Johnny Monsarrat and The Hard Data Factory Team

Hard Data Factory is run by the team that built Turbine Inc., now the largest computer games company in New England.

Johnny Monsarrat, CEO

Johnny was previously Founder, CEO, and Chairman of Turbine Entertainment Software, which now employs 250 people. Then, forming his own strategic consultancy, his clients included top-level executives of Citigroup and General Electric, and he played stopgap VP roles for numerous firms over a decade. He has an MIT BS and MBA, and also attended Harvard and Brown University. He is an award-winning public speaker and has lectured on entrepreneurship at MIT, Brown University, and Wellesley. Johnny has appeared in the Boston Globe, CNN, USA Today, Mass High Tech, and the Wall Street Journal.

Rickland Powell, EVP

Rickland has over 20 yrs experience in entrepreneurship, and has been an executive at Internet companies since 1995. As Director of Business Development and Sales at Sandstorm Enterprises, a computer network security firm, he grew company sales from a small concern to a multi-million dollar enterprise, and is currently a member of their Board of Directors. As EVP of Turbine Entertainment Software, he managed development, investor relations as well as sought and negotiated publishing opportunities. Prior to joining Turbine, he founded, grew and sold two other companies. Rickland is one of Boston's most well-connected technical recruiters, with close ties to the MIT, Harvard, and Brown communities.

Howard Salwen, Board of Directors

Howard Salwen founded Proteon in 1972, a maker of network systems and software, and served as its Chairman until it was acquired in 1999. He has also been Chairman of UltraNet Communications, Chairman of the New England chapter of IEEE Communications Society, and a board member of Marathon Technologies and Turbine, Inc. He is on the board of the Massachusetts Network Communication Council and serves on the Oversight Committees of The Museum of Science and the Bank of America Celebrity Series. He has a BS and MS from MIT.

Michael Ashley Schulman, CFA. Advisory Board

Michael is a Director/Senior Portfolio Manager at Hollencrest, where he manages a fixed income arbitrage hedge fund. He has 11 years of professional investment experience, a CFA designation, an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a BA in Economics from UC Berkeley. Michael has broad experience in top-down and bottom-up analysis from both the fundamental and quantitative perspective across a wide variety of financial instruments. He has consulted for Accenture, the World Federation of Exchanges, the Colombian Financial Exchange, as well as several high-tech firms, and has presented at forums in Malaysia, Argentina and Spain. Michael previously held the positions of Portfolio Manager at Pacific Income Advisors, Director of Strategy at Open Ratings, Strategy Manager at Accenture, and most recently, Vice President, CDO/Quantitative Analysis Specialist at Deutsche Bank. Within the community, Michael is serving as President elect of the CFA Society of Orange County and for the last four years has been an Event Committee member for the National Kidney Foundation of Southern California.

Prof. Eugene Charniak, Advisory Board

Dr. Charniak is University Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. He received an A.B. degree in Physics from University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. in Computer Science. He has published four books, including the definitive textbook for college courses in natural language software. He is a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence and was previously a Councilor of the organization. His research has always been in the area of language understanding or technologies which relate to it, such as knowledge representation, reasoning under uncertainty, and learning. Over the last few years he has been interested in statistical techniques for language understanding. Formerly he was Chairman of the Brown University Department of Computer Science.

Prof. Rob Miller, Advisory Board

Rob Miller is an associate professor in the MIT EECS department and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (2002). His doctoral research concerned intelligent interfaces and pattern languages for automated text editing, particularly of structured and semi-structured text. He received B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in EECS from MIT (1995). His research interests span human-computer interaction, user interfaces, software engineering, and artificial intelligence. His current research concerns usable programming systems and usable security.

Ian Eslick, Advisory Board

Ian Eslick is a doctoral candidate at the MIT Media Lab, working on the construction of highly interactive, intelligent computer interfaces and their ability to augment human problem solving and communications skills. He is co-advised by Prof. Deb Roy and Prof. Frank Moss, Director of the MIT Media Lab.