Livia Barton -- World bank, Lead of Online Marketing

Livia has been leading the online marketing efforts for the World Bank's web program for the prior two years. Most recently, she worked on the development and launch of the World Bank Public Data Google search initiative. Previously with Boston advertising agency Hill Holliday, she brings a wide range of digital marketing experience to the Bank.


Eva Busza -- Executive Office of the Secretary General of the United Nations, Principal Officer in the Strategic Planning Unit

Eva Busza is currently the Principal Officer in the Strategic Planning Unit of the Executive Office of the Secretary General of the United Nations. Previously she served as the Team Leader for Asia and the Pacific and Policy Advisor and Strategic Planner in UNDP’s Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery. She joined the UN after three years as the Senior Advisor for the National Democratic Institute’s Global Civil-Military Programs. Dr. Busza holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia. In addition to teaching in the Department of Government at the College of William and Mary, she has been a research fellow at several universities and institutes including: the George Washington University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Brookings Institution, and the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University.

Mark Cardwell -- UNDP, Chief, Online & Multimedia

Mark oversees web strategy, content development and operations for the $5 billion organization. He was previously the managing editor for digital media at The Denver Post where he more than doubled the online audience, and garnered numerous accolades, including recognition by the Bivings Report as one of the country's top 5 newspaper sites. Previously, he served as the editorial director and the director of product development in the ABC News digital media group.  Before joining ABC, he was executive producer of the digital division of The Associated Press.

Lorant Czaran -- UNOOSA/UN-SPIDER, Head of the Bonn Office. 

He is well known in the UN community for his commitment to making available innovative geospatial solutions in support of the UN work. He has a long UN career, having first joined UNEP/GRID-Arendal in March 1996. He then worked at the UN Headquarters (Cartographic Section) from 2002, later transferring to UNDPKO (Department of Peacekeeping Operations). In 2005 he joined the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) to help produce the first UN digital topographic maps at large scale. He then served as the Map Centre Manager for ReliefWeb/UNOCHA for over two years, before joining UNOOSA in October 2008. Lorant supported UNGIWG and its task group efforts since 2002, and is also currently a CEOS/WGISS vice-chair, co-lead for various GEO Tasks, and the liaison contact from UNGIWG to ISO/TC211 and OGC, as well as a focal point for the UN - Google (Earth&Maps) partnership.

Dozie Ezigbalike -- UNECA Chief of Geoinformation Systems Section

As Chief of Geoinformation Systems Section at the UNECA, Dozie oversees the advisory support to African member States in the field of geoinformation development. Emphasis has been on developing the policy component of National Spatial Data Infrastructures. Dozie's section also develops and applications both as examples for member states and as resources to improve the availability and use of geoinformation in national and regional development decisions. Before ECA, Dozie had been lecturing at the universities of Botswana (2years), Melbourne Australia (8 years) and Zimbabwe (2 years). He also spent six months as a visiting scholar to Wits University when he was involved in the SAFARI 2000 project. Education: PhD from University of New Brunswick on Land Information Management (software and management considerations); MSc from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria Nigeria; BSc from University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus. While at ECA, Dozie at one time was seconded to an institutional strengthening programme for 18 months as focal point for Knowledge Management pillar of the programme.

Gabriel Francis -- Google Sales Technical Operations, Google Analyitics

Gabe spent the first three years at Google developing web application based efficiency workflow tools for the Online Sales and Operations teams. A seasoned traveler, he most recently spent the past 6 months working from Buenos Aires Argentina helping our local sales teams pitch and sell the Google Analytics product to the Latin America market. He currently works out of the New York office on the Sales Technical Operations team supporting the Google Analytics product.

France Lamy -- Google.org Program Manager

France  is an agricultural engineering by training and earns a Ph.D. from Oregon State University in GIS-based decision making approaches. Her professional interests lie in multidisciplinary projects that help stakeholders develop capacities and tools to generate, access, organize, and analyze a wide range of information and alternative strategies leading to well-informed, systematic and consistent decision-making. At Google she is a member of the Crisis Response team which goal is to develop, maintain, and optimize rapid-deployment protocol to enhance emergency preparedness and response. To avoid duplication of efforts, leverage existing resources, and develop effective synergies, her team is actively engaged with the international disaster and humanitarian community. Through the course of her career, she professionally contributed to projects in the Americas; the Caribbean; Europe and Africa with the United Nations; International Research Centers; NGOs; and the private sector. 

Mark McCarthy -- OCHA ReliefWeb Project Manager

Mark has been working to provide effective information management to the humanitarian community for over 5 years.  He started in September 2004 with the Humanitarian Information Center for Darfur (HIC), first as the Data Coordinator and then as Manager in 2006.  In late August 2005 he was deployed on mission to Niger to launch the HIC in response to the food crisis.  He was deployed to Lebanon in 2006 as the Manager of the HIC there.  After the closure of the HIC in Lebanon, Mark moved to Geneva to become Project Manager for ReliefWeb, the essential resource for the humanitarian community.


Matt Mohebbi  -- Tech Lead, Flu Trends

Matt Mohebbi has been a software engineer at Google since 2004, working on Search Quality and Flu Trends. He graduated from the University of Washington in 2004 with a Bachelors in Computer Engineering.


Craig Nevill-Manning -- Google Director of NY Engineering Office

Dr. Craig Nevill-Manning is the founder of Google Engineering New York, Google’s second-largest development center. In his role as Engineering Director, he has overseen the development of products including Google Local (now Maps) and Froogle (now Product Search,) as well as features of web search such as Google Squared, Question Answering and Web Definitions. Prior to joining Google in 2000, he was an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University, and a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Biochemistry Department at Stanford University. He is the author of 44 peer-reviewed academic publications, and was awarded a Career Grant by the National Science Foundation for work combining information retrieval and computational biology. A native of New Zealand, he earned a BSc in Computer Science from Canterbury University and a PhD in Computer Science from Waikato University.


Hillel Maoz -- Google Software Engineer, Google Visualization Project

Hillel Maoz has joined Google in 2007 and was one of the founders of the Google Visualization Project. In addition, he has worked on providing charts in Google Spreadsheets. Prior to joining Google, Hillel completed his Masters  degree in the Weizmann institute Israel, in the field of distributed networks. In his free time Hillel likes exploring places around the world such as: India, Nepal, Laos, Thailand, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Turkey and more...

Cail Pearce -- Google Sales Technical Operations, Google Analyitics

Cail has worked on numerous improvements to Google help center search as well as predictive online help systems, for which he has two patents pending. He currently works on Google's Sales Technical Operations team supporting the Google Analytics product.


Francesco Pisano -- UNITAR/UNOSAT Manager

Francesco Pisano is an expert in international affairs and geopolitics with a professional background in humanitarian affairs and risk management. He studied international relations with a specialisation in conflict resolution, and law with a specialisation in international and constitutional law. He joined the United Nations in 1993 where he took positions of increasing responsibility with the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs, its Division for Disaster Mitigation, then with OCHA as Senior Officer. He now serves at the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) where he is the Manager of UNOSAT (Operational Satellite Applications Programme). Before joining the UN his previous professional positions included business development with a multinational company, and international development cooperation with Italy’s Foreign Office.


Jonathan Rochelle -- Google Group Product Manager

Jonathan Rochelle is a Group Product Manager in the Google Apps area of Google's NYC office, primarily responsible for Google Docs and Google Sites.  Jonathan has more than 20 years of experience in software development and product management. Prior to joining Google in 2005, Jonathan co-founded, built, and sold two profitable technology companies - ITK Solutions, a technology focused consulting firm, and 2Web Technologies, a software product company which developed the XL2Web product (which allowed complex spreadsheet models to be immediately converted to interactive web applications). 2Web Technologies was acquired by Google as the technology behind Google spreadsheets, which launched in 2006 as the first component of what became Google Docs. Before founding his companies, Jonathan spent 16 years as a software engineer and Applications Development manager, primarily at JP Morgan & Co., working across a broad set of financial service businesses. He's a strong advocate of web-based software and is always enthusiastic to help businesses and other organizations gain extreme value from web apps and help developers bring interesting technology products to market. He holds a degree in computer science and Business Administration from the State University of New York at Albany.


Lior Ron -- Google Group Product Manager

Lior Ron, Senior Product Manager, is currently the lead for Google’s global user generated content and Geo Web efforts including My Maps, Google Map Maker, Geo search and others. He has spent the last 12 years innovating in the geo industry where he was the CTO of the Israeli Intelligence mapping and search efforts, product manager at Yahoo, founder of a geo search startup and in the last 2 years part of the Google geo leadership team. He holds an MBA from Stanford GSB, BSc and MS from the Technion – the Israeli institute for technology. He’s also an amateur space traveler (in the future) and launched Google Sky and other space related efforts while in Google.

Ola Rosling -- Google Product Manager Motion chart and public data search

Ola co-founded the Gapminder Foundation and led the development of Trendalyzer, a software that converts time series statistics into animated, interactive and comprehensible graphics. The aim of his work is to promote a fact-based world view through increased use and understanding of freely accessible public data. In March 2007, Google acquired the Trendalyzer software, where Ola and his team are now scaling up their tools and making them freely available for any individual or organization to use for analyzing and visualizing data.

Rebecca Shapley -- Google Product Manager for Fusion Tables

Rebecca is PM with the Google Fusion Tables team, a product focused on helping data owners visualize, integrate and collaborate around their data with other parties. Rebecca has worked for Google since 2005, focusing on understanding how people use Google's websites and making that experience better.  Previously, she developed multimedia software for hands-on science education at the Lawrence Hall of Science, and surveyed for bat species in the Neotropics. Rebecca received her Masters in Information Management and Human-Computer Interaction from UC Berkeley, and her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in Ecology and Environmental Sciences.

Alfred Spector -- Google VP of Research and Special Initiatives

Alfred joined Google in November of 2007 and is responsible for the research across Google and also a growing collection of special initiatives – typically projects with high strategic value to the company, but somewhat outside the mainstream of current products. Previously, Alfred was Vice President of Strategy and Technology IBM's Software Business, and prior to that, he was Vice President of Services and Software Research across IBM. He was also founder and CEO of Transarc Corporation, a pioneer in distributed transaction processing and wide area file systems, and was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in highly reliable, highly scalable distributed computing. Alfred received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford and his A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM, and the recipient of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society's Tsutomu Kanai Award for work in scalable architectures and distributed systems.

Michael Stanley-Jones -- UNECE Environmental Affairs Officer

Michael Stanley-Jones is an environmental affairs officer with the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) in Geneva. He serves as principal officer to the Kiev Protocol on Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers to the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention). Michael also manages the Aarhus Clearinghouse for Environmental Democracy, a global web portal. boards of Friends of Formerly, Michael taught political science in California and the Czech Republic. He also served as director of California Clear Water Fund, and on the San Francisco Estuary and the Silicon Valley Environmental Partnership.

David Stevens -- UNOOSA Programme Coordinator of the UN-SPIDER Programme

David Stevens is Programme Coordinator of the UN-SPIDER Programme (United Nations Platform for Space-based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response) being implemented by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) and current co-chair of the United Nations Geographic Information Working Group (UNGIWG). Born and brought up in Brazil, he graduated in engineering and environmental planning (M.Sc.) at the University of São Paulo, and is currently carrying out his doctoral research at Salzburg University. He joined the United Nations in 1999 having been assigned to his current position in 2001.

Suha Ülgen - OICT, UN Secretariat, Senior Advisor on Spatial Data Infrastructure .

Suha joined the Office for Information Communication Technology to support UN Geographic Information Working Group’s efforts to move the UN Spatial Data Infrastructure initiative forward. Previously, he was the Coordinator of the UNGIWG Secretariat in Geneva. When he first joined the UN, he assumed the role of Technical Manager for Field Information Services Unit of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Between 1985-95 Suha worked for Los Angeles County where he held various information management posts with an explicit geospatial focus. Later he headed a small socially-responsible international consulting firm focusing on disaster management and public health applications of geoinformatics which eventually lead him to OCHA in 2005. Suha received his graduate degrees at the University of California in Los Angeles where he studied Urban and Regional Development Planning as a Fulbright scholar.