GTAC 2013: Committee

Alan Myrvold, Test Engineer (Kirkland, WA)

Alan is currently a test engineer on the Google cloud team. Previously, he helped test Google advertising platform products, including Google Display Network Ad Planner and DoubleClick Bid Manager. Prior to joining Google in 2011, Alan worked at Microsoft, Entrust and Cognos, focusing on security, automation and performance testing. His personal opinions on testing can be found at http://testapprentice.com. Alan earned a bachelor's and master's in mathematics (statistics) from the University of Waterloo.

Anthony Vallone, Software Engineering Manager (Seattle, WA)

Anthony joined Google in 2009 and has worked on various projects in Cloud Platforms (focus on Google Cloud Storage), Infrastructure (focus on Chubby), and most recently, Google Chrome. He designs/builds test automation frameworks and leads teams doing the same. He uses 20% time for technical writing by creating documentation for cloud products and leading the Google Testing Blog.

Before Google, Anthony worked as a software engineer in scientific computing at Lockheed Martin and financial computing at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. He has a BS in Physics (dual minors in Mathematics and Computer Science) from Drexel University (Philadelphia, PA). Anthony enjoys playing guitar, renovating old homes, finding treasures in thrift stores, vegetarian cooking, gardening, biking, and drinking cheap red wine with friends.

Anthony F. Voellm (aka Tony), Google Cloud Security, Performance and Test manager (Kirkland, WA)

Anthony F. Voellm currently manages the Google cloud security, performance and test team. He has a wide range of experience ranging from kernel and Database engines to image processing and graphics. Anthony is an avid inventor who holds seven technology patents. In his current role, he is focused on delivering performance, reliability and security to existing products like Google Compute Engine, Google App Engine, Google Cloud SQL and Google Cloud BigQuery while also innovating new offerings. Prior to joining Google in 2011, Anthony held multiple roles at Microsoft leading the Microsoft Windows reliability, security and privacy test team working on Windows8; Microsoft Hyper-V Performance Team; and SQL Server Performance team. He has also been a developer and tester on the Windows Filesystem, SQL Server Engine and SGI IRIX networking teams. Anthony has taught performance testing to more than 2,000 people worldwide and given dozens of informative talks on software fundamentals and the cloud. He keeps a personal technology blog on software fundamentals at perfguy.blogspot.com. Anthony holds a master of science degree from George Washington University, and bachelor's degrees in physics, computer science and mathematics from the University of Vermont.

Archana Kannan, Tech Lead & Manager (Mountain View, CA)

Archana joined Google in 2007 and currently manages projects in Search Infrastructure focused on Crawling and Indexing the web. She focuses on improving engineering productivity and product quality and has designed and built several large scale automation frameworks, including image comparison frameworks, structured data differencing engines, integration testing frameworks, and production monitoring tools which are widely used by projects across all of Google. Prior to Google, she was busy with grad school and got her Masters in Computer Science from the University of Arizona. In her free time, she loves to travel around the world and play with her dog.

Ari Shamash, Troublemaker (New York, NY)

Based in New York, Ari Shamash is part of the Test Engineering group at Google, focused on building developer productivity and quality automation tools for Ads, where he passionately works on improving product quality through better, faster, more complete, and more automated testing. Prior to joining Google in 2010, Ari spent 11 years at Sun Microsystems, in the Java, Utility Computing / Cloud, and Developer Tools arenas. Prior to Sun, Ari was involved in a couple of startups in the NYC area. Ari was granted an undergraduate and graduate degree in Computer Science from Columbia University, with a focus on User Interface Design for Mobile Computers.

Brian Vance, Tech Lead & Manager (New York, NY)

Brian Vance joined Google in November of 2007 and has worked on Google-wide test infrastructure projects, Google Compute Engine and multiple Display Ads projects. He currently leads teams building test frameworks for DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick for Advertisers. Brian is passionate about improving engineering productivity through automation and tools.

Before Google, Brian worked at Egenera doing feature development and writing test automation for virtualized hardware and software platforms. He has a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Davis. When he’s not improving Googler productivity, Brian loves spending time with his family and exploring the outdoors in a variety of ways such as backpacking, fly-fishing, and mountain-biking.

Chaitali Narla, Software Engineer in Test (Kirkland, WA)

Chaitali is a Software Engineer in Test and has been at Google for 3 years now. She currently works in the Google+ backends team, specifically on the recommendations backend. She has worked extensively with Google technologies such as FlumeJava and Bigtable. Her current focus is building automated systems for data-driven testing and debugging. Chaitali has a Masters in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida. She enjoys teaching and has helped prepare courses for new-hires and interns at Google. In her free time she enjoys papercrafting and blogging about her papercrafts.

David Aristizabal, Test Engineer (New York, NY)

David joined Google in 2011 and works on testing Google’s API infrastructure, including client libraries in many languages and platforms. Prior to Google, David was a Principal Test Engineer at Microchip Technology where he worked on test automation for PIC Microcontrollers. He has a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from McGill University, Montreal. David enjoys mentoring students who participate in FIRST Robotics Competitions, snowboarding and macro photography.

Deanna Chen & Gail Hernandez, Administrative Assistants (Mountain View, CA)

Deanna has joined Google in 2009, and is the veteran on the GTAC team, having been involved in organizing each and every GTAC since then (in addition to her day job). Deanna's strong focus on execution has kept the GTAC committee moving forward, on time and on budget!

Since Gail joined Google in 2011, in addition to her day job, she has worked tirelessly on organizing each GTAC. Gail's attention to details and willingness to do whatever it takes have been critical in ensuring the success of these conferences. Gail's creativity has been an inspiration, as she has designed the GTAC logos for each conference!

Gail is literally the G in GTAC and Deanna always gets the A in GTAC.

Michael Klepikov, Tech Lead & Manager (Cambridge, MA)

Michael joined Google in 2008 and is working on tools for automated web performance and latency testing, such as WebPageTest.org, as part of Google's Make The Web Faster initiative. Prior to Google, he worked at PTC on large scale enterprise design data management solutions. His MS in CS is from Moscow State University. He enjoys travel, skiing, climbing, and old black and white movies.

Nikhil Gore, Tech Lead & Manager (Kirkland, WA)

Nikhil Gore joined Google in March of 2005 and has worked on Ads Backends, Google Talk and Search Infrastructure, building automation frameworks and writing automation. He has also managed the Search Infrastructure testing team in Kirkland and most recently has taken over the role of Tech Lead and Manager for the Google+ test teams in Kirkland. Nikhil also teaches the "Interview Training" class within Google engineering education programs, aimed at training engineers to interview the Google way.

Before Google, Nikhil worked at BEA Systems (now part of Oracle) testing debugging tools. He has a MS in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Pune (India). Outside of work, Nikhil spends time playing football, soccer, ultimate frisbee and scuba diving.

Shadi Abdul Khalek, Software Engineer in Test (Kirkland, WA)

Shadi joined the Chrome Video Stack team at Google in 2011. Since then he has been working on tools and infrastructure for HTML5 <video> and <audio> performance and quality measurement. Lately he has been working on automated tools for Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) testing in Chrome. Shadi received his Ph.D. in Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. His dissertation was focused on automated software testing, specifically systematic testing of relational applications. He enjoys playing ping pong, skiing, and watching sitcom shows.