Technology Summit for Victim Service Providers

Scott Berkowitz, Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network

Scott Berkowitz is the founder and president of RAINN, America's largest anti-sexual violence organization. RAINN created and operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline and educates more than 130 million Americans a year about sexual assault. RAINN also runs the National Sexual Assault Online Hotline, which was the nation's first real-time, secure counseling hotline. The Online Hotline won a Technology Innovation Award from Npower and was cited as a model program by the Justice Department. RAINN also operates the Safe Helpline for the Defense Department, and developed an app that won the American Telemedicine Association's President's Award for Innovation. Recognizing RAINN's “effectiveness, efficiency and professionalism,” Worth magazine selected RAINN as one of “America's 100 Best Charities.” Berkowitz is also the CEO of A&I Media, a firm that specializes in media start-ups, acquisitions, and management. Previously, Berkowitz served as publisher of Campaigns & Elections magazine. He holds a B.A. from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass.

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Andrea Casanova, ALLY Foundation

Andrea Casanova and Steven Stiles are co-founders of the ALLY Foundation, whose mission is to prevent sexual violence through systemic change, root cause, and data-driven research, and to mainstream public awareness for this need. For 12 years they have been “changing the terms of the discussion,” advocating for an intelligent, evidence-based approach to sexual offense law, policy, and culture change. Following the murder of their daughter, Alexandra, by a repeat sex offender, Casanova and Stiles realized there was no comprehensive organization employing accurate data to inform policy; to advocate for the necessary intelligent, effective change to bring sexual offense perpetrators to justice; and to absolve those wrongly accused. ALLY views sexual violence as an ecosystem, and Casanova and Stiles are championing a collective impact approach to create an organization to create solutions as opposed to services. Prior to ALLY, they each were in business, having no prior relationship with this field.

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Chris Diehl, The Data Guild

Chris Diehl has extensive experience defining and developing analytics for a variety of sense-making and prediction tasks. As the principal data scientist at Jive Software, he focused on designing and developing advanced analytics for enterprise social search and online community health assessment. Prior to Jive, Diehl spent more than 10 years as a senior research scientist at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There he defined and developed machine learning approaches to address a variety of inference challenges across the Department of Defense and intelligence community. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

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Tim Dierks, Laura and John Arnold Foundation

Tim Dierks leads technology projects for criminal justice initiatives at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. He joined LJAF from a career as a software engineer and engineering manager at Google, where he founded Google Wallet and developed advertising platforms and internal systems; Apple, where he led system software projects; AOL, where he was CTO of the Huffington Post Media Group; and at startups and established companies in the information security and cryptography industries. He holds patents in several areas, including encryption technology, e-commerce, and online advertising. He also advises New York City startup companies and non-profits on technology and strategy issues. He and his family live in Brooklyn, NY.

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Jennifer Di Nicola, National Runaway Safeline

Jennifer Di Nicola serves as the call center manager for the National Runaway Safeline (NRS), the federally designated national communication system for runaway and homeless youth. NRS makes more than 250,000 connections to help and hope through hotline, online, and offline resources. Di Nicola serves as an advisory board member for Crisis Text Line (CTL), a national text-based service for youth in crisis. She holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and has 15 years of experience in providing direct crisis line services and managing call center operations, including: data collection, reporting, program evaluation, and managing NRS' phone and online service delivery by staff and more than 165 trained crisis line volunteers.

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Joye E. Frost, Office for Victims of Crime

President Obama appointed Joye E. Frost as the director of the Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) in June 2013. She launched the Vision 21: Transforming Victim Services initiative to expand the impact of the victim assistance field and championed the need for innovation, technology, and research in OVC's efforts to build capacity in the field. She fostered a groundbreaking partnership between OVC and the Department of Defense to strengthen support to military victims of sexual assault, has overseen the development of OVC's human trafficking program, and was instrumental in the creation of OVC's Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner and Sexual Assault Response Team training and technical assistance initiatives. Her career spans almost 40 years in the victim assistance, healthcare, and disability advocacy fields.

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Sarah Michal Greathouse, RAND Corporation

Sarah Greathouse is a full behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. Her research uses social science theory and research methods to examine the efficacy of processes within the criminal justice system. She is currently working on the BJS funded project to develop an establishment survey of victim service organizations, an NIJ funded study to develop a performance management information system that will identify police officers and correctional officers at risk for severe disciplinary action, an NIJ funded study examining how forensic evidence is used in investigations and prosecutions, and an NIJ funded study to experimentally evaluate an intervention to reduce gun violence. Prior to coming to RAND, she was an assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University.

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Brian A. Jackson, RAND Corporation

Brian A. Jackson is a senior physical scientist at the RAND Corporation, director of the RAND Safety and Justice Program, and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His research focuses on homeland security and terrorism preparedness. His areas of examination have included safety management in large-scale emergency response operations, the equipment and technology needs of emergency responders, and design of preparedness exercises. Jackson's terrorism-focused research has examined organizational learning by terrorist groups, terrorist groups' use of technology, development of assessment methods for novel terrorist threats, and examination of the strategies to respond to terrorist targeting of national economies. Jackson received his M.A. in science, technology, and public policy from The George Washington University and his Ph.D. in bioinorganic chemistry from the California Institute of Technology.

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Teresa Ko, Google

Teresa Ko is a senior software engineer at Google, where she develops algorithms for photo search. Previously, she was a co-founder at Wertago, a mobile nightlife startup and grand prizewinner of Google's first Android Developer Challenge, where she developed on Android and iOS platforms. Ko also worked as a senior member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories on wireless sensor networks, embedded sensors, and agent-based modeling. She holds a Ph.D. in computer vision from the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as a bachelor's and master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Janxin Leu, HopeLab

Janxin Leu is the director of product innovation at HopeLab, an R&D organization that promotes human resilience and inner values through social tech innovation. Leu was formerly a psychology professor at the University of Washington, studying emotion and mental health in immigrant communities and in Buddhist traditions. She created the cultural curriculum for the Emmy-nominated Nick, Jr. show Ni hao, Kai-lan! Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Time magazine, and The Seattle Times. Leu was elected as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar and to the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan and completed a B.A. and M.A. in psychology from Stanford University. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and daughter.

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Nelson Lim, RAND Corporation

Nelson Lim is a senior social scientist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Lim is currently the principal investigator on the BJS funded project to develop an establishment survey of victim service organizations, National Survey of Victim Service Organizations (NSVSO). He also recently led an effort to develop a GIS planning tool for the U.S. Air Force (USAF) to identify locations for its diversity outreach and recruiting events. The tool integrates data from various sources, including databases from Department of Education and USAF administrative data, to rank geographical areas across the country, based on USAF's diversity and recruiting objectives. The tool is also designed to interact with Google Earth to select the event site. Other research interests include military manpower analysis, diversity management, and police recruiting. Lim has conducted studies of military recruiting and retention of active duty as well as reserve components for the U.S. Army and USAF. In addition, he has examined the influence of military life conditions on the labor market situations of military spouses. Lim has also conducted research on the most effective diversity practices by Fortune 500 companies and on barriers to improve diversity among the leadership of various government agencies and corporations, including the National Security Agency, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Army, and USAF. Lim received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Paula Lucas, Americans Overseas Domestic Violence Crisis Center, Sexual Assault Support & Help For Americans Abroad Program

Paula Lucas is the founder and executive director of the Americans Overseas Domestic Violence Crisis Center, AODVC, and the Sexual Assault Support & Help For Americans Abroad Program, SASHAA. The center operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, serving the 6.5 million Americans living overseas, the 68 million Americans who travel overseas annually, and the 750,000 military personnel and their dependents overseas. Services are provided via an international toll-free hotline, 866-USWOMEN, live chat, and crisis email. They include advocacy, safety planning, lethality assessment, referrals, danger to safety relocation in the foreign country or back to the USA, legal consultations and representation, cash assistance for emergency needs, housing and utilities, and counseling. Lucas is also an author, an international speaker, a social entrepreneur, and an expert on providing services to a globally disbursed population of American domestic violence and sexual assault victims overseas.

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Jennifer Marsh, Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network

Marsh currently works for the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), the nation's largest anti-sexual assault organization, managing the National Sexual Assault Hotline and coordinating services and communication with 1,100 affiliate sexual assault service providers nationwide. In addition, she acts as the RAINN project manager for the Department of Defense (DOD) Safe Helpline, serving the DOD community worldwide. With more than 10 years of experience in the field of nonprofit management, Marsh has been published in the journal, Evaluation and Program Planning, and has presented at national victim services conferences on online crisis intervention best practices. Marsh testified before Congress in the spring of 2011, and is a member of the U.S. Department of Justice National Victim Assistance Standards Consortium and the Department of Defense Sexual Assault Advocate Credentialing Program Certification Committee. In 2012, Marsh was appointed by the director of the Peace Corps to serve as chair of the Volunteer Sexual Assault Advisory Council. She has been featured on ABC News, NBC News and CNN, as well as in People, Seventeen, and Cosmopolitan magazines.

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Herman Millholland, End Violence Against Women International

Herman Millholland is an independent consultant with Millholland & Associates and has more than two decades of experience in the crime victims field. He currently serves on the board of directors as president of End Violence against Women International (EVAWI), an educational organization whose mission is training and educating criminal justice professionals in the response to sexual and domestic violence, stalking, and trafficking. As a consultant and national victim advocate, his work includes providing guidance and advice on public policy matters to community and systems-based organizations; federal, state and local governments; and non-profit and for-profit organizations whose work seeks to advance the rights and improve services to crime victims. Millholland also has extensive experience in executive-level management and strategic planning, financial management, public policy and legislative analysis, training and technical assistance, non-profit board development and governance, and professional development strategies for victim services organizations.

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Ravi Mishra, ReliableCoders

Ravi Mishra is a co-founder and vice president of Business Development & Technology at ReliableCoders, Inc. He has being helping both enterprise companies such as Verizon Wireless, Cisco, and Adobe, as well as startups such as Fridge (acquired by Google) in building mobile and web services for the past 20 years. His expertise is building cross-platform mobile services in enterprise, healthcare, non-profits, and security space.

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Brian Pinero, National Domestic Violence Hotline

Brian Pinero is the director of Digital Services for the National Domestic Violence Hotline and its youth-focused project, loveisrespect.org. For more than a decade, Pinero has been dedicated to helping teens and young adults. He has previously supervised youth shelter services, was an investigator at Child Protective Services, and worked as a juvenile probation officer. At loveisrespect, he oversaw the initial rollout of chat services in 2007 and text message (SMS) services in 2011. He also oversaw the rollout of chat services for the National Domestic Violence Hotline in 2013 and provides technical assistance to the domestic violence and human services field. He also is a National Advisory Board Member for Crisis Text Line. Pinero holds a master's degree in social work from the University of Texas.

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Cheryl Porro, salesforce.com Foundation

Cheryl Porro is senior vice president of Technology & Products for the salesforce.com Foundation. She and her team are responsible for driving product strategy and product delivery to meet the needs of nonprofits and higher education institutions that use salesforce.com products to achieve their missions as well as providing IT application support for all aspects of the Foundation's business including support for the 1/1/1 model of integrated corporate philanthropy pioneered by salesforce.com. Prior to joining the foundation, Porro held numerous engineering positions with salesforce.com, DigitalThink Inc., and amazon.com. In her spare time she enjoys exploring the greater San Francisco Bay Area with her musician husband and 7-year-old daughter and volunteering with organizations that provide educational access to underserved youth.

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Sami Rayes, Americans Overseas Domestic Violence Crisis Center

Sami Rayes is the market and technology manager for Hotsy Cleaning Systems. Drawing on 18 years of experience in programing and 10 years of sales management, Rayes develops the processes required for the success of a national dealer network in competitive markets and makes recommendations on technologies that enable business owners to manage their businesses, set higher sales goals, and become more profitable. Rayes maintains the websites for the Americans Overseas Domestic Violence Crisis Center and web applications. He also provides in-office tech support and recommends technologies as the need arises.

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William Santana Li, Knightscope

William Santana Li is an American entrepreneur with 24 years of broad and deep experience gained through several global assignments in the automotive sector and a number of new ventures. He is presently the chairman and chief executive officer of Knightscope, an innovative startup developing technologies to predict and prevent crime utilizing autonomous robots, predictive analytics, and social engagement. At Ford Motor Company, Santana Li held more than 12 positions including director of Mergers & Acquisitions. After securing $250 million, Santa Li founded and was chief operating officer of GreenLeaf, a Ford subsidiary that became the world's second largest automotive recycler. SOFTBANK Venture Capital recruited Santana Li to establish Model E Corporation and he subsequently co-founded Build-To-Order Inc. Santana Li also founded Carbon Motors, developer of the world's first purpose-built law enforcement patrol vehicle. Santana Le earned a B.S.E.E. from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.B.A. from the University of Detroit Mercy.

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Thomas Seigle, Appriss Inc.

Thomas Seigle has been with Appriss since 1997, and currently leads all aspects of Deployment and Federal Products Teams. He is responsible for developing and maintaining customer relations at the federal, state, and local government levels as well as advising sales, customer relationships management, and product development. He is a University of Louisville graduate with a degree in finance and brings more than 40 years of management experience to Appriss.

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Steve Siegel, Special Programs Unit, Denver District Attorney's Office

Steve Siegel is director of the Special Programs Unit of the Denver District Attorney's Office. He serves as an advisor and consultant in the United States and abroad on policy development and interagency collaboration. Siegel supervised the Colorado/Oklahoma Resource Council and served as the team leader in the crisis response to Columbine High School. He has supported response efforts for the tragedies of 9/11, Sandy Hook, and the Boston Marathon Bombing. He is in charge of the Denver Victim Services Network, designated by the U.S. Department of Justice as a national model. He was one of the primary authors of that city's interagency protocols on domestic violence, sexual assault, child sex abuse, and victimization of the elderly and disabled. Siegel has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the 1997 COVA Award for Exemplary Leadership and the 2006 National Crime Victims' Services Award. He has been an early and persistent voice to encourage the development of technology to serve victims of crime.

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Krishnan (Krish) Sastry, Appriss Inc.

Krishnan (Krish) Sastry is executive vice president of Products at Appriss and is responsible for product strategy, user experience, and product development. Sastry has held a variety of engineering and product management roles for more than 25 years and built enterprise and consumer products for a variety of industries and verticals ranging from human resources, financial services, healthcare, public safety, and risk and compliance. Most recently, Sastry was senior vice president of Products for Privia Health, a health and wellness technology company. Prior assignments include executive vice president of Product Management for SHPS Inc. (acquired by ADP, Inc.), director of Products for BEA Software, vice president of Products at Abilizer (acquired by BEA), consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and solutions manager at Unisys.

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Susan Smith Howley, National Center for Victims of Crime

Susan Smith Howley has worked with the National Center for Victims of Crime since 1991, serving as its director of public policy since 1999. From 2002 through 2005, she also served as the Center's director of victim services, overseeing the National Crime Victim Helpline. She has significant project management experience, including leading an OVC-sponsored project to improve the collection of victim restitution, and co-leading Vision 21: Building Capacity, a project to examine the challenges and solutions to building the effectiveness and efficiency of crime victim services. She is currently involved in a BJS-funded project to conduct the first national survey of all crime victim serving agencies and organizations, under the direction of the RAND Corporation.

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Jacob Solomon, Code for America

Jacob Solomon is working to make social services more effective and respectful. Solomon studied economics at Occidental College, worked as a forward deployed engineer at Palantir Technologies, and supported health care policy research at the RAND Corporation. Most recently, he joined Code for America to create a rapid prototyping team for digital human services.

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Steven Stiles, ALLY Foundation

Steven Stiles and Andrea Casanova are co-founders of the ALLY Foundation, whose mission is to prevent sexual violence through systemic change, root cause, and data-driven research, and to mainstream public awareness for this need. For 12 years they have been “changing the terms of the discussion,” advocating for an intelligent, evidence-based approach to sexual offense law, policy, and culture change. Following the murder of their daughter, Alexandra, by a repeat sex offender, Casanova and Stiles realized there was no comprehensive organization employing accurate data to inform policy; to advocate for the necessary intelligent, effective change to bring sexual offense perpetrators to justice; and to absolve those wrongly accused. ALLY views sexual violence as an ecosystem, and Casanova and Stiles are championing a collective impact approach to create an organization to create solutions as opposed to services. Prior to ALLY, they each were in business, having no prior relationship with this field.

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Wade Treichler, National Domestic Violence Hotline

Wade Treichler is communications director at the National Domestic Violence Hotline where he oversees the information technology, implementation of digital services, and other more traditional communications efforts. He has a degree in design from Texas A&M and has spent the majority of his career focused on web and print design in the nonprofit sector. He is currently pursuing a master of information science degree at the University of Texas.

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Gordon J. Vance, ACSW, LCSW, National Runaway Safeline

Gordon J. Vance is currently director of programs at the National Runaway Safeline (NRS) where he manages all crisis intervention and prevention services, volunteer services, training and education, community engagement, and the technical infrastructure necessary to operate 24/7/365. Prior to joining the NRS, he was the associate executive director of a Chicago-based agency providing a continuum of residential services for runaway, homeless, and at-risk youth. He has presented workshops at state and national conferences and for state and national social service organizations. Internationally, he has consulted and provided training in: Saudi Arabia, Albania, Columbia, Namibia, South Africa, Spain, Mexico, and the Netherlands. Vance is a member of the New Technologies Advisory Council for Childhelpline International (CHI); the Runaway, Homeless, Youth Training and Technical Assistance Center's (RHYTTAC) National Advisory Board, and the Youth Committee of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (CCH).

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Douglas Yeung, RAND Corporation

Douglas Yeung is a social psychologist at the RAND Corporation. His research has examined communication styles, behaviors, and mental health when using technology (e.g., social media, mobile devices). He is currently conducting sentiment analyses of social media, and recently conducted research on the impact of new technologies (e.g., mobile devices, Facebook, Skype) on military mental health. Yeung's other research involves online professional communities, and explores workforce attitudes, organizational knowledge sharing, and how people discuss and seek career information. He has also conducted workforce diversity research such as how minorities perceive career options and career development services. Before coming to the RAND Corporation, Yeung was a product analyst at Oracle and also helped to create a mobile application that was a grand prizewinner in Google's first Android Developer Challenge. He holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers University - Newark, and a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Alex Yule, Textizen

Alex Yule is a civic entrepreneur, geographer, and chief operating officer and co-founder of Textizen, a firm that uses mobile technology to deliver targeted interventions and transform the way organizations connect with the people they serve. Prior to his work at Textizen, Yule was a Code for America fellow working with the City of Philadelphia. Previously, he worked as an engineer at Esri, an industry leader in geographic information system (GIS) software, where he built interactive web mapping technology. He talks about civic engagement, technology, and maps on Twitter as @yuletide.

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