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DSSlab�s Advisory Board:

Dr. David Clemens

Dr. David Clemens earned his PhD in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1991, developing a recognition system for 3D objects in 2D images using region-based feature grouping. He is currently the Chief Architect for workforce management systems at Ascent Technology in Cambridge, a spin-off from the AI Lab. There, he designs and develops web-based decision-support applications mixing artificial intelligence, optimization, and general problem-solving techniques with good old communication skills, nourished at Swarthmore College where he earned his BS in 1982. Before Ascent, Dr. Clemens worked at Millennium Pharmaceuticals writing scientific applications to help chemists analyze protein sequences and explore potential drug compound structures. Other employers include the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and TRW.


David Grossman Ph.D.

David is currently on the faculty at the Illinois Institute of Technology where he runs their next generation search lab. In 2003, he was the general chair for the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management and has over seventy publications on next generation search technology as well as a graduate level textbook on Information Retrieval. David worked for the government for 12 years where his last job was as project manager for the enterprise data warehouse and he led efforts to build an executive information system that is still in place. After doing significant research, David was awarded the 1997 CIA Scientist of the Year.

David has significant knowledge of OLAP technology and was a pioneer in this field. He has a depth of experience in the natural integration of structured and unstructured data. He has written patents on �intranet mediation� which describes the many fundamentally different high-level types (structured, semi-structured, text, video, image, sound, etc.) and "Detection of Misuse of Authorized Access in an Information Retrieval System". David received his Ph.D. from George Mason in 1995 - Ph.D. Information Technology Thesis: Integrating Structured Data and Text: A Relational Approach. His consulting work focuses on Data Warehousing and Data Mining, and Database systems.


David McGoveran

Mr. McGoveran has served as President of Alternative Technologies (Felton and Boulder Creek, CA) since 1976 and is an internationally known analyst, and management and technology consultant. He has founded two consulting companies and three not-for-profit organizations, and served as a principal in each of them. He has become well-known for his thought leadership as an analyst, consultant, and educator regarding both the business and technology of e-Business and integration (BPMS, adapter frameworks, and B2Bi), helping to set key marketing and technology strategies for firms such as IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sybase.

He co-founded DataBase Associates International in 1989. Mr. McGoveran has authored or co-authored a number of technical books, including (with Chris Date) A Guide to SYBASE and SQL Server. He has been Senior Technical Editor of the Business Integration Journal (formerly The eAI Journal) since its inception, and Founder, Chairman of the non-profit Enterprise Integration Council (EIC).

He continues to consult for end-users and vendors regarding application architecture, integration, migration, database design, development methodology, design audits, performance tuning, database evaluation/selection, and deployment. He has consulted for virtually every major database vendor. He designed and developed the first commercial CIM system using a relational DBMS. The client/server system also used custom knowledge-based technology and was arguably the world's first business process management system. He has in-depth experience with a wide range of applications (manufacturing, bond trading and portfolio management, health insurance, telecommunications, and Web-businesses). He was the main architect of one of the first uses of object-oriented programming with RDBMSs and has over thirty-five years experience in mission critical applications and over thirty years experience consulting on RDBMS and distributed application problems.


John O�Connor
John spent decades at the World Bank and IMF, where he designed and managed systems for internal decision-making and external reports, such as the Bank�s operational guidelines for financial preferences and reporting of results in the World Bank Atlas, etc. As Senior Advisor in the Bank�s Environment Department he devised a quantitive portfolio management system for monitoring the �triple bottom line� or TBL, at the national level, and was the manager and primary author of Monitoring Environmental Progress, that was widely quoted at the time mainly for these estimates of national wealth.

John left the Bank in 1995 to explore two areas beyond the grasp of such organizations. First, working for centralizing authorities limits exposure to open, participatory decision-making. Second, official bodies filter information differently than businesses do and hence the latter require clear links to GAAP to be fully engaged in sustainability.

As Chief of the Bank's Comparative Analysis & Data Division (1986-93) he was responsible for World Development Indicators, etc., and played a key role in deciding countries� eligibility for financial preferences and in other operational mechanisms for monitoring and evaluating development

In 1985, he was External Debt Advisor to the Central Bank of Bolivia. For the previous 21 years he was at the International Monetary Fund, ending as Chief, International Banking and External Debt Division. He went on over 60 missions for the World Bank/IMF, to over 30 countries; visited another dozen; lived in France (1949-52), Spain (1958-60) and Bolivia (1985). He speaks English and Spanish and some French; he has Irish and US citizenship.


Mike Sutherland Ph.D.

Mike�s Ph. D. is from Harvard University. He focused on multidimensional empirical Bayes estimation techniques for multi-state processes. Mike spent the late 60's and early 70's as a graduate student in the Department of Statistics. He then moved from an Instructorship at Harvard to the just begun Hampshire College in 1972 and spent 10 years teaching and consulting there and in the associated 5 College system. In the early 1980's Mike was offered the opportunity to staff and direct the University of Massachusetts' new Statistical Consulting Center and has been the Director of the Center for over 20 years.

During the 80s, being disparaged by available statistical tools Mike designed a sophisticated extensible statistical package, written in APL on the then new micro computers, which allowed him to provide unique high level solutions. In the 1990's Mike became deeply involved in the Six Sigma deployment of project based statistical thinking in industry and business. Presently Mike is an internationally recognized master black belt teacher in Six Sigma. His unusual consulting position in both academe and industry has allowed him to work both on a wide variety of thorny analytical problems (e.g., creating multidimensional performance measures for litigation results analysis for very large insurers; designing clever experiments for incremental process optimization in manufacturing; modeling and controlling complex flows in molten glass furnaces) and to think, write about and bring to his graduate students, some of the fundamental, perhaps deeper or more abstract, issues underlying the practical problems that affect him or his clients every day.