About

We make your predictive analytics work.

 

Our Name

The name Zementis, symbolizing "concrete thoughts", is derived from the German word Zement (cement, concrete) and the Latin word Mentis (thought, intellect) and relates to our core competence in machine learning and AI.

Our Story

Zementis is the brain child of Michael Zeller and Wendy Cheung who initially met because of their passion for Tae Kwon Do. Founded in 2004 with the goal of providing exceptional predictive analytics to the marketplace, Zementis is composed of two main divisions, analytics and engineering. Although we started by building predictive models, we soon realized that our models needed a platform in which they could be easily deployed and managed. From this need, ADAPA came to be. ADAPA initially supported only neural networks, but it soon became a platform for the deployment of a myriad of statistical techniques as well as data processing. In 2008, ADAPA was launched as a service on the Amazon Cloud and is currently being used worldwide by companies and individuals who want to obtain the most from their predictive models and decision logic.

Zementis is a privately held company with offices in the USA and in Asia.

Our Location

Zementis HQ is located in beautiful San Diego in California. We also have an office in Hong Kong for servicing clients in the Asia-Pacific Region.

Our offices in San Diego are located only a few miles from the beautiful Torrey Pines State Park famous for its grove of Torrey pines. Our office in HK is located in the Hong Kong Island. Victoria Peak is minutes away.

Leadership

Dr. Michael Zeller
Chief Executive Officer – Co-founder

Michael Zeller manages the strategic direction of Zementis. As Co-Founder of Zementis, his vision is to position the Company’s technology as a competitive solution in a global market. Providing the financial industry with innovative business solutions, Michael has extensive experience in strategic technology implementation, business process improvement, and system integration.

Previously, Michael served as CEO of OTW Software, a company focused on implementing structured software engineering processes and delivering object-oriented analysis and design services. Prior to his engagement at OTW, he held the position of Director of Engineering for an aerospace firm, managing the implementation of IT solutions for major aerospace corporations.

Michael received a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Frankfurt (Germany), with emphasis in the development of neural networks, robotics, and human-computer intelligent interaction. Michael also received a visiting scholarship from the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was the recipient of a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California, and was an invited researcher at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan.

Wendy G. Cheung
Chief Operations Officer – Co-founder

As Chief Operations Officer, Wendy Cheung oversees day-to-day operations, investor relations, and client engagements for Asia/Pacific. She has over 25 years experience in information technology, software process management, and system development.

Prior to co-founding Zementis, Wendy served as VP of Operations for OTW Software, where she directed the introduction of new software methodologies and technology in the Hong Kong and Asia/Pacific market, and negotiated strategic alliances and service contracts. Before joining OTW, Wendy held the position of Chief Technology Officer of Dickson Cyber Concepts, Ltd. in Hong Kong. She directed the implementation of a major "bricks and clicks" online retail business and established the Dickson Cyber consultancy services unit. Prior to joining Dickson Cyber, Wendy held several software development and consulting positions with Candle Corporation, AT&T/NCR, and Flying Tigers in the USA. In addition to Wendy's technical background, she also is a graduate from the Art Center College of Design at Pasadena, CA.

Dr. Alex Guazzelli
Vice President of Analytics

Alex Guazzelli is responsible for developing the Company's core predictive technology. He manages all scientific aspects and advanced analytics for the Zementis solution platform, as well as client engagements. Prior to joining Zementis, Alex was a key member of the Falcon Fraud Detection team at HNC Software and FICO where he developed and deployed numerous neural network based models for a variety of financial institutions around the globe.

Prior to FICO, Alex was a faculty member at the Psychology Department at University of Washington where he applied his knowledge of artificial neural networks to the study of the brain. His work in animal navigation and how the brain represents space has been published in a variety of peer reviewed journals.

Alex brings to Zementis more than 15 years experience in the field of neural networks and machine learning. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and a M.S and B.S. in Computer Science from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

Dr. Konstantinos Stathatos
Vice President of Engineering

Konstantinos (Kostas) Stathatos directs the Zementis engineering group which is responsible for developing the company’s product line. He also leads the IT professional services team.

Prior to joining Zementis, Kostas was with BEA Systems, where he worked closely with major customers helping them architect enterprise data integration solutions using the BEA WebLogic platform. As Director of Engineering at Enosys Software, he led the engineering team building the first commercial XML based Enterprise Information Integration platform, which is today offered as BEA Aqualogic Data Services Platform (formerly Liquid Data). Prior to joining Enosys Software, Kostas was a research scientist with the Enterprise Integration Group at Telcordia Technologies (formerly Bellcore).

Kostas brings to Zementis more than 10 years experience in the area of web technologies, enterprise applications and integration, data management, and product development. Kostas holds a Ph.D. and a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, and a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece.

David E. DeVol
Executive Vice President

David DeVol has extensive experience in the banking and the financial management community, having served in a senior management position with a large, statewide financial institution, and as founder, organizer and charter President of two banks. He is a past President of the San Diego State University Alumni Association, and has served on the Board of Trustees of the San Diego County Employees Retirement Association, a $4 billion pension fund. He is currently serving on the Board of Directors of the San Diego County Capital Asset Leasing Corporation, an appointed position. David has been biographically cited in Who’s Who in Finance and Industry and Who’s Who in the West.

What people say about us

Graham Williams
Director, Togaware Pty Ltd.

"Open standards encourage innovation. PMML frees model deployment from the shackles of model development. Using a PMMLtoC converter developed by Togaware for WebFOCUS RStat, data mining models expressed as PMML can be directly deployed within Information Builder's widely used business intelligence platform. Zementis' ADAPA web-based compute cloud for PMML allows complex models to score large datasets as a service. It is exciting to see such developments leading the way with model deployment through PMML."

Dr. Andreas Widl
CEO, Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum

"With their ADAPA framework, Zementis was able to approach our need for preventive maintenance solutions from a completely different angle, while other, more traditional methods failed. With their help, we found correlations within the design of our product, which were almost impossible to presume and lead us to completely new methods of ensuring and improving our product quality."

Bob Nisbet, Ph.D
co-Author with John Elder, Ph. D. and Gary Miner, Ph. D. of the soon to be released HANDBOOK OF STATISTICAL ANALYSIS and DATA MINING APPLICATIONS, (900 pages, publication date: APR-2009, ISBN-13: 978-0-12-374765-5, Imprint: ACADEMIC PRESS)

"ADAPA® is truly modeling tool agnostic. Modeling tools may come and go; it makes no difference to ADAPA®. Data sets may be small to gigantic; it makes no difference to ADAPA®. It plugs into the Amazon.com elastic cloud to score data sets of any size, and (after the free trial, of course) charges a small monthly fee and according to the amount of CPU usage only. No software to buy, no installations to endure. Models are deployed through an intuitive, Web-based management console, allowing the user to manage the deployment of decision models in a central repository. The ADAPA® product from Zementis is based on an approach developed from seemingly the opposite direction – deployment to analytical modeling. Of course, this doesn’t mean that deployment comes before modeling. Rather, this approach provides a flexible, scalable, adaptable deployment engine, which you can load with models created in any data mining package that outputs the standard Predictive Model Markup Language (which, with ADAPA®, you don’t even have to learn).
This approach is quite novel and quite powerful, because it is open-ended on the model load end (any PMML 3.2 model can input) and open-ended (almost infinitely scalable) on the deployment end, providing model predictions in a true Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. Besides being data mining tool independent, on the cloud it is hardware independent as well."

Jeffrey Henschel
President, First NLC Financial Services, LLC.

"Our partnership with Zementis enabled us to roll out a comprehensive solution with immediate operational benefits and overwhelming acceptance from our team of account executives and loan officers. We are extremely proud to now offer FirstQual to our wholesale brokers and business partners. This roll out further manifests our commitment to deliver superior customer service to the mortgage industry."