Keynote Speakers

Ricardo (Rick) J. Echevarria

Vice President and General Manager of Security Sales, Intel Corp.

Ricardo (Rick) J. Echevarria is the vice president and general manager of Security Sales at Intel Corp. A growth-minded business leader with more than 25 years of success spanning technology, cybersecurity, professional services, and enterprise software, Echevarria has held a variety of leadership positions with Intel. He has overseen divisions responsible for the corporate segment personal computing P&L, which resulted in 40% volume growth for Intel's most profitable platform in this segment, as well as the management, development, and delivery of Intel's cybersecurity technology roadmap. He was instrumental in the growth and development of the worldwide software developer ecosystem for Intel architecture-based products and was responsible for building a worldwide professional services organization inside Intel.

Before assuming his current role, Echevarria led Intel's Olympics and Paralympics Office where he was responsible for establishing and accelerating Intel technology solutions in the market through exclusive and transformational integrations on one of the largest international platforms in the work, the Olympic Games. He has also been leading Intel's Pandemic Response Technology Initiative. This includes the management of a $50M fund targeted at investments in pandemic response and readiness, online learning, and ecosystem/partner innovation.

Echevarria has also served as vice president of software and services and general manager of Platforms Security, leading Intel's efforts to transform security across the computing landscape. Echevarria built the foundation for security strategies at Intel from the edge to the cloud and from devices to data centers, demonstrating his ability to execute across a broad enterprise context. In this role he established strategic partnerships with Cisco, Microsoft, and Purdue University among others.

Echevarria has a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from Purdue University and a master's degree in computer systems management from Union College. He has served as chair of the Intel Hispanic Leadership Council and held positions on the Board of Directors for the Boy Scouts of America Cascade Pacific Council and the Board of Trustees for Saint Andrew Nativity in Portland, Oregon. Echevarria was named one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics in Business by Hispanic Business Magazine and a 2020 Power Player for the Olympics by the Sports Business Journal. He also received the Industrial Engineering Outstanding Alum Award from the Purdue University School of Industrial Engineering and the Distinguished Engineer Award from Purdue University's College of Engineering.

Cassandra Sotos

Entrepreneur, Co-Owner and CEO, AmpRx
Violinist and Recording Artist

Cassandra Sotos is an entrepreneur, co-owner and CEO of AmpRx, as well as an internationally recognized violinist and recording artist.

Her journey as a musician started in Western Pennsylvania at the age of four when she first picked up her violin – by 13, she was performing in honkytonks and dive bars. After attending Penn State, studying industrial engineering and a brief detour in consulting, she realized she needed to re-devote her life to music and moved to Nashville, Tennessee. Although she grew up playing country and rock and has worked with many incredible artists, she is most well known for touring all over the world as the violinist with international Bollywood star Arijit Singh.

Also possessing an unyielding passion for entrepreneurship, Sotos has returned to the world of engineering and business and is now the co-owner and CEO of AmpRx, a music products company that designs and manufactures voltage reduction devises for guitar amplifiers. Their flagship product, the "BrownBox" is a must-have for the serious guitarist and is sold internationally.

She is the co-chair of the Women in Music Nashville chapter and strives to empower young musicians and entrepreneurs, especially women, through her professional and nonprofit work in the industry.

Sotos holds a B.S. with honors in industrial engineering, with a focus in product design and service engineering and a minor in entrepreneurship and innovation from the Pennsylvania State University Schreyer Honors College. She has published research in the areas of product family design, customer experience, marketing segmentation and analytics, and quality function deployment. Listen to her interview "An IE's World on the Strings" on Problem Solved: The IISE Podcast.

Jionghua (Judy) Jin

Professor, Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering
Director, Manufacturing Program
University of Michigan

Jionghua (Judy) Jin is professor in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering and the Director of Manufacturing Program at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the interface of data science and quality engineering to analyze and integrate system design and operational data for quality improvement decisions. Her data fusion methodologies emphasize synergistic fusion of engineering models with advanced statistics, machine learning and optimization algorithms to discover underlying knowledge for predicting and optimizing system performances via data driven decision making.

She has served as a PI/Co-PI of more than $20 million grants funded by federal government agencies and various industrial companies. Her research results have been widely implemented in industrial production systems, and recognized with numerous awards including sixteen Best Paper Awards, Forging Achievement Awards, the NSF CAREER Award, the Presidential (PECASE) Award, etc.

Jin currently serves as the editor for IISE Transactions on Data Science, Quality and Reliability. She was also a former vice president of INFORMS, the chairperson of the INFORMS Quality, Statistics and Reliability Section, and the president of the Quality Control and Reliability Engineering Division in IISE. She is a fellow of ASME, IISE and INFORMS.