Key Industry Figures to Address Storage Networking World Conference, April 7-10 in Orlando

Storage Networking World Conference (SNW) announced today an illustrious roster of IT executives, industry leaders and analysts to address its upcoming spring conference to be held April 7- 10, 2008 at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando.

SNW is the world's largest storage networking event and the only conference where IT managers and professionals get an education endorsed by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and a hands-on view of the world's only SNIA-sanctioned Solutions Center. At SNW, attendees can choose from over 140 educational sessions and network with peers from around the globe, plus visit with top solutions providers in the world's largest Expo focused on storage.

Featured presenters at Storage Networking World Conference include:

Laura Campbell, associate librarian for strategic initiatives and chief information officer, Library of Congress

Campbell was appointed to the position of associate librarian for strategic initiatives in 2000 by the Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington. He noted that "Laura has already made many significant contributions to the realization of the Library's digital future. Her demonstrated leadership, technical knowledge and network of expert colleagues in the public and private sectors will bring added strength to our decision-making process."

Campbell's responsibilities include overall strategic planning for the Library, oversight of the Information Technology Services directorate, and leadership of the $100 million National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program ( www.digitalpreservation.gov ), which was established to build a nationwide network of partners to preserve important digital content that is at risk of being lost. Campbell is also director of the National Digital Library Program, a cooperative national effort to digitize and make available online primary source materials of American history and culture. The program's award-winning Web site, American Memory ( http://memory.loc.gov ), offers more than 11 million items from the collections of the Library of Congress and those of its partners.

William Kramer, division deputy and general manager, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center

Kramer is the general manager of NERSC and head of the high performance computing department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The NERSC Facility is the DOE Office of Science "Keystone" computing facility that supports a broad and diverse computational science portfolio. At NERSC, Kramer led the acquisition, testing, and introduction of the early, very large HPC computational systems (e.g. IBM SP and Cray systems, one of the first production Linux clusters, and one of the largest open HPSS mass storage systems. He was instrumental in managing the paradigm shift for NERSC from a traditional storage implementation to the one of the first production highly parallel, facility wide file system in the HPC community. He contributes to LBNL's "Science Driven Computer Architecture" initiatives and has helped build three efficient computing facilities. Kramer has taught at two universities, industry and conference on a range of topics, including cluster computing, computer security, computer graphics and visualization, data intensive computing, and high performance computing. His research interests include large-scale system management, scheduling, performance evaluation, and the integration of high performance networks and computers. Kramer was the general chair of the SC 05 conference in Seattle and was named as one of HPCWire's "People to Watch in 2005. Prior to Berkeley Lab, he worked at the NASA Ames Research Center, the University of Delaware and Inland Steel Company.

Ray Kurzweil, founder, chairman and chief executive officer, Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.

Kurzweil has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison," and PBS included him as one of 16 "revolutionaries who made America," along with other inventors of the past two centuries.

As one of the leading inventors of our time, Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. His web site www.KurzweilAI.net has over one million readers.

Among Kurzweil's many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, established by the US Patent Office. He has received fifteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.