Yannis Labrou is a distinguished engineer at Verisign Labs, where he leads strategic thinking initiatives based on Verisign's operations. Yannis brings to Verisign more than 20 years of experience in conceiving, creating, and bringing to fruition innovations; combining big thinking with laboring through the pains of materializing ideas. He has done so in an academic environment, at a start-up company, while conducting government- and DoD/DARPA-sponsored research, and for a global Fortune 200 company. Yannis was previously a senior researcher at Fujitsu Laboratories of America, a unit of the global R&D arm of Fujitsu Ltd. There, he was responsible for all aspects of the process of creating and commercializing innovation within the group of researchers and developers that he managed, in the application areas of ubiquitous computing, mobile payments, security, and big data search. Before Fujitsu, Yannis served as director of technology and member of the executive staff of PowerMarket, an enterprise application software (supply chain), VC-funded, start-up company. As one of the earliest employees at PowerMarket, he was engaged in all technology and product-related activities, leading the technology roadmap, intellectual property and technology partnerships, collaborations, and acquisition efforts. Prior to PowerMarket, Yannis was a research assistant professor at the CSEE Dept. at UMBC, where he taught, participated in standardization efforts, and conducted research in the areas of artificial intelligence, software agents, information retrieval, enterprise software, and supply chain management. While still in graduate school, he interned at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center. Yannis received his PhD in computer science from UMBC, where his research focused on software agents, and a diploma in physics from the University of Athens. He has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications, with almost 4,000 citations, and he has been awarded 14 patents from the USPTO. His current research focus is data through the entire lifecycle, from generation to monetization. Additional publications may be found at Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search.