Laura Hill

Director, Information Analytics Lab

Biography

Laura Hill is Director of the Information Analytics Lab (IAL) at HP Labs, which develops innovations in the timely delivery of real-time business intelligence to enterprise customers. Such information is a critical enterprise asset and needs to be described in the language of businesses, to be processed within a business context, and automatically selected, gathered and transformed from diverse, heterogeneous, distributed sources. To that end, IAL research focuses on enabling new business intelligence solutions with robust, scalable data management, data-intensive analytics and the fusion of structured and unstructured information.

Hill comes to HP Labs from Sun Microsystems where, over a period of twelve years, she held executive positions in research, engineering, marketing, global operations and planning. Most recently she was Senior Director of Shared Services and Cloud Computing at Sun, where she led the group that defined the company’s Cloud Computing Platform-as-a-service offering.

Before that, Hill was COO of Sun’s Developer Marketing organization and from 2006 to 2008 she managed corporate planning for the company. From 2000 to 2006, Hill was Deputy Director of Sun Microsystems Laboratories where she managed projects spanning Java, language design, security, networking, switches and complexity theory. While at Sun Labs, Hill created a technology transfer program to better enable the transfer of Sun labs innovations into Sun products and services. A leading advocate within the company for strengthening ties between Sun Labs and other Sun divisions, Hill also created a Sun-wide summit program to foster cross-divisional communication on key technical topics such as auto-id, statistics and mathematical modeling, the big Java stack, and refactoring.

Hill began her career as an IT expert in banking systems, working for investment banks Robertson, Stephens & Co, in San Francisco and JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley & Co. in New York.

A Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), of which she was Secretary/Treasurer from 2004 to 2006, Hill received an MS in Physics from MIT and a BA in Physics from Reed College.