Dr. Forest Baskett

Forest joined NEA in 1999 as a Venture Partner and became a General Partner in 2004. Forest focuses on information and energy technology investments. He is the NEA representative on the boards of Arch Rock, AstroWatt, Audience, Chelsio Communications, Fulcrum Microsystems, Serious Materials, SiBEAM and SuVolta. He also assists Alta Devices, Aprius, Azuray Technologies, Bandgap Engineering, Conviva, Fusion-io, Illumitex, Luxtera, NovaTorque, Solar Junction, Solar Storage Company, Svaya Nanotechnologies, Tableau Software and Tintri as either a board member, observer or advisor, usually in conjunction with another member of the NEA investing staff. In the past he has worked with, among others, Aeluros, Atheros Communications (NASDAQ: ATHR), Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP), E2O, Nanochip, Newisys, RingCube Technologies, Telegent Systems, and T-RAM Semiconductor. Forest also previously held advisory positions with FineGround, PolyServe, ReShape and SMIC. Prior to NEA, Forest was Senior Vice President of R&D and Chief Technology Officer of Silicon Graphics Inc. He founded and directed the Western Research Laboratory of Digital Equipment Corporation from 1982 to 1986 before joining SGI. Prior to that, he was a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from 1971 to 1982. He also spent two years at Los Alamos National Laboratory building an operating system for the original Cray-1 computer and a year and a half at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center as a Principal Scientist doing VLSI research. At Stanford, he worked with Andy Bechtolsheim on the SUN workstation project, with Jim Clark on the Geometry Engine project, and with John Hennessy on the MIPS microprocessor project. Dr. Baskett received a BA in Mathematics from Rice University, a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Dr. Paul Mockapetris

Paul is the the inventor of the Domain Name System (DNS), is Chief Scientist and Chairman of the Board at Nominum, Inc. His mission is to help guide DNS and IP addressing to the next stage.

Paul created DNS in the 1980s at USC’s Information Sciences Institute, where he was later the Director of ISI’s High Performance Computing and Communications Division.

Throughout his career, Paul has contributed to the computing research community and to the evolution of the Internet. His earliest work at UC Irvine on distributed systems and LAN technology preceded the commercial Ethernet and Token Ring designs.

At ISI, after working on the design and initial implementation of the SMTP protocol for email as part of the birth of the Internet in 1983, Paul took on the challenge of designing DNS, and then operated the original “root servers” for all Internet names. After the formal creation of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1986, DNS became one of the original Internet Standards. The IETF continues to be the focus of new applications and extensions to DNS. Paul has been associated with the IETF since its creation, chaired several DNS and non-DNS working groups, and was Chair of the IETF from 1994 to 1996.

Paul was program manager for networking at ARPA in the early 1990s, supervising efforts such as gigabit and optical networking. From 1995 on, Paul held leadership roles at several Silicon Valley networking startups, including @Home, Software.com (now OpenWave), Fiberlane (now Cisco), and Siara (now Redback Networks). Paul’s mission at Nominum is to help guide DNS and IP addressing to the next stage.

Paul has dual B.S. degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine.

Dr. Yoshio Nishi

Dr. Nishi is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of Stanford Site of National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network at Stanford University. He is involved in the initiative for Nanoscale materials and processes and for non-volatile memory technologies. He joined the Stanford faculty in 2002. Previously Dr. Nishi was the first to be appointed to Chief Scientist at Texas Instruments. When Dr. Nishi was at TI, he started as Vice President and Director of Research and Development for the Semiconductor Group in 1995, and was elected Senior Vice President in the following year. At TI, he directed research work for the Digital Signal Processing Solutions R&D Center, the Silicon Technology Development at Kilby Center, the Tsukuba R&D Center in Japan, and the Converter Product Development Center in New Jersey and Dallas. Dr. Nishi was also at Hewlett-Packard where he established and became director of the ULSI Research Laboratory, a new advanced research laboratory at HP. At HP, Dr. Nishi also served as Director of the Silicon Process Laboratory and Director of the R&D Center for Integrated Circuits Business Division.

Dr. Nishi started his professional career at Toshiba Corporation where he spent more than 20 years pioneering various semiconductor related researches. His leadership roles include the world’s first CMOS 1Mb dynamic, 256Kb CMOS static and 1Mb CMOS programmable memories. With those achievements, he has been credited as a technology leader who brought Toshiba to the world as a leading memory manufacturer.

Dr. Nishi’s current involvement in other activities includes:

•    Board of Directors, Japan-America Society of Dallas/Fort Worth, 1999-present
•    Advisory Committee, IS&T, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, 1998-present
•    Governing Council, SIA Focus Center Research Programs, 1998-present
•    Executive Advisory Board, MARCO/DARPA Gigascale Silicon Research Center, 1998-present
•    Executive Advisory Board, MARCO Interconnect Research Center, 1998-present
•    Corporate member, Dallas Japanese Association, 1998-present
•    Technology Strategy Committee, SIA, 1997-present
•    Board of Directors, SEMATECH and International SEMATECH, 1996-present
•    Board of Directors, Semiconductor Research Corporation, 1996-present
•    Policy Board, NSF/SRC ERC for Environmentally Benign Semiconductor Manufacturing, 1996-present

Dr. Nishi holds a B.S. in metallurgy from Waseda University and Ph.D. in electronics engineering from the University of Tokyo. Dr. Nishi has published approximately 75 papers in international technical journals and conferences and has co-authored nine books. He has been awarded more than 50 patents in the U.S. and Japan. He received IEEE Fellow Award (1987), 1995 IEEE Jack A. Morton Award for “Contributions to the basic understanding and innovative development of MOS device technology” and became 2002 IEEE Robert Noyce Medal winner for “Strategic leadership in global semiconductor research and development”.

Dr. Ali Sayed

Dr. Ali H. Sayed is Professor and Chairman of Electrical Engineering at UCLA, where he also directs the UCLA Adaptive Systems Laboratory (www.ee.ucla.edu/asl). He received the degrees of Engineer and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1992.

Dr. Sayed has published widely in archival journals and conference proceedings with over 340 articles and 5 books. Dr. Sayed has over 340 journal and conference publications and 5 books. He is co-author of the research monograph Indefinite Quadratic Estimation and Control (SIAM, PA, 555pp, 1999) and of the graduate-level textbook Linear Estimation (Prentice Hall, NJ, 854pp, 2000). He is also the author of the textbooks Fundamentals of Adaptive Filtering (Wiley, NJ, 1168pp, 2003). This book provides one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date treatments of adaptive system analysis and design. He has also authored Adaptive Filters (Wiley, NJ, 786pp, 2008), and co-editor of the volume Fast Reliable Algorithms for Matrices with Structure (SIAM, PA, 342pp, 1999).

Dr. Sayed has served on the editorial boards of several journals including the SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Its Applications, the International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing, the European Signal Processing journal, and the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2003-2005) and the EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing (2006-2007). Dr. Sayed has contributed several articles to engineering and mathematical encyclopedias and handbooks, and has served on the program committees of several international meetings. He has also consulted with industry on different aspects of adaptive filter design, echo cancellation, channel equalization, and OFDM communications. His research group has been awarded several honors and recognitions. He is a Fellow of IEEE for his contributions to adaptive algorithms and estimation theory.

Prof. Sayed’s research interests span several areas including adaptation and learning, adaptive and complex systems, cognitive networks, flocking behavior and swarming, cooperative behavior, bio-inspired networks and systems, distributed adaptive processing, adaptive networks, self-healing adaptive circuitry, adaptive and statistical signal processing, estimation and filtering theories, signal processing for communications, signal processing for sensor and wireless networks, MIMO signal processing, linear system theory, interplays between signal processing and control methodologies, and reliable and efficient algorithms for large-scale computations.

Dr. William Siegle

William T. (Bill) Siegle received his BSEE, MSEE and Ph.D. all from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He joined IBM in 1964, the year IBM announced the historic System 360. Bill held a number of technical, management and executive roles at IBM in Poughkeepsie, Burlington, Vt, E. Fishkill and Armonk, New York. He was Director of the Advanced Technology Center in E. Fishkill which created the ASTC, IBM’s premier technology development platform through the 1990s. In 1990 he was recruited to Advanced Micro Devices in Sunnyvale, California, where he was appointed Vice President and Chief Scientist. He directed the development of AMD’s technology platforms for logic and flash memory products, which enabled leading edge product production in new wafers fabs in Austin, Texas, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, and Dresden, Germany. In 1998 he was promoted to Sr. Vice President, responsible for AMD’s world-wide manufacturing operations in addition to his continuing role as Chief Scientist. Bill served as a member of the Board of Directors of SRC and as its chairman in 1993. He also has served on the Board of Directors of Sematech, and has been a Director of the public companies, Etec, Inc. and DuPont Photomask, Inc. Currently Dr. Siegle is a member of ASML’s supervisory board as of march 2007. He retired from AMD in April, 2005.