Paul Havala is vice president of planning at Fujitsu Network Communications, where he leads strategy and planning for Fujitsu’s optical, wireless, and software solutions. Paul is an experienced Product Line Management leader with a passion for solving business problems and developing other leaders. Paul has over 28 years of experience in the telecom industry. Prior to Fujitsu, he served in technical marketing, business development, product line management, and senior technical roles at Ericsson, Nokia, and White Rock Networks. Paul holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University.

Brian Kursar leads Toyota Connected Global Big Data Strategy as Vice President and Chief Data Scientist for the Toyota Connected Data Services group.

Brian started at Toyota Motors North America in 2001 as a Quality Assurance Engineer and Automotive Systems Architect spending 7 years working in Vehicle Supply Chain Systems. In 2008 he worked as Principal Architect for the Product Quality Analytics Application spearheading the first NoSQL based Analytics solution deployed at Toyota. From there he served as Chief Architect on the Toyota Customer 360 Insights platform where he championed Data Science and Big Data Technology adoption in the Enterprise. His contributions brought together for the first time Digital, CRM, Survey, Social, and Transactional Customer data under one unified platform. This platform predictive models at scale to identify customers at risk of churn and prospective In-Market Consumers to enable micro-segmentation for digital advertising campaigns. During his time at Toyota, Brian contributed 5 pending patents around Mobile Consumer Profiling and Social Media Text Classification.

Brian left Toyota in 2015 to serve as Vice President and Chief Architect at Warner Bros. for their Big Data Direct to Consumer Activation and Analytics platform. After 3 years, and forming of the new company, Toyota Connected, Brian decided to return to Toyota to continue driving innovation in Big Data and Mobility.

Girish Nazhiyath
Solutions Architect Director, Retail Solutions,
NEC Corporation of America

Girish Nazhiyath is a senior professional with over 20 years of experience in creating, evangelizing, selling and delivering innovative technology value solutions into vertical markets with specialization in the retail industry. Experienced in envisioning and selling the vision and value of emerging technology advances that enable business innovation to C-level audiences. Extensive experience in global cross-team creation and collaboration between customer organizations, internal teams and partner ecosystems to enable strategic partnerships, planning and execution. Before joining NEC in 2012, Girish worked at Microsoft and IBM as a key IT professional. His comments are often featured in major publications such as Forbes.

Girish holds a Bachelor of Technology in Electronics Engineering from the National Institutes of Technology (“NIT”) in India.

Dr. Hiroki Takeuchi
Associate Professor, Tower Center for Political Studies, SMU
Director, Sun & Star Japan and East Asia Program

Dr. Takeuchi’s research and teaching interests include Chinese and Japanese politics, comparative political economy of authoritarian regimes, and international relations of East Asian, as well as applying game theory to political science. He has published articles in numerous professional journals and is the author of Rural Tax Reforms in Contemporary China: Revenue, Resistance, and Authoritarian Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Dr. Takeuchi received his Ph.D. in political science from UCLA, his M.A. in Asian studies from University of California at Berkeley, and his B.A. in economics from Keio University in Japan.