Richard Tobias

Mr. Tobias has over 25 years of experience in corporate management, project management, and business development for the electronics, embedded systems, DSP and CAD/EDA industries. Mr. Tobias was the founder and former President and CEO of White Eagle Systems Technology, an integrated circuit intellectual property company and technology turn-key design company acquired by QuickSilver Technology, Inc. (QST) in July, 2000. He was the Vice President of Engineering of the System Group at QST, responsible for the IC, Development Tools and Systems Engineering groups.

Mr. Tobias as CTO and Vice President of Engineering was responsible for world-wide engineering activities and technical direction of Pixelworks.

At Toshiba (TAEC), Mr. Tobias was initially brought in to turn around the engineering ASIC design center activity. With innovative management changes he created a new and more efficient design center organization. Today the group is taping-out many more designs than in the past. He was quickly promoted, from Vice President of Engineering and head of the Design Center Engineering, to head of the Business Unit including the design center organization and R&D engineering. The organization was 200 people strong, which includes responsibility for the P&L of Toshiba's American ASIC, Custom SoC and Foundry businesses, reporting into Toshiba Semiconductor in Tokyo, Japan. There have been many accomplishments in taking over the group from better engineering management practices; to increasing the number of design wins; to improved inventory control.

His goals in business are to create groups or companies that provide world class services and products in a fulfilling and enjoyable working environment.

Andreas Spanias, Ph.D, Fellow IEEE - Professor of Electrical Engineering, Arizona State University

Dr. Spanias joined the ASU faculty in 1988. He has published 40 journal and 100 conference papers and contributed three book chapters in speech and audio processing. He has served as associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and as the general co-chair of the 1999 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP-99) and as vice-president for the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He and former Ph.D. student Ted Painter received the prestigious 2002 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award for their IEEE Proceedings paper entitled “Perceptual Coding of Digital Audio.” He was recently elected IEEE Fellow and appointed IEEE Distinguished Lecturer. Dr. Spanias’s research interests include Digital signal processing, multimedia signal processing, speech and audio coding, adaptive filters and signal processing for the arts.

Rajeev Madhavan, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Magma Design Automation Inc.

Rajeev Madhavan is serving as the chief executive officer, president and chairman of the board of directors of Magma Design Automation since he co-founded the company in 1997. Prior to that Madhavan co-founded and served as president and chief executive officer of Ambit Design Systems, Inc. Madhavan previously co-founded and served as director of engineering of LogicVision, Inc. Madhavan received a bachelor's degree in electronics and communication from KREC, Surathkal, India, and a master's degree in electrical engineering from Queen's University, Ontario, Canada.

P.Sudhir Rao

P. Sudhir Rao, a Chartered Accountant (ICAI, India) and Chartered Management Accountant (ACMA, London) with more than 26 years of business management experience. He was a Founder Director of Karvy Investor Services and Karvy Securities and was associated in Capital Market related activities including Shareholder Services, Investment Banking, Stock broking and Financial Product Distribution. His experience at Karvy included dealing with over 16 million shareholder accounts for over 250 leading Indian companies and participating in over 2000 IPOs, as also being a key participant during the crucial period over which the Indian Capital Market experienced a paradigm structural change in Market Regulation, Market Trading and Dealing Platform changing from physical to electronic form. In 1999, he founded IndusAge Advisors. As an Advisor and/or Non-Executive Director on the Board of several Indian companies, he plays an active role in improving stakeholder value through an emphasis on Business Fitness through Performance & Capital Management along with Corporate Governance practices.