Connecting Tampa’s  
Data Community

Alex Merced is a senior technical evangelist at Dremio with experience as a developer and instructor. His professional journey includes roles at GenEd Systems, Crossfield Digital, CampusGuard, and General Assembly. He co-authored "Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide" published by O'Reilly and has spoken at notable events such as Data Day Texas and Data Council. Alex is passionate about technology, sharing his expertise through blogs, videos, podcasts like Datanation and Web Dev 101, and contributions to the JavaScript and Python communities with libraries like SencilloDB and CoquitoJS.

PhD Associate Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, USF Director, Advancing Machine and Human Reasoning Lab

John Licato is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at USF, Director of the USF Advancing Machine and Human Reasoning (AMHR) Lab, and founder of startup Actualization AI. He designed and teaches the natural language processing course (the field that created ChatGPT) at USF, and his lab’s mission is to not only make AI smarter, but to use those advances to make people reason better as well. His research expertise lies in AI, NLP, human reasoning, cognitive modeling, and legal/regulatory reasoning.

Jared Lander is Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics, the Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming Meetup and the New York R and Government & Public Sector R Conferences, an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School, and a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University. Jared oversees the long-term direction of the company and researches the best strategy, models and algorithms for modern data needs. He specializes in data management, multilevel models, machine learning, generalized linear models, visualization and statistical computing.

Mr. Jim Smith, former Acquisition Executive for U.S. Special Operations Command, managed support for global operations and has over 30 years of government acquisition experience. Committed to strengthening the industrial base and technology sector for national defense, he served as an infantry officer before transitioning to Army acquisition, where he led the development, procurement, and fielding of state-of-the-art technologies. After 27 years as an Army officer, he served 10 more years as a Senior Executive in Special Operations Command.

Casey Johnson is the VP of Business Development at Certus Core. He is a 20 year veteran of the Navy, with experience across Special Operations and Navy intelligence, linguistics and cryptology. He has led sales and client success teams across a multitude of startups, in various stages, to include Palantir, Dataminr & Govini. He served as Digital Services Expert at Defense Digital Service (DDS), directly supporting the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) where he assisted and led programs in the technical transformation of the Department of Defense.