IMPENDO - Key Persons
Mr. Smythe's background focuses on the data centre relocations, application development lifecycles, and their supporting infrastructure. He has helped large and small organizations with data centre relocations, infrastructure consolidations, implementations, and solution architecture. He has successfully worked with a variety of ERP, CRM, HR, e-Commerce, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Reporting, WEB, Content Management, Document Management, and Payment Management systems, using a wide variety of development tools, and has extensive experience supporting application servers and database environments including Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. Adam specializes in cost conscious reliable solutions with maximum automation, enabling staff to focus on the more important things.
Job Titles:
- Research Scientist
- Senior Advisor
Dr. Watson is a senior advisor and research scientist at IMPENDO Inc. He is also a chief scientist at IP Blox - a developer of leading edge technologies for deep-packet inspection, with a focus on performance and virtualisation. Academically, he is co-founder and co-director of the distributed FASTAR Research Group, director of the Centre for Decision Making and Knowledge Dynamics, co-director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research, and most importantly the co-founder of the School for Data Science and Computational Thinking. He also holds a visiting professorship in the Department of Computer Science at King's College (London) and is head of the department of Information Science at Stellenbosch University (Cape Town). With more than a dozen researchers, his FASTAR Research Group performs fundamental research in new algorithms and implementations for high-performance pattern matching.
In 1995, Dr. Watson received his first PhD in computing science/engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology, after studying discrete mathematics and computer science at the University of Waterloo. Watson's Eindhoven dissertation contained taxonomies and new algorithms for pattern matching and regular expressions. He later returned to Eindhoven as chair of Software Construction. Dr. Watson's second PhD, in computer science, is from the University of Pretoria in 2012. His recent book is The Correctness by Construction Approach to Programming, 2012.
Dr. Watson has published over 200 papers covering various topics including research in quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and algorithms to name just a few. He has graduate students in 6 different continents and participates in student, corporate, and government research around the globe. He is often asked to review papers (conference to dissertations) and participate as an opponent/examiner for PhD defence. Dr. Watson also sits on many conference program committees, exposing him to a much wider scope global of research.
Parallel to his academic career, he worked as a compiler engineer at several companies (e.g. Microsoft), followed by engineering and architecture work on virtual machines and pattern matching algorithms (e.g. for Cisco), chip design optimisation (e.g. Sagantec and ASML), hardware solutions for pattern matching (e.g. Netronome), and predictive analytics (e.g. Ayata). Today, Dr. Watson offers his advice and guidance to private and public sector organisations in an effort to help future proof their policies, strategies, and offerings.
Job Titles:
- CEO & Director of Professional Services
Mr. Kushwaha's background focuses on (1) cyber and its relation to international law (Law of Armed Conflict and International Humanitarian Law) and (2) data centre (IT infrastructure, IT security, physical data centre design, power, cooling, business processes, and IT consolidation). He is currently working on his PhD on cyber and international law.