Lindsay West established the Platform Expos in the United Kingdom and has seen them grow exponentially since with 10,000 delegates attending Platform 2012 in March, 2012.
Platform Doha is the first Platform Expo to take place in Qatar and it will become an annual event.
Lindsay is also Joint Managing Director of Garthwest Ltd, a family run business in England and is a Director of World Trade Centre Hull and Humber.
Professor Qutaibah Malluhi joined Qatar University in September 2005. He has been appointed as the head of Computer Science and Engineering Department at Qatar University in June 2006. Before joining Qatar University he was a professor of Computer Science at Jackson State University where he served as a faculty member between 1994 and 2005. During 1995 and 1996, he was a research faculty at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley California. Dr. Malluhi was the co-founder and CTO of Data Reliability Inc. between 2001 and 2005.
Prof. Malluhi’s research area is in the fields of parallel and distributed high performance computing, cloud computing, networking, data management, and storage systems. His research efforts have been supported by grants and contracts from the Qatar National Research Fund, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the US Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, NASA, the US Department of Defense, and IBM. Prof. Malluhi has received a number of honors and awards including the QU research award (2007), the JSU Technology Transfer and Entrepreneurship award (2004), the Mississippi University Research Authority to establish material financial interest in a private entity (2003), and the JSU faculty Excellence award (2001).
Chris is a native of Boston in the US. After graduating from Boston College in Computer Science, and Harvard Business School, he became a consultant in marketing with McKinsey & Co. His subsequent career spanned four decades in technology, global marketing and distribution with Gillette, Atari, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and Sony PlayStation.
He launched the PlayStation in EMEA, Australia and New Zealand in 1995 and served as CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe for 10 years, with cumulative sales exceeding 100 million consoles and over 1billion game discs. Chris also headed Sony Electronics in Europe during 2004-2005.
Chris has served on a number of Boards since 2005, notably as Chairman of Codemasters Games and Chairman of the Edinburgh Interactive Festival for 5 years , and now serves as Special Envoy for Games on behalf of the government of Malta as well as chairing high tech start-ups, splitting his time between London and America.
Brian Wesolowski, Executive Director of Communications, leads the strategic communications efforts for ictQATAR.
Wesolowski is directly responsible for managing ictQATAR’s brand, marketing, advertising, media relations and digital media presence, including the ictQATAR website and blog, www.DigitalQatar.qa, and is also responsible for a range of outreach events, including the ictQATAR Connected Speakers. Wesolowski also currently serves as the Community Lead for Creative Commons Qatar, which is hosted by ictQATAR.
Prior to joining ictQATAR, Wesolowski worked as a senior strategic communications consultant for a variety of high-profile corporate, government and non-profit organizations.
Joycia Young is a partner at Clyde & Co, an international law firm with 27 offices and over 1,300 lawyers. Joycia is a partner in the intellectual property practice, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Admitted to practice law in England and Wales and New South Wales, Australia, Joycia has over 12 years’ experience in advising multinational organisations on regional trade mark, copyright and domain name protection issues.
Joycia also advises on the commercial aspects of intellectual property and has focused on the licensing and commercialisation of intellectual property assets, including the protection of digital rights. In a complex, yet developing and exciting market, Joycia has been praised by clients for assisting clients in navigating the myriad of local IP laws and regulations in the Middle East. Joycia “really hits the mark on a wide range of IP work” (Chambers Global 2011) and is “highly regarded as a leading IP lawyer in the region” (Legal 500 2010).
Stefan has been in the media industry for over 20 years, working for companies such as Sky , ITV, Orbit and Quantel.
In the last 5 years Stefan has been living and working in Qatar, where in the last year Stefan has set-up Ginger Camel which is a Animation/Video Production company.
Stefan has also set-up www.thinkbigqatar.com which is a business website to promote businesses here in Qatar using social media and online video.
Avalore Studios is an independent studio specialising in mobile design & development. We’re creative problem solvers, experienced developers and passionate trainers developing talent in-house where possible. All of our work is completed in-house, keeping a close eye on progress and quality. Specialising in mobile platforms means experience and skill can be difficult to find, which is why we are consistently training in-house as well as forging links with local education to fill this need.
Multi-Award Winning Designer Michael Tierney has studied Graphic Design for 7 years and worked in the industry for 2 years. He will be speaking about the journey of a design project, showing “How an App is made” from the initial ideas, through the design & development stage to the final product.
Michael Mansour is the Director of Developer Platforms & Technologies at Microsoft Corp with over 20 years of sales & marketing experience in the IT, telco and power generation space. He works in collaboration with corporate enterprises, start-ups, academia and partners in advancing Microsoft’s software programs and iCT innovation across the Gulf. Prior to Microsoft, Michael was the Director of Marketing at EMC Corp in New York, leading various successful telecom product launches encompassing optical, VoIP, Ethernet and ATM. He also led product management at Tellium, an optical-switch New Jersey-based start-up & manufacturer. Tellium went public in 2002 and was eventually acquired by Zhone Technologies in 2003. Michael also spent 6 years at ABB driving sales for power electronics across North America, and later joined Nortel in various engineering and product management roles.
Throughout his career, Michael has covered several geographies including the Middle East and Canada and US. He holds a Masters of Business Administration and Electrical Engineering Degree both from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
Dr. Osama Halabi has joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Qatar University in Sept 2010. Dr. Halabi had excellent opportunities to conduct a world-rank research on emerging fields. His research activities had provided him with interdisciplinary experience related to human interface, virtual reality, interactive media systems, human-computer interaction, computer graphics, laser projection, and robotics.
As a visual effect artist, Muqeem Khan’s motion picture credits with Walt Disney and Square USA are Deep Rising, George of the Jungle, Flubber, Armageddon and Final Fantasy. Besides teaching interactive and digital media in design, Khan has been teaching 2D/3D animation classes for over 10 years in the Arabian Gulf region. He has also served as a member of the technical committee for The International Association of Science and Technology Development (IASTED), Alberta, Canada and a member of the Editorial Board for “Design Behaviors,” the College of Design, Hanyang University, Korea. He holds Master of Arts and Bachelor of Science in Industrial Design from Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.
Khan also holds a full Dean’s Scholarship for his PhD studies from Australia. Khan’s PhD goal is to provide better opportunities for museum visitors to engage with constructive learning through “edutainment”- based user experiences. He is pursuing this goal with the use of procedural animation and motion detecting technologies in the context of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). Khan is currently working as Associate Professor at Northwestern University in Qatar, teaching 2D and 3D animation classes. His animations and mixed reality experimentations can be seen at: www.muqeemkhan.com
