Prith Banerjee
Senior Vice President, Research
Director, HP Labs
Hewlett-Packard Co.
Prith Banerjee, in his roles at HP, assists the executive vice president of strategy and technology in charting technical
strategies for the company, and heads HP Labs, which has seven locations worldwide. Most recently, Mr. Banerjee
was dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he led an organization that had
$21 million in annual research funding. He also is the founder, chairman, and chief scientist of BINACHIP Inc., a
developer of products and services in electronic design automation. Previously, Mr. Banerjee was at Northwestern
University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He founded AccelChip, Inc., in 2000; that company
was sold to Xilinx, Inc., in 2006. His research interests are in VLSI computer-aided design, as well as parallel
computing and compilers; he is the author of some 300 research papers in these areas. He serves on the technical
advisory boards of several companies.
Gailanne Barth
Director, Marketing Communications
IEEE
Gailanne Barth leads corporate marketing and communications, branding, and PR and media relations for the IEEE.
She has firsthand experience in enhancing the public visibility, branding, and strategic positioning of companies doing
business globally. Ms. Barth began her career on Wall Street with Bankers Trust (Deutsche Bank), advancing to vice
president and director of marketing for trust and investment services. She joined AT&T, where she held leadership
positions in product management, marketing, and general business operations supporting a diverse set of emerging
technologies, including Voice over IP, Internet, data networking, and hosted services, before joining AT&T Solutions’
high-speed fiber optic network team, which provided managed network outsourcing services globally. She then served
as director of global marketing for EasyLink Services, where she oversaw all branding, strategy, product marketing,
and communications for EasyLink’s portfolio of business process outsourcing services.
Bart Becks
President International and Director
Netlog
Bart Becks is president international at Netlog, the leading European social networking platform with more than 30
million users in 25 countries across the continent. He started his career in Paris at FNAC, one of Europe’s leading
leisure goods retailers. From 1998 to 2005, he served the Belgacom Group, where he became CEO of Belgacom Skynet
and president and CEO of Skynet iMotion Activities, an interactive television entity. He moved to Amsterdam and
Munich to become senior vice president, new media and innovation, for the SBS/ProSiebenSat1 Group, where he
was in charge of all new media activities across Scandinavia, Eastern and Central Europe, and the Benelux countries.
Mr. Becks has served as a director since 2003 of Belgium’s Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and was elected vice
president in 2005. He is also a member of the IAB Europe strategy council. Cable and Satellite Media named him one
of the Euro50 media leaders in 2006.
tom Bedecarré
Chief Executive Officer
AKQA
Tom Bedecarré, CEO of AKQA since 2001, has led the company to be recognized as one of the digital marketing
industry’s most successful and innovative. AKQA was cited earlier this year as one of the World’s 50 Most Innovative
Companies and named Digital Agency of the Year by both Adweek and Advertising Age, also in 2008. Mr. Bedecarré
recently announced a major investment in AKQA from General Atlantic, a global private equity firm focused on
growth companies. The Wall Street Journal also featured him as an Admaker to Watch. An enthusiastic entrepreneur,
Mr. Bedecarré was a founder and CEO of Citron Haligman Bedecarré, San Francisco’s largest independent advertising
agency and winner of Adweek’s West Coast Agency of the Year award in 1996. He started his career in advertising at
Ogilvy & Mather New York in 1981, then returned to San Francisco where he was with Hal Riney & Partners.
