ARRIA NLG Limited

EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP TEAM

Sharon Daniels

Chief Executive Officer

Sharon Daniels is a member of the shareholder group that founded Arria NLG. Sharon has over thirty years’ experience in strategic business development and has consulted to leading global technology and financial services companies. Sharon is also a founder of Diligent Corporation and served on the Diligent board through 2010, where she also held an executive position as Chief Marketing Officer. Prior to joining the Diligent, Sharon was a vice president at the US-based company PaperDirect where she helped develop the business from start-up to acquisition. Throughout Sharon’s career, her entrepreneurial background and business experiences led to helping launch multiple start-up companies and pioneering new product categories. Sharon is a member of Forbes Technology Council, an active speaker, and thought leader in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Technologies.

Jay DeWalt

Chief Operating Officer

Jay DeWalt is the Chief Operating Officer of Arria. Jay is a senior executive with extensive experience and track record in leading revenue growth on a global scale. A key member of the executive teams at growth companies including Arria NLG, Metalogix, Documentum, and EMC. Jay’s leadership and vision played a key role in helping Documentum during its growth phase and acquisition by EMC. Led and built the Documentum/EMC partner ecosystem and Global Account Sales. In addition to leading the partner business, he also led numerous M&A initiatives, Sales Teams, Legato Sales Channel, Global Account Sales, Product and Solution Sales, Product Development, and General Manager roles. Prior to Documentum/EMC, Jay held multiple senior executive positions including Sales, Professional Services, Engineering, and General Manager roles at Unisys and Lockheed Martin.

Thomas Makeig

General Counsel

Thomas Makeig has forty-one years of law practice and business management, giving him wide-ranging experience in business transactions, corporate finance, and litigation, both domestically and internationally. Areas of significant concentration include domestic and transnational private placements of securities, mergers and acquisitions, solvent and insolvent reorganizations, intellectual property portfolio development and exploitation through licensing, software development and integration transactions, online commerce and global issues in cybersecurity and data privacy, transactions and litigation involving corporate governance and control, general business transactions, commercial and employment law litigation and transactions, commercial real estate, city development and telecommunications regulation and transactions. He has advised clients in matters involving private placements of securities, domestic and international tax, bank financing, employment law and executive compensation, intellectual property, litigation and commercial law. He has also led numerous litigations in commercial, capital formation and M&A transactions.

Brian Locke

Chief Security Officer

Brian Locke has over 25-years of experience designing, implementing, and deploying IT, DevOps and security systems suitable for enterprise clients. Brian has a wealth of understanding and the ability to manage and maintain a global infrastructure to address the requirements of Fortune 500 companies worldwide. His professional experience spans across oversight of Security Audits, Cyber Security, Ethical Hacking, Network Engineering, Software Development, and enterprise Risk and Compliance management. Prior to joining Arria in 2017, Brian was part of the core team who developed the IT/Security department for Diligent Corporation. His industry experience includes software services, SaaS, consulting services, Financial Services, and Insurance.

Neil Burnett

Chief Technology Officer

Neil Burnett is a founding member of Arria and was part of the Data2Text team which was formed in 2010 and acquired by Arria in 2012. As CTO, Neil has spearheaded new product development in areas like business intelligence, conversational AI, and generative AI. He has also led initiatives to refine Arria’s technology suite, team structure, and processes to enable the business to scale successfully. Neil has deep expertise across a range of technologies including the range of natural language technologies and LLMs, machine learning, cloud computing, and software engineering. He is also a named inventor on several patents related to Arria’s natural language generation technology. Prior to becoming CTO, Neil held various senior technology roles at Arria including Head of Development. Before joining Arria in 2010, he was Technical Manager at a company where he managed a development team building energy optimization software. He holds an MSc in Computing from the University of Aberdeen and works closely with Arria’s scientists to advance language technologies.

John Poole

Chief Architect

John Poole has over 3 decades of experience leading the design and development of complex, enterprise level, mission critical software systems as well as their deployment and operation at global scale. John joined Arria at its inception in 2012 working closely with the Chief Scientists and founders to commercialize NLG. John is responsible for platform architecture design and development, integration management systems, and AI technology innovations. Prior to joining Arria, John held key positions with global Telecom companies including Optus, MCI, Telstra, and BigPond.

Cathy Herbert

Executive Vice President, Pre-Sales and Support

Cathy Herbert has a professional passion is to drive customer value by achieving unparalleled customer experience. To achieve this, Arria field and partner sales organizations must have the knowledge they need to have valuable conversations with their customers throughout the sales and delivery cycle. Prior to Arria, Cathy spent 20+ years serving in various roles within Dell EMC’s Enterprise Content Division. Her journey began as the first field Sales Engineer for Documentum. From there, she had the pleasure of leading Sales Engineers within the field sales and partner organizations. In 2015 Cathy briefly retired from EMC and joined Metalogix for one year, where she led the deployment and deployment of a scalable customer, partner, and employee training solution.

Mark Goodey

Executive Vice President, Financial Services

Mark Goodey DiP, IoD is a subject matter expert across Financial Services. Mark’s mission is to establish Arria Investment Analyst as the industry leader in NLG for Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI). Mark leads Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) product strategy, and his role includes thought leadership and innovation. He intends to disrupt historical thinking. Always. Mark has been dedicated to the investment performance and portfolio risk analysis profession since 1995. He has led product and strategy and / or the production teams for BNY Mellon, JPMorgan Asset Management, AVIVA Investors and F&C Asset Management plc. Mark’s professional roles were built on a foundation of continuing education from Chartered Association of Certified Accountants (ACCA), Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT), Electronic Engineering & Microcomputer Technology, PRINCE 2, Ashridge Business School and at the Institute of Directors where Mark holds a Diploma in Company Direction, the examined element of the Chartered Director qualification.

Bryan Zwahlen

Executive Vice President, Customer Success

Bryan Zwahlen consistently provides exemplary customer service that is part of the Arria culture and brand. His vast experience in working with thousands of users fuels him to lead new implementation with the confidence and assurance our clients greatly appreciate. Before coming to Arria, Bryan was part of the founding member group of Diligent Corporation and spent the last 20 years in various customer support roles at Diligent. Since 2013, Diligent has won numerous customer service awards. Bryan brings this experience to Arria along with his long-standing relationships and client success strategy of working with enterprise-level clients across multiple industry verticals worldwide.

Prof. Ehud Reiter

Founder, Chief Scientist

Dr. Ehud Reiter is a widely published and cited pioneer in the field of NLG. He is a Professor of Computing Science in the University of Aberdeen School of Natural Science, founder of the University’s NLG research group, and a founder of Data2Text Limited. Professor Reiter co-wrote “Building Natural Language Generation Systems” (2000, Cambridge University Press), a seminal NLG treatise. He is currently Chair of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation (SIGGEN). His current university research focuses on healthcare applications of NLG and on evaluating NLG systems. He holds a PhD from Harvard University.

Dr. Yaji Sripada

Founder, Chief Scientist

Dr. Somayajulu (“Yaji”) Sripada is a Senior Lecturer in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen and a founder of Arria Data2Text Limited. Dr Sripada’s research is at the intersection of data science, machine learning and natural language generation. He holds a PhD in Natural Language Generation from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India. Dr. Sripada is widely published and cited about NLG, particularly data-to-text NLG. He joined the Aberdeen NLG group in the year 2000, and his post-doctoral work developed the foundations of data-to-text NLG. In 2004, his team created the NLG weather reports that were for the first time rated by users as better than human-authored texts because NLG reports used consistent linguistic verbalization of weather information. More recently, Dr Sripada is working on Explainable AI (XAI) and Table-to-Text (T2T) neural NLG techniques.