Our team
Meet the People who make HeyStaks Great
Dr. Maurice Coyle
CEO & Founder
Maurice has over 10 years' experience researching and developing innovative collaborative search technologies. His Ph.D. research examined the nature of collaboration and social network effects in enterprise social search environments and community-based personalization in video sharing contexts, winning best paper awards at major international conferences. In 2010 he co-founded HeyStaks with Pete and Barry.
- Ph.D. in social network effects and explanation in collaborative search
- Best paper awards at leading conferences and journals
- Internationalization engineer in Sun Microsystems
Dr. Peter Briggs
CTO & Founder
- Ph.D. in user modeling, trust and reputation in collaborative search environments
- Papers at leading conferences and journals, 1 best paper award
- Device driver test engineer in sun Microsystems
Prof. Barry Smyth
Chief Scientist & Founder
Barry is a leading academic in collaborative recommendation, machine learning and data analytics. His over 600 publications in major international journals, conferences and industry publications have garnered many awards for academic and commercial excellence. An earlier mobile personalization spin-out company that he co-founded, ChangingWorlds, was acquired by Amdocs International in 2008 for $60M.
- Professor of computer science in University College Dublin, a leading Irish university
- Distinguished academic in fields of collaborative filtering, recommender systems, case-based reasoning, with many papers and awards
- Director of €42M INSIGHT centre for big data analytics
Gearoid Kenny
Head of Sales
Gearoid has worked in the Telecoms Industry for 15 years. His commercial roles included Sales Management, Account Management and Business Development. He has worked in both multinational and startup environments. Gearoid owns the sales function within HeyStaks and is responsible for all aspects of client relationships.
- Prior to joining Heystaks, Gearoid worked for Ericsson in a number of key international roles where he traveled globally and worked with people from all cultures
- Gearoid has also worked in the professional services sector as a consultant with Ernst and Young, where he delivered projects in the IT and Government sectors
Sebastian Gavarini
Senior Engineer
Sebastian is a senior engineer at HeyStaks who has been working in IT for the past twelve years. His previous experience includes time spent as a search specialist for customers around the world as well as varied positions in the industry as technical and enterprise architect, infrastructure administrator, and back end developer. His focus at HeyStaks is on search technologies and scalable architectures.
- Qualified Systems Engineer, UNICEN, Argentina
- Co-founded a web start-up vertical search engine and internet crawler
- Designed and implemented an advertising platform search component and optimizer
Johannes Tomin
Senior Engineer
Johannes is a passionate software engineer with 7 years professional experience. Among others he has worked for Accenture where he was deployed to numerous international projects in the financial and digital marketing industry. He is experienced in engineering large scale enterprise applications including their design, implementation and maintenance. Johannes was technical project manager for the implementation of the regulatory Basel III requirements.
- Software engineer for Accenture in Germany and Ireland.
- Strong focus on data mining algorithms and big data processing (Hadoop, Spark)
- Designed heuristic graphics algorithm for contouring in networks
Rami Albatal
Data Scientist
Rami is the Data Scientist of HeyStaks. Ph.D. in Computer Science from Joseph Fourier University, France 2010. Alumni of Insight Centre for Data Analytics - DCU where he was co-leader of the Lifelogging group. His expertise lies in the area of Machine Learning, Lifelogging and Computer Vision. Rami is working on advanced Big Data solutions for user intents and behavioral analysis.
- Founder & organiser of the Lifelogging@Dublin Meetup Group
- Designer of behavioral analysis and privacy aware solutions for Google Glass and wearables
- Successful funding applications for research and commercialisation projects with Enterprise Ireland and SFI
- Books, Journals and Papers at leading conferences
Ricardo Hernández
Operations Engineer
Ricardo has a wealth of experience with the design and implementation of data centre architecture and DevOps practices as well as cloud solutions deployments. Previous experience on Supporting roles, as Infrastructure Engineer, Technology deployment lead and DevOps specialist. His expertise lies on redundancy technology architecturesn, cloud and mixed environments and deployment automation. His focus at HeyStaks is to design, implement, monitor and maintain the platform that sustain the services.
- Working with deployment automation and DevOps good practices since 2010.
- Leading projects of high scale impact on public and private sector involving several disciplines like Security, Networking, Development, and Databases.
- ITILv3 certified and Linux LPI certified