Contributor Bios

Emily Bentz, Cyber and SIGINT Division (CSD) Communications Lead, is a recent graduate of Wesley College with a dual English and Music degree. She is a self-published author, and an avid cyclist and kayaker.

Jason Bihun is a Senior Account Executive concentrating on Novetta’s Entity Analytics product offering and has worked within the applications development, data management and master data management spaces for over 20 years in a variety of roles including sales, pre-sales, services, and account management. Jason has extensive industry expertise in healthcare, insurance, financial services, and retail.

David J. Elkind is a data scientist at Novetta Solutions, working on this effort through Sentinel Data Labs, the focal point of Novetta's social science analytics R&D. Since 2012, he has worked on statistical modeling projects for private and US Government clients, with a focus on automated risk assessment methods to support the national security mission. He holds a BA in international studies from Emory University.

As the Vice President of Defense Intelligence Solutions, Kevin is responsible for big data analytics, cyber solutions, cloud deployments, and software development solutions. Kevin graduated from Miami University with a BS in Management Information Systems.

Matt is a Mechanical engineer by training, digital product manager and analytics expert by profession, passionate innovator and entrepreneur at heart. Matt has a unique ability to translate business needs into valuable technical solutions. Matt’s experience includes global product management, grass roots innovation, big data, full stack development, and cloud architecture. As Director of Cloud Services at Novetta, Matt manages our relationship with Amazon Web Services and works with operational teams on internal research and development (IRAD) projects. Outside of the office, Matt enjoys spending time with his family, playing golf, and spending time exploring outdoors.

Tamas is a long-time open source enthusiast and Xen contributor. Tamas works as Senior Security Researcher at Novetta and he is also in the process of finishing his PhD on the topic of malware analysis and virtualization security at the University of Connecticut.

Dave is a solutions architect for commercial markets. Dave supported research and engineering programs for federal customers in the domains of biometrics, cyber security, and privacy enhancing technologies, and led the development of identity intelligence technologies at Novetta. Dave also blogs about privacy and technology.

Caitlin Newark is a Senior Consultant​ ​in the​ Cyber, SIGINT & Identity Discovery division (CS&ID)​​, providing​ feasibility ​and​ performance testing, strategic consulting, and innovative research into technologies and applications involving traditional biometrics, novel physiological/behavioral/cognitive biometrics, and online identity.

Corey Petty is a Blockchain Analyst at Novetta Solutions, and holds a PhD in Computational Chemical Physics from Texas Tech University which focused on efficiently scaling software across supercomputers. After graduating, he co-founded The Bitcoin Podcast and spent his time studying all aspects of the blockchain community, immersing himself in the technology and the people that build it. Corey also helps produce the BlockChannel Podcast.

Akshitha Ramachandran is a junior at Harvard University pursuing a joint degree in both Computer Science and Statistics. This past summer she interned for Novetta's Machine Learning Center of Excellence, expanding the scope of their entity extraction practices. She was a founding member and Lead Engineer at Harvard Student Agencies - DEV, a start-up focused on developing mobile and web applications for third party clients. She is both a senior developer and board member at ProMazo, a campus organization focused on partnering top students from leading universities with projects at leading companies. Additionally, Akshitha attends Hackathons and has been on the board of Harvard’s Women Engineers Code (WECode) conference.

Jenn is Director of Product Management at Novetta. In this role, she is responsible for defining and implementing product strategy for Novetta Entity Analytics, establishing and maintaining relationships with clients, partners, and analysts, seeking new market opportunities, and providing oversight of overall strategy, technical and marketing aspects of the product. Jennifer joined Novetta after serving as a Senior Product Manager at IBM for InfoSphere MDM. While at IBM, she was responsible for overseeing MDM strategy for Big Data, including unstructured data correlation, for which she was a co-inventor, and entity resolution on Hadoop. With more than 20 years of technical expertise and background in financial services and government, Jennifer is focused on turning that knowledge into easier to implement solutions that solve the highly complex, real-world needs of Big Data customers.

Kirsten is the Director of Talent Acquisition and has over 20 years of technical recruiting experience. After a short while working as a software developer then help desk manager, while studying Human Resources Management at University of Maryland University College, she combined her love for technology and HR by becoming a Technical Recruiter at a start up ecommerce firm in 1999. She then moved to recruiting in Telecom and has been primarily supporting the Information Security field, mostly for the Intelligence Community, since 2008 before joining Novetta in Sept 2016.

Nikolai Sazonov is a Senior Software Developer. Since joining Novetta in 2013, his core research and development efforts have centered on biometric fusion, specifically as required for successful active (continuous) authentication via behavioral and cognitive biometrics. In addition to developing software implementations, Nikolai has authored a white paper that outlines key concepts and trade-offs involved in designing fusion methods for Novetta’s active authentication platform. Nikolai routinely attends major industry events to demonstrate advanced fusion capabilities, and has mentored West Point cadets in a related innovation project. His additional core interests include classification algorithms and pattern recognition.

Matt Teschke is an applied machine learning researcher who has demonstrated experience developing solutions to complex problems for government and commercial customers. As leader of Novetta’s Machine Learning (ML) Center of Excellence, Matt directs ML research in NLP (Natural Language Processing), object detection, face recognition, entity resolution, and supervised learning. He is interested in applying open source and cloud technologies to develop practical and innovative solutions for customer problems. Matt also supports some of our largest Novetta Entity Analytics customers.

Peter is a Senior Solutions Engineer with the Commercial division of Novetta. His focus is on supporting the Novetta Cyber Analytics solution, which provides organizations with network visibility and awareness for the purpose of detecting the presence of advanced attackers and sophisticated malware. Based in McLean, VA, Peter has 12 years of experience in technical solution design, development, and integration. He holds certifications for GIAC Certified Incident Handler and EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker and is actively pursuing CISSP. Learn more about Peter’s background here.

Debbie Waung is an Identity Intelligence Director​, ​specializing in providing innovative, mission-critical technology products and solutions in identity management, large-scale data analytics and entity resolution, cybersecurity, cloud computing, and custom solutions development to the​ ​I​​C and DoD.

Bernard is a Junior Machine Learning Research Scientist at Novetta. Since joining the company in early 2017, he has worked predominantly on analyzing text data for Novetta Mission Analytics, Amazon Web Services, and Novetta's Machine Learning Center of Excellence, focused on media analysis. Prior to Novetta, Bernard was a Data Scientist and Consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton. Outside of machine learning, Bernard is passionate about music, basketball, and the outdoors. He also spends his time volunteering in his church, gaming, and hosting game nights and potlucks.

Knowledgent is a data and analytics consulting firm that helps clients maximize the value of information by improving their data foundations and advancing their analytics capabilities. www.knowledgent.com

Consisting of a diverse team of security researchers and analysts with backgrounds in the public and private sectors, Novetta's Threat Research Group works to analyze, remediate, and report on advanced cyber threats though the leveraging of public and proprietary data sources, tools and techniques. Utilizing decades of combined experience, the group monitors threat actor groups continually to protect both Novetta customers and the Internet population at large. They serve as a proactive member of the security community, coordinating working groups, researching emerging malware, and developing new tools and techniques for identifying security risks before they can gain traction.