Speakers
Jacob Soll
Professor of History and Accounting, Leventhal School of Accounting, University of Southern California
"The Role of Accounting in a Prosperous Society: A Historical Perspective"
Jacob Soll is a Professor of History and Accounting, Leventhal School of Accounting, University of Southern California. He was previously Professor of History at Rutgers University, and has lectured at Princeton University and held visiting scholarships at the National Library of Portugal, Lisbon, and Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as the Fernand Braudel Professorship at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy.
Soll is the author of three books: Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations; The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Information System; and Publishing The Prince: History, Reading and the Birth of Political Criticism, which won the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society. He has also received a number of awards and grants, including the MacArthur “Genius” Grant, a 2005 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.
He is a regular contributor to The New Republic, The Boston Globe, and The American Historical Review, and his articles have appeared in the New York Times, Book Forum, Slate, and The Journal of Modern History. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Samia Msadek
Governance Global Practice Group, World Bank
Samia Msadek is the Director, Governance Global Practice Group and is in charge of the Public Resource Mobilization and Management Department. In her new role she is leading the Financial Management agenda in the public and private sectors in the World Bank Group’s member countries and her goal is to use global knowledge to meet local needs with efficiency and effectiveness.
A Tunisian national, she joined the World Bank Group in 1998 as Financial Management Specialist in the Rural Development, Water and Environment Sector in the Middle East & North Africa (MNA) region. She has since then held different positions in the institution including Manager, Financial Management in MNA and East Asia and Pacific (EAP) regions and Director of Operational Services and Quality and Director Operations and Strategy in the Europe & Central Asia (ECA) region.
Before joining the Bank, she spent 15 years including 12 years with Arthur Andersen in the accounting, auditing and business consulting areas covering a wide range of line of services in a variety of sectors. Over the last 30 years she worked extensively with public and private institutions and International Organizations, to enhance Public Financial Accountability and advocated with passion and professionalism for enhanced transparency and adherence to good governance principles to eradicate poverty and achieve better shared prosperity.
Charles M. C. Lee
Graduate School of Business (GSB), Stanford University
"Building Bridges from the Academy to the Business Community"
Charles M. C. Lee is the Joseph McDonald Professor of Accounting at the Graduate School of Business (GSB), Stanford University. He is also a Senior Academic Fellow of the Asian Bureau of Financial and Economic Research (ABFER), and Co-Founder of Nipun Capital, LLC, a San Francisco based asset management firm focused on Asian equities.
Professor Lee studies the effect of human cognitive constraints on market participants and other factors that impact the efficiency with which market prices incorporate information. His work on market microstructure, investor sentiment, equity valuation, and financial analysis is widely published in leading academic journals in Accounting and Finance, and he has received numerous awards and honors for this research. He has also received nine school-wide Teaching Excellence Awards (at Michigan, Cornell, and Stanford).
From 2004 to July 2008, Dr. Lee was Managing Director at Barclays Global Investors (BGI; now Blackrock). As the firm’s Global Head of Equity Research and Co-Head of North America Active Equities, he led BGI’s world-wide active equity research team and was jointly responsible for its North American active equity business. During his tenure, the firm had over $300 Billion USD in active equity strategies. He joined Stanford GSB as a Visiting Professor in July 2008 while continuing to serve as a Senior Consultant to BGI, and became a full-time faculty member in July 2009.
Professor Lee is former Editor or Associate Editor of numerous academic journals, including: The Accounting Review, Journal of Finance, Management Science, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Review of Accounting Studies, and the Financial Analysts Journal.
Professor Lee received his BMath from the University of Waterloo (1981), and his MBA (1989) and PhD (1990) from Cornell University. He has been a faculty member at the Michigan Business School (1990-95) and the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University (1996-2004). From 1995-96 he was Visiting Economist at the New York Stock Exchange. At Cornell he held the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professorship in Management and was Director of the Parker Center for Investment Research.
Prior to entering academic life, he spent five years in public accounting, the last three in the National Research Department of KPMG, Toronto, Canada. He holds a Certificate in Biblical Studies from Ontario Theological Seminary, and is fluent in Mandarin Chinese.
The Second City Works
"Learning to Think Like an Improviser"
Actors from Chicago’s renowned comedy theater, The Second City, will reveal the secrets of successful improv comedy and demonstrate how those secrets can be applied in your classes everyday to make them more efficient, effective, and engaging experiences for both you and your students!
During the presentation you will:
See improv skills in action as we do what we do best…improvise live.
Hear how improv skills have worked for us as the leaders in comedy for over 55 years.
Do - you will try the skills for yourselves and feel the power of improv.
And you will leave more confident, more nimble, and more aware.
Thomas H. Davenport
President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College
Thomas Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, the co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, a Fellow of the MIT Center for Digital Business, and a Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics. He teaches analytics and big data in executive programs at Babson, Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School, and Boston University. He pioneered the concept of “competing on analytics” with his best-selling 2006 Harvard Business Review article (and his 2007 book by the same name). His most recent book is Big Data@Work, from Harvard Business Review Press. He wrote or edited sixteen other books and over 100 articles for Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, the Financial Times, and many other publications. He also writes a weekly column for the Wall Street Journal’s Corporate Technology section.
In 2003, Professor Davenport was named one of the world’s “Top 25 Consultants” by Consulting magazine. In 2005 Optimize magazine’s readers named him among the top 3 business/technology analysts in the world. In 2007 and 2008 he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the IT industry by Ziff-Davis magazines. In 2012 he was named one of the world’s top fifty business school professors by Fortune magazine.
Brian Sommer
Vital Analysis
"The Big Impact of Big Data on Accounting"
Brian Sommer, a ZDNet & Diginomica contributor and renowned accounting software expert. Prior to his current role at Vital Analysis, Brian served as a senior partner at Accenture. Brian has sold, designed and implemented massive financial and HR solutions around the world and has been active on the industry speaking circuit on most every continent. Brian has written extensively on business value and ROI for prestigious publications like Optimize and the Wall Street Journal Europe.
Brian has advised over 100 of the Fortune 500 on financial software selections and continues to advise a wide array of high technology firms globally. He has testified before US Treasury Department’s Pathways Commission regarding the future of accounting profession; published over 600 articles on the technology space; keynoted numerous financial accounting software conferences including events for NetSuite, PeopleSoft, and Sage, as well as for the American Accounting Association’s Transformative Technologies group and the AICPA; won several awards including Software Advice’s 2011 Authority Award – ERP Expert (2011) and an ERP Writers’ Award (2014); and holds the VP-Practice role (volunteer) with the American Accounting Association’s Strategic Enabling Technologies team.
At Accenture, Brian established and ran their worldwide centers of excellence for Finance and HR. He was also their Worldwide Director for their Software Intelligence Unit. Brian is a frequent guest lecturer at major university MBA programs including Harvard Graduate School, Wharton School of Business and Arizona State University.
Brian has a Business Bachelor of Arts, Marketing, University of Texas at Austin and a Masters of Business Administration, Finance, University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Ann Cavoukian
Executive Director of the Privacy and Big Data Institute at Ryerson University
"Embed Privacy into Big Data Analytics - by Design: Accounting's Role"
Dr. Ann Cavoukian is recognized as one of the world’s leading privacy experts. She is presently the Executive Director of the Privacy and Big Data Institute at Ryerson University. Appointed as the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada in 1997, Dr. Cavoukian served an unprecedented three terms as Commissioner. There she created Privacy by Design, a framework that seeks to proactively embed privacy into the design specifications of information technologies, networked infrastructure and business practices, thereby achieving the strongest protection possible. In October 2010, regulators at the International Conference of Data Protection Authorities and Privacy Commissioners unanimously passed a Resolution recognizing Privacy by Design as an essential component of fundamental privacy protection. Since then, PbD has been translated into 37 languages.
Dr. Cavoukian’s expertise has been recognized in many ways. She was: ranked among the top 25 Women of Influence, recognizing her contribution to the Canadian and global economy; named one of the top 100 City Innovators Worldwide by UBM Future Cities for her passionate advocacy of Privacy by Design; chosen as one of the ‘Power 50’ by Canadian Business magazine for her tireless efforts as a privacy champion; awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Guelph; she was selected for Maclean’s Magazine’s ‘Power List’ of the top 50 Canadians, and most recently, picked as one of the top 10 women in data security, compliance, and privacy you should follow on Twitter.
In her leadership of the Privacy and Big Data Institute at Ryerson University Dr. Cavoukian is dedicated to demonstrating that Privacy can and must be included, side by side, with other functionalities such as security and business interests. Her mantra of “banish zero-sum” enables multiple interests to be served simultaneously – not one to the exclusion of the others.
Bruce Behn
University of Tennessee
Bruce Behn is the Deloitte LLP Professor, CBER Faculty Fellow, and Associate Dean for Graduate Programs and Executive Education at The University of Tennessee. He has taught at Arizona State University and The University of Tennessee, where he previously served as Chair of the Department of Accounting and Information Management. Prior to obtaining his PhD at Arizona State University, he gained international professional experience in Uithoorn, The Netherlands, as international financial coordinator for Allen-Bradley Europa B.V. and the controller for PTI Controls in Tecate, Mexico. He also has domestic professional experience with Allen-Bradley Company as controller and financial analyst and KPMG Peat Marwick as senior auditor. Professor Behn has published widely in peer-reviewed journals including The Accounting Review, Accounting Horizons, Issues in Accounting Education, Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, and Contemporary Accounting Research.
Professor Behn has 25 years’ experience teaching and has received over 20 awards for teaching excellence. He is the recipient of the AAA Innovation in Accounting Education Award (1999), IAS Section’s Outstanding Service Award (2008), and Beta Alpha Psi’s Business Information Professional of the Year (2012). He has served on numerous AAA committees and task forces including the Membership Advisory Committee, Accounting Education Committee, Deloitte Wildman Committee, Governance Task Force, and the Pathways Commission. He has held numerous AAA Section leadership positions over the years, and is the incoming President (2015-2016) of the AAA.