategic advice and full operational capacity globally, to the public and private sector, as to how to gain from improving their own use of location information to enhance their decision-making and to meet the ever changing needs of their customers and stakeholders.

She is the Honorary Colonel of 135 Geographic Squadron Royal Engineers, a Non-Executive Director of the Satellite Applications Catapult whose focus is fostering innovation in the use of satellite data, on the Advisory Group of the Urban Big Data Centre and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Southampton and Visiting Professor at Kingston University.

From 2000-2014, she held the post of Director General and CEO of Ordnance Survey, Britain’s National Mapping Authority and she was the advisor to the British Government for issues involving mapping, surveying and geographic information. She is the longest serving Director General and CEO of Ordnance Survey since 1875.

From 2011-2015, she was a founding co-chair of the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM). During her tenure UN-GGIM grew to having over 140 nations at Ministerial and Senior Official level involved.

Prior to joining the British Civil Service, she held senior commercial roles with the billion-dollar American software company, Autodesk and also the global media and publishing company, Pearson plc.

A proud Canadian, Asif is a renowned global speaker, author and serial entrepreneur. He is currently focused on working as a consultant and venture capitalist to the locationbased marketing services community. In support of this, Asif formed the Location Based Marketing Association - an international group dedicated to research and education in the space.

Prior to launching The LBMA, Asif built 4 start-ups and worked with companies as diverse as Limited Brands, IBM, Baxter Pharmaceuticals, Molson-Coors, BestBuy, American Airlines, Cineplex Entertainment, ING Bank, Gamestop and L’Oreal. You can catch Asif’s weekly video podcast - This Week In Location-Based Marketing.

An avid technology evangelist, Asif also holds a degree in economics and management sciences from the University of Waterloo, is regular guest lecturer at Ryerson University, Penn State University, George Brown University and University of Texas, and can be found on Twitter @AsifRKhan

Prakash Iyer is a software technologist with over 25+ years of engineering and management experience. Currently he is the Vice President of Software Architecture and Strategy at Trimble Navigation Ltd. He is also the COO for the VSS division (a software joint venture between Caterpillar and Trimble) managing an internationally distributed team. Prakash works on initiatives that are critical to Trimble?s software strategy providing leadership to software focused development activities. The current focus areas are Cloud, IoT(Internet of Things), Mobile and leading the technical due diligence on strategic acquisitions. Prior to Trimble, Prakash was the CTO and SVP of Products at @Road, a leader in Telematics/MRM solution. Prakash also co-founded Everypath, Inc., which pioneered the concept of Enterprise Mobile Task Automation in the early days of mobile computing. Prior to that Prakash has also contributed to successful companies like Prism Solutions, Informix, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, and Alltel Information Services in various engineering and management roles. Prakash holds a Master of Science degree and completed the AMP program from the Harvard Business School. Prakash also holds several US software patents to his credit. As a mentor and seasoned entrepreneur, Prakash sits on the board of several private and public companies in the US.

Ed Parsons is the Geospatial Technologist of Google, with responsibility for evangelising Google?s mission to organise the world?s information using geography. In this role he maintains links with Universities, Research and Standards Organisations which are involved in the development of Geospatial Technology. He is currently co-chair of the W3C/OGC Spatial Data on the Web Working Group. Ed is based in Google?s London office, and anywhere else he can plug in his laptop. Ed was the first Chief Technology Officer in the 200-year-old history of Ordnance Survey, and was instrumental in moving the focus of the organisation from mapping to Geographical Information. He came to the Ordnance Survey from Autodesk, where he was EMEA Applications Manager for the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Division. He earned a Masters degree in Applied Remote Sensing from Cranfield Institute of Technology and holds a Honorary Doctorate in Science from Kingston University, London and is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Ajay Kumar, Director of Engineering - Location Intelligence at Pitney Bowes in India, is a radical innovator, critical thinker, data architect and consultant. With over 16 years of industry experience, Ajay?s domain expertise lies in location intelligence for geospatial and geocoding applications, Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence, search with ranking, scalability, data. At Pitney Bowes, Ajay has been leading the highly complex and fast growing Location Intelligence (LI) portfolio in India. He?s been driving market focused innovation and efficiency including Data Modernization, global geocoding & data visualizations. In his current role at PB, Ajay has been focused on implementing Data Mining, Machine Learning, location related search and scalability to help solve critical business problems. He?s instrumental in leading practices shared across the enterprise for data sciences & Machine Learning. He also leads the UX practice with a focus on Mobile First Experience. In the past, his work on accelerating machine learning has played a role in helping Bing compete effectively with Google and become a leader in local search by improving analytics and online algorithms. Prior to Pitney Bowes, Ajay has worked with Tech giants such as Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Quark, Accenture, Microsoft, and Yahoo. He has earned 25 US patents for Sun Microsystems? Application Server. During his stint with Yahoo, his work with Yahoo Homepages included leading cross geographic teams and executing major editorial process overhauls in a algorithmically highly personalized property space.

Rohan Verma is the Executive Director and CTO of MapmyIndia. He leads Product, Technology and Marketing efforts at MapmyIndia. Back in 2004, at the age of 19, Rohan created India’s very first interactive mapping portal, MapmyIndia.com, leveraging the unparalleled digital map data repository of India built by his parents since the early 90s. Since then, Rohan has been leading MapmyIndia in bringing best¬ in ¬class cutting ¬edge technologies to the Indian geospatial industry, including the first All India GPS Navigation system, Advanced Maps that can power safer and self-driving cars, powerful GPS ¬based IoT devices, valuable location-¬enabled Enterprise SaaS and delightful and useful location ¬based Consumer Apps, and map APIs and location engines that can empower the whole ecosystem of Smart City administrators, government agencies, enterprises, app developers and consumers. Rohan is wholeheartedly committed to MapmyIndia’s mission to make the world better through maps and location technologies. A geospatial technology thought leader and innovator, Rohan is regularly invited to speak at various industry forums and media events, and has been profiled by CNBC as a 'Young Turk' and India Today as one of 30 'Indians of Tomorrow' . He is a member of the FICCI committee on Geospatial Technologies, and advises senior business and government leaders as well as the public at large on how to benefit from digital maps and location technologies. While in the US, Rohan has worked at Intel, McKinsey and Microsoft. Rohan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, where he received the President's Award for Academic Excellence. He is an MBA (with Distinction) from London Business School, where he was also a Dean's List Awardee. Besides academics, Rohan has been active in extracurricular activities. At London Business School he was co-¬president of the India Club and the Cricket Club, and at Stanford University he was a member of the Hindi Film Dance team. Besides work, Rohan enjoys travel, dance and sports. Rohan is married to Namrata and the couple has recently been blessed with a baby boy. He lives with his family and two dogs in New Delhi.

Ammini Chaitanya Kumar is an MBA Export Management (IMT) and Dual degree graduate from BITS-Pilani. He has sound domain knowledge of electronics supply chain and experience with ICT companies like ARKA-IMS, Qualcomm and consulting experience with Globaldata, MarketsandMarkets. He has authored and overseen more than 1,000 market research studies during his work experience across companies and provided his strategic consulting expertise to CTOs and VPs of many Fortune 500 companies such as Samsung, Atmel, Microsemi and Misumi Corp, Government organisations and Trade bodies.