Tony Jebara
Chief Scientist & Co-Founder

Dr. Jebara is Director of the Columbia University Machine Learning Laboratory, whose research focuses upon machine learning, computer vision and related application areas such as human-computer interaction. Jebara is also a Principal Investigator at Columbia's Vision and Graphics Center.

He has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in conferences and journals including NIPS, ICML, UAI, COLT, JMLR, CVPR, ICCV, AISTAT, and PAMI. He is the author of the book Machine Learning: Discriminative and Generative (Kluwer).

Jebara is recipient of the Career Award from the National Science Foundation and has also received honors for his papers from the International Conference on Machine Learning and from the Pattern Recognition Society. He has served as chair, program committee member, and reviewer for various conferences and workshops.

Jebara's research has been featured on television (ABC, BBC, New York One, TechTV) as well as in the popular press (Wired Online, Scientific American, Newsweek, and Science Photo Library).

Jebara obtained his Bachelor's degree from McGill University (at the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines). He obtained a Master's and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (at the MIT Media Laboratory).

Alex (Sandy) Pentland
Chief Privacy Advocate & Co-Founder

Professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland is MIT's Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences as well as Director of Human Dynamics Research. He is Faculty sponsor of the Next Billion Network and the EPROM enterpreneurship program in Africa and formerly served as the Academic Head of the MIT Media Laboratory.

Pentland is one of the 30 most cited researchers in the field of computer science, and Newsweek has recently named him one of the 100 Americans most likely to shape the 21st century.

Pentland is a pioneer in mobile information systems, health informatics, smart environments, and technology for developing countries. He has won numerous international awards in the Arts, Sciences and Engineering, including from the AAAI, IEEE, and Ars Electronica, and has published more than 200 scientific articles.

His "Future of Cyberfashion" event which combined technology and fashion received rave reviews from a broad range of news organizations including the New York Times, LA Times, Newsweek, Time, ABC, NBC, and Vogue, and was named "Idea of the Year" by Parade Magazine.

Pentland holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan.

Christine Lemke
COO & Co-Founder

Ms. Lemke brings a broad range of startup and corporate experience in technology and finance to Sense Networks. Most recently, at Microsoft, she was the XBOX World Wide Program Manager in charge of development programs encompassing four global regions and twenty markets.

Prior to her work at Microsoft, Lemke was the President and co-founder of Channel Velocity, Inc., an online auction management software and services company, where she led strategy and operations and where she currently serves as an advisor. Prior to that, Lemke was the first employee and Director of Product Management at Returns Online, Inc., a venture-backed reverse-logistics technology firm.

In addition, Lemke has held roles at 3i Group, Paris, where she analyzed the Internet, Software, and Advanced Technologies markets, and at SAP AG, Germany, on the Global Execution Acceleration Team.

Lemke holds an MBA from HEC Paris and a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Finance from the University of Washington.

Anand Venkataraman
Chief Technology Officer

Dr. Venkataraman joins Sense from 33Across, where he was responsible for the team that defined and translated the company's initial vision into actionable social targeting segments and power-packed products. He brings to Sense vast experience in building and leading high-performance teams of super-intelligent, energetic and curious minds.

Dr. Venkataraman is an alum of SRI International's Speech Technology and Research Lab, where he led the productization and commercialization efforts of a number of SRI technologies, with a special focus on technologies to enable a mobile lifestyle. He is published widely in the Speech and Language modeling areas and is the author of several patents.

Prior to SRI, he was faculty in Computer Science/ Machine Learning at Massey University of New Zealand, where he received his doctorate in Computer Science.

Mikki Nasch
EVP, Business Development

A 20-year veteran of deal-making in the software, finance, and telecom industries, Ms. Nasch was most recently the Vice President of Market Management at Fair Isaac, Inc. (NYSE: FIC), a provider of decision management solutions driven by advanced business intelligence and predictive modeling.

Prior to Fair Isaac, Nasch held leadership positions in the incubation phase of numerous startups, and lead development of products, sales strategies, business models and corporate vision at the Brightspark Group, a leading early-stage software venture capital fund.

She was a founding member of BackWeb Technologies (NASD: BWEB), and managed European business development projects at AT&T Business Network, Europe Online, and Reuters. Nasch began her career as a Network Engineer for the US and European governments.

Nasch holds a degree in Computer Science from DMS, South Africa.

Board of Directors

Tony Jebara, Chief Scientist & Member of the Board of Directors

Kenan Altunis, Member of the Board of Directors

Mr. Altunis is a Managing Director in the Markets and Investment Banking division of the UniCredit Group. With strong roots in 23 European countries, the UniCredit Group is widely recognized as the first truly European bank. Currently managing business across New York, London, Hong Kong, Paris and Munich, Altunis has 12 years of experience in the finance industry. He formerly held the post of Managing Director, European Head of Foreign Exchange Sales to Hedge Funds in the Global Markets division of Deutsche Bank, where he was employed for nine years.

Via private equity investments in the US, UK and South America, Altunis is an avid investor in the hospitality, property, and technology industries, specifically focusing on next generation mobile applications.

Altunis holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania's highly selective Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology, which is comprised of a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Wharton School of Business, alongside a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His concentrations were Finance and Chemical Engineering respectively.

John Trobough, Member of the Board of Directors

Mr. Trobough is a dynamic leader with domestic and international experience, combining operational expertise with vision to bring next generation applications and technologies to market. Early in his career, he was a pioneer in mobility, working with McCaw Cellular, and was part of the Wireless evolution from Analog to Digital technology.

Recognizing the potential of digital mobility (the mobile Internet), Trobough co-founded Gravitate, a wireless location based technology company that created location based P2P applications and services, filing several of the original patents around the idea of Location Based Advertising. Later he joined Openwave Systems, where he assumed a number of roles in the office of the CTO, Corporate Strategy, and M&A. Trobough eventually lead the Mobile Business Unit that defined the next generation Web 2.0 mobile data and location gateways that are in existence today.

Mr. Trobough was a member of the Executive Team of Sylantro Systems, where he brought his next generation data experience and applied it to VOIP and the concepts of CaaS (Communication as a Service). In addition, he is working on several initiatives, most recently with Teleca, a mobile device software company that is at the nexus of next generation computing as mobility extends itself to a new class of devices and form factors. Mr. Trobough is an Advisor and Board Member to early stage technology companies and is an active Advisory Board Member to the Washington State University Entrepreneurship and Engineering departments.

Eghosa D. Omoigui, Board Observer

Mr. Omoigui has been with Intel for 9 years and is currently Director, Strategic Investments, Consumer Internet & Semantic Technologies. In this Santa Clara, CA-based role, he acts as a senior investment professional in the world's largest stage-agnostic technology venture capital organization, focused on platform-agnostic web services and digital media-based investment opportunities in the consumer internet. Due to a 10+ year passion for all things semweb/semtech, Eghosa also drives Intel Capital's investment focus on next generation semantic technologies. Current representative investments include Sense Networks, Voxify, Yatra, BuzzInTown, Cerebra and TextDigger.

Prior to joining Intel, Omoigui worked in several start-ups in senior management positions and has variegated experience as a corporate and securities law firm lawyer, in-house counsel and turnarounds/restructuring advisor. Eghosa attended the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College. Eghosa lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his 3 kids, a miniature poodle and a supersized german shepherd.