Balisage 2016 Participant Biographies

Jason Aiken
Jason Aiken manages Quark Enterprise Solutions, a platform for content automation that streamlines the entire lifecycle of high-value content -- from creation to delivery. He coordinates with strategic partners and product engineering to help clients across financial services, manufacturing, life sciences and government reinvent and modernize their content strategies. With two decades of experience in technical publishing and content management, including products and services for aerospace and biomedical devices, Jason consistently advocates for technical solutions which improve user experience and simplify business process. Jason has a MS in IT System Design & Programming from Capella University.

Syd Bauman
Syd Bauman began working at the Women Writers Project in 1990. Although his title would have you believe that he is a computer programmer, Syd is fond of pointing out that he doesn't write that much actual code, which is perhaps the genesis of this paper. (A more serious computer scientist or software engineer might not have such trouble with soft hyphens.) In any case, Syd usually writes in XSLT, and his programs are always copylefted.

Syd became a hard-core computer user in 1982, and a devotee of descriptive markup two years later. He began using SGML and the TEI when he came to the Women Writers Project. From 2001 to 2007 Syd served as North American editor of the TEI, and is currently on the TEI Technical Council.

Jeffrey Beck
Jeff Beck is a Technical information Specialist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine. He has been involved in the PubMed Central project since it began in 2000. He has been working in print and then electronic journal publishing since the early 1990s. Currently he is co-chair of the NISO Z39.96 JATS Standing Committee and is a BELS-certified Editor in the Life Sciences.

Tammy Bilitzky
Tammy Bilitzky, Chief Information Officer of Data Conversion Laboratory is responsible for managing DCL's technology department. Tammy has extensive experience in leveraging technology to deliver client value, supporting business process transformation and managing complex, large-scale programs onshore and offshore. Tammy holds a BS in Computer Science and Business Administration from Northeastern Illinois University. She is a Project Management Professional, Six Sigma Green Belt, and Certified ScrumMaster.

Todd Carpenter
Todd Carpenter is Executive Director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), a US-based non-profit industry trade association that fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, discovery, and effective interchange of information in publishing and media. Throughout his career, Todd has served in a variety of roles with organizations that connected the publisher, library and software communities. Prior to joining NISO, Todd had been Director of Business Development with BioOne. He has held management positions at The Johns Hopkins University Press, the Energy Intelligence Group, and the Haworth Press. He is a graduate of Syracuse University and holds a masters in business from the Johns Hopkins Univeristy. Todd is also editor of the recently published book, The Critical Component: Standards in Information Distribution published by the American Library Association.

Paul Caton
Paul Caton has worked in digital humanities since for two decades. Beginning as Electronic Publications Editor for the Women Writers Project he went on to hold posts with the TEXTE Project at the National University of Ireland, Galway and with the INKE Project at the University of Victoria in British Columbia before going to the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London in 2010. Now a Research Analyst in the recently-formed King's Digital Laboratory he works on multiple projects in both analytical and development roles. His research interests include the representation of text by formal models and by markup languages; ontologies of personal relations; and models of transcription.

Ashley M. Clark
Ashley M. Clark serves as the XML Applications Developer for the Northeastern University Libraries' Digital Scholarship Group (DSG). She works on TAPAS and the Women Writers Project, specializing in XML databases, XQuery, and XSLT.

Timothy W. Cole
Tim Cole is the Math Librarian and Professor of LIS at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a also a co-chair of the W3C's Web Annotation working group. His research interests include metadata, linked open data, the annotation of digital resources, and digital library interoperability.

Sarah Connell
Sarah Connell is the Project Manager for the Women Writers Project and a member of the Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern University. Her current research explores applications of literary theory through text encoding, working with early modern histories of Great Britain and Ireland.

Autumn Cuellar
Autumn Cuellar has had a long and happy history with XML. Her first degree is in Biomedical Engineering, which led to a role as a researcher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. There Autumn co-authored a metadata specification, explored the use of ontologies for advancing biological research, and developed CellML, an XML language for describing biological models. Since leaving the academic world, Autumn has been delighted to share her enthusiasm for XML in technical and enterprise applications. Previously at Design Science, her roles included MathML evangelism and working with standards bodies to provide guidance for inclusion of MathML in such standards as DITA and PDF/UA. Now at Quark Software, Autumn provides her XML expertise to organizations seeking to hide the XML for a better non-technical user experience.

David Dubin
David Dubin is a research associate professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include the foundations of information representation and description and issues of expression and encoding in documents and digital information resources.

Damon Feldman
Damon Feldman is a passionate "Mark-Logician," having been with the company for over 7 years as it has evolved into the company it is today. He has worked on or led some of the largest MarkLogic projects in terms of both volume of data and complexity of implementation, for customers ranging from the US Intelligence Community to HealthCare.gov to private insurance companies.

James Fuller
James Fuller works in engineering at MarkLogic on the world's leading enterprise NoSQL database. James is a passionate XML stack enthusiast writing articles and giving presentations on all things XML in addition to contributing to the W3C XML Processing Working Group.

Amanda Galtman
Amanda Galtman develops XML markup designs, quality-checking tools, and other XML-based tools for MathWorks software documentation. She integrated XQuery and RESTXQ into the Documentation Department's tool chain. She was previously a technical writer at MathWorks.

Tony Graham
Tony Graham is a Senior Architect with Antenna House, where he works on their XSL-FO and CSS formatter, cloud-based authoring solution, and related products. He also provides XSL-FO and XSLT consulting and training services on behalf of Antenna House.

Tony has been working with markup since 1991, with XML since 1996, and with XSLT/XSL-FO since 1998. He is Chair of the Print and Page Layout Community Group at the W3C and previously an invited expert on the W3C XML Print and Page Layout Working Group (XPPL) defining the XSL-FO specification, as well as an acknowledged expert in XSLT. Tony is the developer of the "stf" Schematron testing framework and also Antenna House's "focheck" XSL-FO validation tool, a committer to both the XSpec and Juxy XSLT testing frameworks, the author of Unicode: A Primer, and a qualified trainer.

Tony's career in XML and SGML spans Japan, USA, UK, and Ireland. Before joining Antenna House, he had previously been an independent consultant, a Staff Engineer with Sun Microsystems, a Senior Consultant with Mulberry Technologies, and a Document Analyst with Uniscope. He has worked with data in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and with academic, automotive, publishing, software, and telecommunications applications. He has also spoken about XML, XSLT, XSL-FO, EPUB, and related technologies to clients and conferences in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia.

Mark Gross
Mark Gross, CEO & founder of Data Conversion Laboratory, is a recognized authority and speaker on XML implementation and document conversion. Prior to founding DCL in 1981, he was with the consulting practice of Arthur Young & Co. Mark has a BS in Engineering from Columbia University and an MBA from New York University, and has taught at the New York University Graduate School of Business, the New School, and Pace University.

Betty Harvey
As President of Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. since 1995, Ms. Harvey has led many federal government and commercial enterprises in planning and executing their migration to the use of structured information for their critical functions. She has helped develop strategic XML solutions for her clients. Ms. Harvey has been instrumental in developing industry XML standards. She is the co-author of "Professional ebXML Foundations" published by Wrox. Ms. Harvey founded the Washington, DC Area XML Users Group. Ms. Harvey is a member of "The XML Guild" and was a coauthor of the book "Advanced XML Applications From the Experts at The XML Guild" published by Thomson.

Gerrit Imsieke
Gerrit Imsieke is managing director of le-tex publishing services.

Jacob Jett
Jacob Jett is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Library & Information Science at the Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include the conceptual foundations of information access, organization, and retrieval, web and data semantics, knowledge representation, data modeling, ontology development and conceptual modeling.

Michael Kay
Michael Kay has been developing the Saxon product since 1998, initially as a spare-time activity at ICL and then Software AG, but since 2004 within the Saxonica company which he founded. He holds a Ph.D from the University of Cambridge where he studied databases under the late Maurice Wilkes, and spent 24 years with ICL, mainly working on the development of database software. He is the editor of the W3C XSLT specification.

Dianne Kennedy
Dianne Kennedy is an independent consultant and serves as the XML Evangelist Emeritus for Idealliance, an international association providing leadership in publishing and information technologies. Ms. Kennedy facilitates the development of XML specifications and best practices on behalf of Idealliance to support platform agnostic, cross-media publishing. She currently serves as technical editor for the Idealliance PRISM 3.0 Specifications, PRISM Source Vocabulary Specifications, MailXML Specification and the Print Quality eXchange Message Specification. Kennedy serves on the Board of Directors for the College of Graphic Communications at Illinois State University.

Martin Kraetke
Martin Kraetke works as Lead Content Engineer at le-tex. He introduced XProc at le-tex which is acts since that time as basis for the Open Source conversion and checking framework transpect.

Robin La Fontaine
Robin La Fontaine is the founder and CEO of DeltaXML. He holds an Engineering Science degree from Oxford University and an MSc in Computer Science. His background includes computer aided design software and he has been addressing the challenges and opportunities associated with information change for many years.

Deborah A. Lapeyre
Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre is a Senior Consultant for Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in helping their clients toward better publishing through XML, XSLT, and Schematron solutions. She works with Tommie Usdin as architects and Secretariat for JATS (ANSI NISO Z39.96-2015 Journal Article Tag Suite) and BITS (Book Interchange Tag Suite). She teaches hands-on XML, XSLT, DTD and schema construction, and Schematron courses as well as numerous technical and business-level introductions to XML and JATS. Debbie has been working with XML and XSLT since their inception and with SGML since 1984 (before SGML was finalized as an ISO standard). In a previous life, she wrote code for systems that put ink on paper and used, taught, and documented a proprietary generic markup system named "SAMANTHA". Hobbies, besides Balisage, include pumpkin carving parties.

Evan Lenz
Evan Lenz has been a specialist in XML technologies since 1999, having served on the W3C XSL Working Group, written XML-related books and articles, and spoken at numerous conferences. He is also a member of the XML Guild, a consortium of top-notch independent XML consultants. As principal of Lenz Consulting Group, he serves clients with their XSLT, XQuery, and MarkLogic development and/or training needs.

Debbie Lockett
Debbie Lockett joined the Saxonica development team in 2014 following post-doctoral research in Pure Mathematics at the University of Leeds. Her Ph.D and further research generally involved symmetries of infinite relational structures. Since moving into the "real" world of software development at Saxonica, Debbie has worked on performance benchmarking, developing the tools for creating Saxonica's product documentation, and the implementation of XQuery 3.1 features, as well as the development of Saxon-JS.

Joshua Lubell
Joshua Lubell is a computer scientist in the NIST Engineering Laboratory's Systems Integration Division. His interests include model-based engineering, cybersecurity, cyber-physical systems, long-term preservation of digital data, information modeling, and XML and other markup technologies. He received the United States Department of Commerce Silver Medal for his leadership in developing ISO 10303-203, a standard for representation and exchange of computer-aided designs. He is also a Balisage local, residing in suburban Maryland midway between North Bethesda and NIST's Gaithersburg campus.

John Lumley
A Cambridge engineer by background, John Lumley created the AI group at Cambridge Consultants in the early 1980s and then joined HPLabs Bristol as one of its founding members. He worked there for 25 years, managing and contributing in a variety of software/systems fields, latterly specialising in XSLT-based document engineering, in which he subsequently gained a PhD in early retirement. He is currently helping develop the Saxon XSLT processor for Saxonica and consulting on various aspects of using XSLT.

James D. Mason
James D. Mason, originally trained as a mediaevalist and linguist, has been a writer, systems developer, and manufacturing engineer at U.S. Department of Energy facilities in Oak Ridge since the late 1970s. In 1981, he joined the ISO's work on standards for document management and interchange. He chaired ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34, which is responsible for SGML, DSSSL, Topic Maps, and related standards, for more than 20 years. Dr. Mason has been a frequent writer and speaker on standards and their applications. For his work on SGML, Dr. Mason has received the Gutenberg Award from Printing Industries of America and the Tekkie Award from GCA. He is currently working on information systems to support manufacturing and documentation at DOE's Y-12 National Security Complex (Y-12) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Gregory Murray
Greg Murray has worked in web development and XML processing for 16 years, mainly in academic libraries. He is currently a project manager (who still codes as much as possible) helping develop web applications built with XQuery and MarkLogic Server for search and display of digitized library materials.

Ari Nordström
Ari Nordström is a freelance markup geek, based in Göteborg, Sweden, but offering his services across a number of borders. He has provided angled brackets and such to a number of organisations and companies over the years, with LexisNexis UK being the latest. His favourite XML specification remains XLink, and so quite a few of his frequent talks and presentations on XML include various aspects of linking.

Ari is the proud owner and head projectionist of Western Sweden's last functioning 35/70mm cinema, situated in his garage, which should explain why he once wrote a paper on automating commercial cinemas using XML. He now realises it's too late, however.

Wendell Piez
Wendell Piez is an independent consultant specializing in XML and XSLT, based in Rockville MD.

Uche Ogbuji
Uche Ogbuji is a pioneer in the integration of Web architecture with traditional enterprise data technology. An Electrical/Computer Engineer by education, Uche has written over 300 articles on XML, RDF, Web services and related topics, connecting open source and commercial software development. His present project is publishing to the Web "dark" data from the comprehensive riches of library catalogs and other metadata. Ogbuji is also an award-winning poet, and first Balisage Poet Laureate (2015).

Laura Randall
Laura Randall is a Technical information Specialist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine. She has been involved with markup languages since late last century and currently spends her time on the PubMed Central project. Her most notable achievement of late is receiving the designation "Bringer of Food" from her three rescued black cats, Vader, Tater, and Spud.

Allen H. Renear
Allen Renear is the dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include information organization and access, particularly the development of formal ontologies for cultural and scientific objects and the application of those ontologies in information system design, scholarly publishing, and data curation in the sciences and humanities.

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen is the founder of Black Mesa Technologies LLC, a consultancy specializing in the use of descriptive markup to help memory institutions preserve cultural heritage information for the long haul. He has served as co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification, the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, and the XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 specification. He holds a doctorate in comparative literature.

Richard Thorne
Richard Thorne, Ph.D. is a software consultant working with Data Conversion Laboratory in the field of Java and Machine Learning. Richard has in the past worked for Answers.com and has consulted for a number of internet start-ups.

B. Tommie Usdin
B. Tommie Usdin is President of Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consultancy specializing in XML and SGML. Ms. Usdin has been working with SGML since 1985 and has been a supporter of XML since 1996. She chairs the Balisage conference. Ms. Usdin has developed DTDs, Schemas, and XML/SGML application frameworks for applications in government and industry. Projects include reference materials in medicine, science, engineering, and law; semiconductor documentation; historical and archival materials. Distribution formats have included print books, magazines, and journals, and both web- and media-based electronic publications. She is co-chair of the NISO Z39-96, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite Working Group and a member of the NISO Board of Directors. You can read more about her at http://www.mulberrytech.com/people/usdin/index.html

Miguel Vieira
Miguel Vieira is Kiln project manager and one of the developers. He has worked in the digital humanities area as a developer/software engineer for more than ten years. He is currently a software engineer/technical coordinator at the recently-formed King's Digital Laboratory, where he is reponsible for the research projects technical architecture, and managing the development team. His research interests include analysing and modelling humanities and unstructured data, natural language processing, machine learning, data visualisation, and linked data.

Norman Walsh
Norman Walsh is a Lead Engineer at MarkLogic Corporation where he helps to develop APIs and tools for the world's leading enterprise NoSQL database. Norm is also an active participant in a number of standards efforts worldwide: he is chair of the XML Processing Model Working Group at the W3C where he is also co-chair of the XML Core Working Group. At OASIS, he is chair of the DocBook Technical Committee.