Management

Dr. William Guttman is Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Technology and Special Advisor to the Provost at Carnegie Mellon University.

He was part of the founding group of Carnegie Mellon's CyLab -- one of the world's largest University-based research initiatives focused on dependability and security in software and networked systems. He also serves as Chairman of Carnegie Mellon's education management company, iCarnegie, Inc.

He has helped build a number of technology companies, including Printcafe (NASDAQ: PCAF, acquired by NASDAQ: EFII), which he co-founded and served as Chairman and CEO. He has previously served in various advisory capacities for the United States, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the OECD. He is the author of Pacific Asian Capital Markets (OECD/ Oxford & IBH), among numerous other publications and patents. He completed his Masters and Doctoral degrees at Balliol College, Oxford University, where he was a British Council Scholar.

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Dr. Sebastián Ceria is one of the world's foremost authorities on optimization.

Before founding Axioma, Ceria was an Associate Professor of Decision, Risk and Operations at Columbia Business School from 1993 to 1998. He was honored with the prestigious Career Award for Operations Research from the National Science Foundation, which is given annually to the two best researchers and teachers in the area. While at Columbia he was also recognized as the "best core teacher" by his students and the school. Additionally, Ceria has served as administrator for the Computational Optimization Research Center and as co-principal investigator in two National Science Foundation research projects.

Ceria is the author of many articles and has been featured regularly in a variety of publications including Management Science, Mathematical Programming, Optima and Operations Research. He has also been an editor for Optima, and a regular referee for a number of publications in the area. Past speaking engagements include international corporate and academic conferences.

Ceria completed his PhD in Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon University's Graduate School of Industrial Administration.

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Olivier d'Assier is President of Axioma in Asia and the Chief Marketing Officer for Axioma, Inc. He is responsible for the firm's strategic and commercial success in the region, as well as being guardian of Axioma's brand and client experience globally. He joined Axioma in 2006.

Prior to joining Axioma, Olivier spent seven years as the Asia Pacific Head for risk management vendor Barra. Prior to managing quantitative solutions providers, Olivier spent nine years in investment banking as a sales trader in Europe and Asia and as a heavy user of quantitative technology.

Mr. d'Assier has been in Asia since 1996 and has lived in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.

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Stefan Schmieta is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Axioma.  He has been with the company since 2000.

Schmieta joined Axioma from the Computational Optimization Research Center at Columbia University. While at CORC, he focused on the development of a portable implementation of high-quality branch and cut strategies suitable for parallel computing. This framework is successfully deployed in research projects at several universities. Schmieta also focused on researching integer programming and symmetric cone programming algorithms.

This work has been recognized internationally and published in Mathematical Programming, Discrete Optimization and Optima.

The results of Schmieta’s extensive research are also deployed in Axioma technology. The company’s flagship portfolio optimization software, Axioma Portfolio™, is based on his powerful symmetric cone solver.  Schmieta also lead the design and implementation of Axioma's unique risk model infrastructure that allows Axioma to publish its full suite of risk models on a daily basis.

Schmieta is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and SIAM. He holds an MS degree in Economic and Industrial Engineering from Technische Universität Karlsruhe in Germany and earned his Ph.D. in Operations Research from Rutgers University.

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Robert Bender is Axioma's Vice President & Chief Financial Officer, responsible for operations and finance. He joined Axioma in November 2000. Rob has years of experience in developing strategic alliances and equity partnerships, mergers & acquisitions, management consulting, and product development. Before joining Axioma he served as Director of Strategic Planning and Business Development at Primedia Inc., (NYSE:PRM) where he was responsible for managing corporate development activities for a $350 million business unit. Prior to Primedia, Rob served as a Manager at Deloitte & Touche Consulting Group focusing on strategic and tactical redesign of operations at client organizations. He also spent five years at W.L. Gore & Associates, Inc., where he directed a team responsible for managing the technical development and market launch of new product.

Mr. Bender holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering from North Carolina State University.

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Dr. Robert Stubbs is Vice President, Research at Axioma, Inc. Stubbs joined Axioma in 2000 and is currently the head of research at Axioma. He is responsible for leading the research team in the design of optimization modeling and algorithmic development for portfolio construction, the development of factor risk models for equities, and the development of other analytical tools that are incorporated into Axioma's products and services.

Dr. Stubbs has extensive optimization research and experience, with a focus on developing algorithms for solving large-scale network, linear, and integer programs. Stubbs developed our robust portfolio optimization technology and has made numerous contributions to classical portfolio optimization techniques such as developing a highly effective, specialized algorithm for solving portfolio rebalancing problems with a limit on the number of assets in the portfolio. In addition to improving portfolio optimization methodologies, Stubbs continues to develop new techniques and software in other areas of financial optimization such as crossing networks, asset-liability management, and cash management.

Before joining Axioma, Stubbs was an Optimization Software Developer for LINDO Systems, Inc., where he worked on developing and maintaining the algorithmic components of LINDO products. Prior to that, Stubbs worked for First National Bank of Chicago and AT&T. At First National Bank of Chicago, he developed a simulation model for computing the expected distribution of the loss in the corporate credit portfolio. The efficiency of this model enabled simulation of the entire credit portfolio. At AT&T, he developed an automated scheduling system that dramatically reduced the number of machine changes needed to color fiber optic cable.

Dr. Stubbs earned a PhD in Industrial Engineering and Management Science and a Master of Science degree in Industrial Engineering and Management Science from Northwestern University, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Mathematics from Auburn University. In his dissertation, Stubbs designed new algorithms for solving large-scale non-linear integer programming problems.

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Prior to joining Axioma, Jon developed multiple successful financial technology and service businesses around the world. Jon's prior leadership roles include General Manager-North America for Activiti, an enterprise workflow management tool for institutions, and CEO of the Portfolio Solutions Group at Thomson Financial, which included all enterprise software and professional services assets targeted to the buy side globally, including the PORTIA portfolio accounting system and the Oneva suite of trading and decision support tools.

Jon has significant international experience having been based out of London as General Manager - IFR Securities Data, the leading provider of non-US new issues and M&A information, and Singapore as Managing Director for Thomson Financial's Database Group - Asia Pacific, which included the Electronic Settlements Group, now Omgeo, the industry standard for trade settlement, and Thomson Investment Software.

Jon graduated with an B.A. degree in political science from Duke University.

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Ron Perez is the newest member of Axioma management team, having joined the company in September 2008. He is responsible for overall product business plans and strategy, overseeing the efforts of the engineering and product management teams. His broad financial services technology expertise is a great asset to Axioma as it enters yet another period of rapid growth.

Prior to joining Axioma, Ron was with Thomson Financial from 2004 until 2008. While with Thomson, he was most recently responsible for the launch of Thomson ONE Spreadsheet Link, the analytic companion to Thomson ONE Investment Management. He was also responsible for leveraging acquired QAI technology into WebQA for the next generation of Thomson Excel Add-ins, Screening, Reporting and Multi-Factor Ranking. In 2004, Ron co-led development of Thomson ONE Portfolio (desktop service for Performance Attribution and Profiling) and in 2005-2006, the launch of Thomson ONE Investment Management (the flagship product for the asset management division).

Before his tenure at Thomson, Ron was Product Manager for Baseline, contributing to a period of dramatic revenue growth. During his eight years at Baseline he expanded the product offering to include portfolio analytics, new valuation measures, peer analysis, integration of client proprietary data, and Baseline's Excel add-in. In addition, he created and helped build out the firm's consulting business unit.

Ron attended New York University where he earned his BA, MA and MBA degrees.

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