SIMBA Chain CEO and leadership

Joel Neidig has a bachelor's degree in operations management and has had 11 years of experience integrating manufacturing technology and software development. Neidig sits on the Technical Advisory Group for MTConnect, an open-source royalty-free standard that is intended to foster greater interoperability between devices and software applications. He has been an active member of MTConnect since 2009. Neidig developed the first iOS and Android-compatible MTConnect apps, and has developed over 65 manufacturing apps for the App Store and Google Play, which have been downloaded over 350,000 times. Neidig also sits on the Technical Advisory Committee for the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute, a federally-funded research and development organization, encourages factories across America to deploy digital manufacturing and design technologies. His company was voted the 2014 Autodesk Inventor of the Year by the Autodesk Community. He has been named as a manufacturing "Thought Leader" by IMTS Insider. Neidig recently won second place in the MTConnect Challenge at the 2014 MC2 Conference for his application: "Expanding Manufacturing's Vision: MTConnect + Google Glass," sponsored by the NCDMM and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Neidig and his company were recently awarded a project from America Makes: Led by the University of Pittsburgh, in conjunction with Johnson & Johnson, ITAMCO, and the University of Notre Dame, this project will strive to develop parametric designs of functional support structures for metal alloy feedstocks for 3D Printing. He has previously been the manufacturing keynote speaker at Autodesk University. Neidig was the recipient of SME's 2015 Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer of the Year Award, the award is named in honor of a specific individual who has made lifelong contributions to manufacturing and recognizes exceptional contributions and accomplishments in the manufacturing industry.

Ian Taylor is an adjunct research associate professor at the CRC, Notre Dame, and a Reader in Cardiff University, UK. He also consults often to the Naval Research Lab (NRL) and has led the IT development and infrastructures for several startups and redevelopment projects for existing businesses. Ian has a degree in Computing Science and a Ph.D. researching and implementing artificial-neural-network types for the determination of musical pitch. After his Ph.D, he joined the gravitational-wave group at Cardiff where he designed, procured and engineered the implementation of the data acquisition system for the GEO 600 gravitational wave detector. He also wrote the Triana workflow system and managed it thereafter.

Ian's research over the last 25 years has covered a broad range of distributed computing areas but he now specializes in Web interaction and APIs, big data applications, open data access, distributed scientific workflows and data distribution, with application areas ranging from audio, astrophysics and engineering to bioinformatics and healthcare. He has managed over 15 research and industrial projects, published over 150 papers, 3 books, acted as guest editor for several special issues in journals and chairs the WORKS Workflow workshop yearly at Supercomputing. Ian has won the Naval Research Lab best research paper (ALAN Berman) prize in 2010, 2011 and 2015.

Joel Neidig has a bachelor's degree in operations management and has had 11 years of experience integrating manufacturing technology and software development. Neidig sits on the Technical Advisory Group for MTConnect, an open-source royalty-free standard that is intended to foster greater interoperability between devices and software applications. He has been an active member of MTConnect since 2009. Neidig developed the first iOS and Android-compatible MTConnect apps, and has developed over 65 manufacturing apps for the App Store and Google Play, which have been downloaded over 350,000 times. Neidig also sits on the Technical Advisory Committee for the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute, a federally-funded research and development organization, encourages factories across America to deploy digital manufacturing and design technologies. His company was voted the 2014 Autodesk Inventor of the Year by the Autodesk Community. He has been named as a manufacturing "Thought Leader" by IMTS Insider. Neidig recently won second place in the MTConnect Challenge at the 2014 MC2 Conference for his application: "Expanding Manufacturing's Vision: MTConnect + Google Glass," sponsored by the NCDMM and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Neidig and his company were recently awarded a project from America Makes: Led by the University of Pittsburgh, in conjunction with Johnson & Johnson, ITAMCO, and the University of Notre Dame, this project will strive to develop parametric designs of functional support structures for metal alloy feedstocks for 3D Printing. He has previously been the manufacturing keynote speaker at Autodesk University. Neidig was the recipient of SME's 2015 Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer of the Year Award, the award is named in honor of a specific individual who has made lifelong contributions to manufacturing and recognizes exceptional contributions and accomplishments in the manufacturing industry.

Ian Taylor is an adjunct research associate professor at the CRC, Notre Dame, and a Reader in Cardiff University, UK. He also consults often to the Naval Research Lab (NRL) and has led the IT development and infrastructures for several startups and redevelopment projects for existing businesses. Ian has a degree in Computing Science and a Ph.D. researching and implementing artificial-neural-network types for the determination of musical pitch. After his Ph.D, he joined the gravitational-wave group at Cardiff where he designed, procured and engineered the implementation of the data acquisition system for the GEO 600 gravitational wave detector. He also wrote the Triana workflow system and managed it thereafter.

Ian's research over the last 25 years has covered a broad range of distributed computing areas but he now specializes in Web interaction and APIs, big data applications, open data access, distributed scientific workflows and data distribution, with application areas ranging from audio, astrophysics and engineering to bioinformatics and healthcare. He has managed over 15 research and industrial projects, published over 150 papers, 3 books, acted as guest editor for several special issues in journals and chairs the WORKS Workflow workshop yearly at Supercomputing. Ian has won the Naval Research Lab best research paper (ALAN Berman) prize in 2010, 2011 and 2015.