SlatorCon Remote September 2022

Andrew is the Commercial Director at Slator responsible for product development and pricing, online ad and research sales, and event sponsorships.

Prior to co-founding Slator, Andrew has worked in the media, internet and finance industries including managing media businesses for Thomson Reuters, Fairfax Media and The Economist Group. He has an MBA in Finance and Investments from The George Washington University in Washington DC and has been based in Asia for over 25 years.

Florian is the Managing Director of Slator and host of the SlatorPod podcast. Based in Zurich, Florian Faes spent almost a decade in Asia before launching Slator in 2015. Slator is the most up-to-date source of news and analysis covering language services and technology and works as a distributed team based in Asia, Europe, and the US.

Stuart brings over 30 years of experience of team building and executive management in the software industry to his role as CEO. Stuart established ZOO’s business strategy and difference in the marketplace by using technology to innovate. This is now adopted by the world’s leading TV and movie businesses to bring their content to market around the world faster and more efficiently. Previously he founded three software companies. Stuart has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and is responsible for securing over 30 patents in the ZOO intellectual property portfolio.

Manuel is a pattern recognition/NLP expert working in the field since 2008. With over 13Bn of parallel segments of data in +80 languages, Pangeanic has become a leader in the development of several NLP applications, from private machine translation to bias /hate detection, document classification and key data extraction and of course anonymization for structured and unstructured content.

Graduated from the Sloan School of Management, the Manchester University and MIT, Manuel has worked extensively for Japanese corporations. Before joining the language industry, he was a software and systems training engineer at Ford and Rolls Royce Industrial and Marine in the United Kingdom.

Amando is a seasoned executive with experience in security systems and cybersecurity for the banking sector after 15 years at IBM (France, Watson Center (US), Spain, and Indonesia). He has also run partnerships with CISCO and CapGemini.

He has a background in internet projects and platform building, security and on-line distributed environments, distributed infrastructure management, building workflows and Document Management Systems. Amando has made use of his extensive experience in digital infrastructures to advance the PangeaMT platform.

Andrew is the Commercial Director at Slator responsible for product development and pricing, online ad and research sales, and event sponsorships.

Prior to co-founding Slator, Andrew has worked in the media, internet and finance industries including managing media businesses for Thomson Reuters, Fairfax Media and The Economist Group. He has an MBA in Finance and Investments from The George Washington University in Washington DC and has been based in Asia for over 25 years.

Sarah Presch is Argos Multilingual’s Director of International SEO. It’s her job to put together solutions for clients looking to expand into new markets using digital channels such as SEO, PPC and Social Media Marketing.

Sarah started off life as a military trained translator, before doing a masters in digital marketing. Now, she’s currently working towards a BA in Psychology and Sociology at Dublin City University.

She has been working in international digital marketing for 10+ years now, and previously founded her own boutique marketing agency which was named Ireland’s 2nd best start-up. Her campaigns have won numerous European awards and saw her named Northern Ireland’s Young Business Personality back in 2019. She also teaches SEO to Master’s students at the University of Strasbourg.

With over 10 years of experience in business intelligence, marketing strategy and digital marketing, Simon’s depth of understanding is well matched by the breadth of contexts in which he can actualize his wisdom.

From multinational corporates to sole traders, neuromarketing to print marketing and everything in between, Simon’s colorful marketing journey has given him the skills to help every kind and size of business with their marketing.

These days he spends his time at SocialSEO – Collaborating with business owners to help them understand digital marketing and develop a strategy accordingly which is optimal for their business.

Andrew is the Commercial Director at Slator responsible for product development and pricing, online ad and research sales, and event sponsorships.

Prior to co-founding Slator, Andrew has worked in the media, internet and finance industries including managing media businesses for Thomson Reuters, Fairfax Media and The Economist Group. He has an MBA in Finance and Investments from The George Washington University in Washington DC and has been based in Asia for over 25 years.

With 20 years’ experience in Localization and more than 30 years of developing teams, Erin leads Welocalize’s people strategy – for employees, customers, and partners. Erin’s passion is to cultivate a culture that empowers and enables people to achieve (and exceed) their goals and reach their full potential.

Brennan Smith, based in NYC, has been part of the localization industry for almost 15 years. Currently he’s thinking about questions like “what are the unique attributes of a great job?”, “how do we make sure new graduates are interested in joining the localization industry?”, and “What are the environmental factors that impact performance the most?”. If you have thoughts, he’d love to hear from you!

Gary is a Chartered Engineer specialising in software internationalisation and localisation. He is Cisco’s Globalisation Architect, a Fellow of the Institution for Engineering and Technology, and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute for IT. Gary has been in the localisation industry for 22 years and has a first-class honours MSc in Multilingual Computing and Localisation from the Localisation Research Centre. He’s also a STEM Ambassador and Code Club leader, enthusing children across England in the subjects of science, technology, engineering, and computational thinking.

Conchita Laguardia is a founder member of the in-house Localization team at Citrix, where she has held various roles in the last 20 years. In her current capacity of Technical Program Manager, she manages Machine Translation initiatives and the in-house automation platform for the delivery of localized product documentation. Before moving to the Localization Engineering team and a program management role in order to drive MT and automation solutions for the documentation workflows, she worked as a linguist and translation project manager in the Translation team.

Adam Bittlingmayer is the CEO and Co-Founder of ModelFront, the leading provider of translation quality prediction. He was previously a software engineer at Google Translate, as well as at startups and on platforms and products like Android and Adobe Creative Suite. He also founded Machine Translate, the foundation for open resources and community for machine translation.

Tony O’Dowd is the founder and chief architect of KantanMT.com, a cloud-based custom machine translation solutions provider. He is a serial entrepreneur and localization veteran with more than 25 years’ experience working in the localization industry. He has previously held senior positions at Lotus Development Corporation, Symantec Corporation, Corel Corporation and Alchemy Software Development, which he founded in 2000. Tony holds a BS in computer science from Trinity College Dublin, and a fellowship from the Localization Research Institute at the University of Limerick. He is currently a member of the governance board of the ADAPT Research Centre at Dublin City University.

Maria Stasimioti is a PhD candidate at the Department of Foreign Languages, Translation and Interpreting at the Ionian University, Greece. Her research interests lie in the areas of Machine Translation (MT), Computer-Assisted-Translation (CAT), Post Editing (PE and Cognitive Studies). She has taught Computer-Assisted-Translation at the Ionian University and participated in the EU-funded project TraMOOC (Translation of Massive Open Online Courses.

Her academic experience is complemented by 10+ years industry specific positions, in roles ranging from Translator to Translation Project Manager, assisting in Translation Workflows and PE. Since January 2022 she has also been researching into localization industry trends globally, from her position as a Research Analyst with Slator.

Ms Ruiz Calavera was born in Madrid in 1962, where she grew up and obtained her university degree in Philology. She studied her senior year at Marlborough School in Los Angeles (California, USA) and has a masters’ degree in Public Management by the “Ecole de Commerce Solvay” in Brussels. She held different management positions in the private sector before joining the EU.

Ms Ruiz Calavera joined the European Commission in 1992 working in the implementation of the customs and taxation arrangements of the internal market and the negotiations for accession of Sweden, Finland and Austria in 1996 and of the Baltic and Eastern European countries, Malta and Cyprus in 2004. She served in the European Commission Taskforce for the Reconstruction of Kosovo during 1999-2000 in Pristina. She was Deputy Head of Unit for Serbia and Montenegro in 2002 and appointed Head of the Kosovo issues unit in 2006.

In January 2009, she became the Head of Unit for “Crisis Response and Peace Building” in the Directorate-General for External Relations. Following the creation of the European External Action Service in 2011, she joined the Service for Foreign Policy Instruments (FPI) working under the auspices of the High Representative/Vice President of the Commission.

From 1 June 2016 until 31 March 2021, she was the Director for Western Balkans at the DG Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations (DG NEAR), responsible for managing bilateral relations between the EU and Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia. Her portfolio also included promoting regional co-operation and providing support to the Western Balkans through the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance.

Since 1 April 2021 she is the Director-General of DG Interpretation (DG SCIC). The mission of DG SCIC is to facilitate the multilingual democratic decision-making process in the EU by providing interpretation to EU institutions and conference organisation and meeting room management to all Commission DGs and services.

Andrew is the Commercial Director at Slator responsible for product development and pricing, online ad and research sales, and event sponsorships.

Prior to co-founding Slator, Andrew has worked in the media, internet and finance industries including managing media businesses for Thomson Reuters, Fairfax Media and The Economist Group. He has an MBA in Finance and Investments from The George Washington University in Washington DC and has been based in Asia for over 25 years.