Board of Directors and Management Team
Ms. Gayle Sheppard,
Chairman and CEO
As chairman and chief executive officer, Sheppard is responsible for Saffron’s corporate vision and fundamental company direction.
Prior to joining Saffron as CEO, Sheppard worked with Saffron’s founders and customers as it’s Executive Chair of the Board of Directors. Prior to Saffron, Sheppard was Vice President and Managing Director at PeopleSoft, Inc. where she successfully turned around an under performing business unit and developed new market strategies, CEO and President with MarketMile, LLC (now part of Rearden Commerce) where she led the development and launch of an application service business focused on serving American Express’ Corporate Purchasing Card Customers, and Vice President, Worldwide Sales, J.D.Edwards & Company, President and General Manager, J.D. Edwards Japan, K.K., and Vice President Sales and Marketing, J.D.Edwards Asia Pacific Ltd. where she was responsible for defining new market strategies and establishing and leading new business units to accelerate J.D. Edwards revenue growth in global markets.
Gayle serves on the Board of Directors for the North Carolina Life and Sciences Museum, dedicated to life long learning in science and technology, and is a Charter Member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE) – Carolinas; the world’s largest non-profit entrepreneurial organization.
Sheppard is a graduate of the University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, where she received a B.S., Business Administration.
Dr. Manuel Aparicio, Chief Memory Maker and Co-Founder
Dr. Manuel Aparicio is Saffron’s Chief Memory Maker and the visionary behind Saffron’s associative memory technology. With more than 25 years experience in the industrial development and commercialization of software solutions supporting real intelligence for intelligent agents, Aparicio has long been an evangelist for broad adoption of associative-memory technology.
Prior to Saffron, Aparicio was Chief Scientist of the IBM Knowledge Management & Intelligent Agent Center. At IBM, he and Jim Fleming, co-founder and president of Saffron, worked on the development and commercialization of associative memory systems. Aparicio also served on the Board of Directors for The Agent Society and the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents, an international standards body.
Aparicio holds several patents for memory-based technology, and has published numerous papers and journal articles. For example, he wrote “Concepts of Personalization” for The Practical Handbook of Internet Computing, and “Learning by Collaborative and Individual-based Recommendation Agents” in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, the latter co-authored with Dr. Dan Ariely, a leading marketing economist. He co-edited Neural Networks for Knowledge Representation and Inference and is now writing Making Memories: Applying Neuron-inspired Associative Memories to National, Business, and Consumer Intelligence.
Aparicio formed Saffron in 1999, serves on Saffron’s Board of Directors and currently serves as an executive advisor to TigerSwan, Inc. A frequent speaker and guest lecturer, Aparicio is an alumnus of the University of South Florida, where he earned a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, with a focus on biologically based neuro-computing.
He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Mr. Jim Fleming,
Chief Software Engineer, President and Co-Founder
Jim Fleming leads Saffron’s research and development in Associative Memory Technology and is Chief Software Engineer for the SaffronMemoryBase®, the company’s core intellectual property and the company’s flagship product.
In 1999, Fleming and Aparicio left IBM to establish Saffron Technology and develop truly intelligent associative memory-based computing solutions. Fleming’s engineering leadership has resulted in Saffron becoming the world’s first commercially scalable associative memory analytic platform. In the Saffron engine, memories are implemented as coincident matrices for greater storage efficiency and processing speed, an approach wholly different from traditional tables or other semantic stores of explicit graphs. It is this patented method of data representation that enables Saffron’s associative memory-based solutions to achieve enterprise scale, the primary shortcoming of competing offerings.
Prior to founding Saffron Technology, Fleming worked for IBM on agent-based learning technologies and security products. He also helped pioneer LAN-based e-mail systems while working as a technical lead at Lotus/cc:Mail. His interest in agent-based software formed while at cc:Mail working on rule-based systems in the early 1990s. He also worked with Microsoft’s PowerPoint division on writing slide-imaging software.
Fleming is an alumnus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois where he earned his bachelor of science in computer science.
He makes his home in North Carolina.
Dr. Paul Hofmann,
Chief Technology Officer
Paul is responsible for Saffron’s technology direction and product management.
With more than 20 years’ experience in enterprise software and services, Paul’s background combines academic thought leadership with international executive leadership at global companies.
Before joining Saffron in 2012 Paul was Vice President Research at SAP Labs at Palo Alto. Paul has also worked for the SAP Corporate Venturing Group. Paul joined SAP in 2001 as Director for Business Development EMEA SAP AG where he has created the Value Based Selling program.
Paul was visiting scientist at Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at MIT, Cambridge, MA 2009.
Prior to joining SAP, Paul was Senior Plant Manager at BASF’s Global Catalysts Business Unit in Ludwigshafen, Germany.
Paul has been entrenched in research as Senior Scientist and Assistant Professor at outstanding European and American Universities (Northwestern University, U.S., Technical University Munich and Darmstadt, Germany). He is an expert in computational chemistry and computer graphics (Ph.D., research and teaching in Nonlinear Quantum Dynamics and Chaos Theory), authoring numerous publications and books, including a book on SCM and environmental information systems as well as performance management and productivity of supply chains.
His passion has always been AI, machine learning and semantics. In 1986 Paul programmed an associative memory system at Technical University Munich to predict chemical reactions in mass spectrometer. His team at SAP Labs implemented semantic rules engine from CMU to show the right data to the right person when accessing enterprise systems, and transferred computational logic from Stanford AI Lab into the SAP Business by Design Configurator.
Dr. John Poindexter, Director, Saffron Board of Directors
Dr. John M. Poindexter serves on the Board of Directors of Saffron Technology.
Now a private consultant, Dr. Poindexter most recently served as Director of the Information Awareness Office (IAO) at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The IAO developed and demonstrated information technologies and systems to counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption, national security warning and national security decision-making. In addition he initiated research on privacy protection. As Director, Dr. Poindexter established the new office, managed the technical and financial aspects of all assignments, and identified revolutionary new projects within the Office’s mission.
Prior to coming to DARPA, Dr. Poindexter served as Senior Vice President for SYNTEK Technologies, a small, high technology firm, where he worked with DARPA on Project Genoa. He also served on the Board of Directors for Digital Commerce Corp. In 1990, he co-founded TP Systems, Inc., serving as that firm’s chief designer and programmer until 1996. From 1993 to 1996, Dr. Poindexter was a consultant with Elkins Group, where he was Chairman of the Maritime Advisory Committee and a member of the Board of Directors. Prior to that, he served as Senior Scientist with Presearch, Inc.
Dr. Poindexter served as National Security Advisor and Deputy National Security Advisor for President Reagan from 1983 to 1986, and as Military Assistant in the White House prior to that. He provided recommendations to the President on national security, foreign policy and defense policy issues. He was also responsible for improving command and management systems to support the President in national security crisis management, culminating in the creation of a new high-technology crisis management center.
Dr. Poindexter served 29 years active duty in the U.S. Navy, rising to the rank of Vice Admiral. While in the U.S. Navy, he specialized in training, new tactics and battle management procedures and pioneering uses of shipboard computers. He holds doctoral and master’s degrees in physics from the California Institute of Technology (1961, 1964). He received his bachelor’s degree in engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy (1958).
He lives in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Mike Yeagley, Vice President, Worldwide Sales
As Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Mike is responsible for leading Saffron’s direct and partner sales channels in both commercial and government markets.
Prior to joining Saffron, Mike was Vice President of Worldwide sales at NovoDynamics, an In-Q-Tel backed company. Here Yeagley expanded the company’s foreign language processing solutions within the U.S. Intelligence and Defense industry and organizations in Europe and the Middle East, through a combination of direct sales and new value-add partner channels. Under Mike’s tenure, software revenue and gross margin achieved quarter to quarter double-digit growth. Yeagley was previously with SPSS, an IBM Company, where he focused on applying predictive analytic capabilities to fraud detection and was responsible for acquiring and managing the largest customer in SPSS’ history. Yeagley was also with AlphaBlox – an Accel Partners backed firm later acquired by IBM – where he focused on delivering business intelligence capabilities to the web in tandem with Oracle and Microsoft products.
In 2010 Yeagley was appointed by the US Dept. of Commerce to lead a trade delegation to the United Arab Emirates to expand technology opportunities for defense, healthcare and education throughout the Middle East region.
