Team

We’re on a mission to help organizations turn smart insights into smart actions.

Carole-Ann Berlioz

Co-Founder and CPO
Carole-Ann is a renowned guru in the Analytics, Decision Management and Business Rules space. She created the vision for Decision Management that is widely adopted now in the industry. Her claim to fame is managing the strategy and direction of Blaze Advisor, a leading BRMS / Business Rules product, while she also managed all the Decision Management tools at FICO (business rules, predictive analytics and optimization).

She has a vision for Decision Management both as a technology and a discipline that can revolutionize the way corporations do business, and will never get tired of painting that vision for her audience. She speaks often at Industry conferences and has conducted university classes in France and Washington DC.

She started her career building advanced systems using all kinds of technologies — expert systems, business rules, optimization, dashboarding and cubes, web search, and beta version of database replication. At Cleversys (acquired by Kurt Salmon & Associates), she also conducted strategic consulting gigs around change management.

While playing with advanced software components, she found a passion for technology and joined ILOG (acquired by IBM) where she developed a growing interest in Optimization as well as Business Rules. At ILOG she coined the term BRMS (Business Rules Management System) while brainstorming with her Sales counterpart. She led the Presales organization for Telecom in the Americas up until 2000 when she joined Blaze Software (acquired by Brokat Technologies, HNC Software and finally FICO).

Her 360-degree experience has allowed her to gain appreciation for all aspects of a software company, giving her a unique perspective on the business. Her technical background kept her very much in touch with technology as she advanced.

Robert Cooper

VP of Sales
Bob has successfully run sales operations ranging from start-ups to greater than $250M in annual revenues. He joins Sparkling Logic after prior sales executive roles most recently with IBM and ILOG SA. Bob has a bachelor’s degree from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario; and studied graduate business at George Washington University in Washington, DC. He lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife and daughter. Bob is active in community programs that include Arlington and Fairfax County youth sports and, as a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors for the Arlington Food Assistance Center.

Marc Lerman

VP of User Experience
Marc was one of the early lead technical architects of the Blaze Advisor IDE at FICO, after a few years spent working on Neuron Data’s Nexpert expert system, and Open Interface (a cross-platform UI toolkit). He also worked as a consultant for government and large institutions on software design and methodology, as well as on performance improvement of applications in production. Marc holds an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (UK). He is based in Paris, France.

Jihae Hwang

VP of Data Science
Jihae has an extensive data science background, especially in finance companies including Goldman Sachs and Enova. He has also led data science teams for start-ups, mostly recently as the Director of Analytics for Align, where he was responsible for building out and implementing the company’s first ML-based credit model. Upon Align being acquired by Enova, he eventually moved on to lead data science efforts for Enova Decisions, where he led the architecting and implementation of full decisioning flows for multiple clients. Jihae is the most passionate about being a problem solver for businesses using a data-driven approach and being able to support data science teams in that endeavor. He holds a MS in Finance from Kellstadt School of Business and a BA in Math and Economics from Northwestern University.

Dr. Charles Forgy, PhD

Dr. Charles Forgy received a BS in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1972, and his Ph.D. in 1979 from CMU. A student of Allen Newell, he received his Ph.D. based on the Rete Algorithm which is now the main engine used by Business Rules Management Systems. Dr. Forgy remained at Carnegie Mellon post-graduation and worked on further improvements to OPS. He was co-principal investigator on a DARPA funded contract to develop parallel hardware for production systems. In 1983, he founded Production Systems Technologies (PST) to develop and sell rule-based software, where he developed Rete II, a more efficient successor to Rete. Rete II enabled rulebased programs to run between 50 and 100 times faster than the original Rete algorithm, with the performance gains increasing with the complexity of the rules. Dr. Forgy was also Chief Scientist with Rules Power where he developed Rete III extensions for rulebased Workflow systems. After Rules Power was bought by Fair Isaac (FICO), he adapted the Rete III engine for FICO Blaze Advisor. More recently, Dr. Forgy has developed Rete-NT, a more advanced inference algorithm than Rete 2 or Rete which enables highly scalable business rules applications, and has created a parallel rule engine used by some of the clients of PST. Dr. Forgy now licenses the Rete-NT algorithm to Sparkling Logic. He also contributes his considerable experience to the R&D efforts of the company.

Patrick Perez

Since 1999 Patrick has been an Angel investor for more than 25 start-ups and a Consultant for Large players in the US & Europe – including Vodafone the Mobile world leader, Vivendi, and Universal Music Film TV and Games. He specializes in the convergence of multi-platform web Content / Community / Commerce and contributes to the rising of a Web 3.0 that combines Semantic & Social Web. In 1985, Patrick was the co-Founder, CEO and Chairman of Neuron Data in Palo Alto, CA. Neuron Data became the world leader in Expert Systems with NEXPERT, and then a world leader in Business Rules with Blaze Advisor. Patrick was a Director of Neuron Data until its IPO on the NASDAQ in 2000 under its new name Blaze Software. Blaze software is now part of FICO, NYSE. In 1984 at BBDO, Patrick was the Creative & Strategic Planner for the launch of the Apple Macintosh in Europe.

Larry E. Rosenberger

Larry Rosenberger assumed the role of Fair Isaac’s first Research Fellow in October, 2007 and currently fulfills that role on a half-time basis, continuing a 36 year career with the company that began in 1974. From 1999 to 2007, he led Fair Isaac’s Research Unit, focused on early stage innovation in predictive and decision analytics focused on helping consumer products and services clients make better decisions on their prospects and customers. From 1991 to 1999, he served as President and CEO. During that time, Fair Isaac experienced consecutive years of record growth, with annual revenues increasing from $31 million to over $276 million. Prior to that position, he led the Engineering, R&D Division focused on the technical development, production and marketing of the company’s most advanced products, such as TRIAD adaptive control and the FICO Score as well as advances in predictive analytics methodology. Larry holds a B.S. in physics from MIT and an M.S. in physics and a M.S. and an M.Eng. in Operations Research from UC, Berkeley. In the for-profit world, he currently serves on the boards of three early-stage privately-held companies: chairs Global Analytics (San Diego), ECCOgen (San Francisco), GMH International (Boston). In the non-profit world, he currently serves on the boards of The Buck Institute for Education (Marin County), Swords-to-Plowshares (San Francisco), and Envision Schools (San Francisco Bay Area). In addition to board work, he advises seven organizations – four for-profits: Sparkling Logic, Crimson Informatics, Scorelogix and DeMyst – three non-profits: the IEOR Department at UC Berkeley (wher he chairs the Advisory Board); E3; 10,000 Degrees. He co-authored: “The Deciding Factor: The Power of Analytics to Make Every Decision a Winner” (2009). Larry and his wife, Diane, have two sons and four young grandchildren.