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We had the opportunity to hear from lots of great speakers today at BibleTech! Learn more about today's speakers & explore bios for our speakers who are presenting tomorrow!

German Jablonski

Topic: A useful and Effective Information Architecture for a Note-Taking Application from Documents

Germán Jabloñski was born in 1997 in Granada, Spain and at age eight moved to Entre Ríos, Argentina. In 2015, he began his studies in systems engineering at the National Technological University. A strong motivator for choosing this career was the desire to develop a powerful program for studying the Bible. In 2016, convinced his vocation should be pastoral ministry, he began his studies in theology at the Adventist University of Plata. He still studies engineering and dedicates many hours to reflect, analyze, and compare biblical software—as well as to design more effective user experiences in this field. He is passionate about the art and science of ordering things, including ideas and knowledge.

Keith Williams & Dan Farrell

Topic: Better Together: Integrating Print + Digital for the Bible

Keith Williams is a senior editor for Bibles at Tyndale House Publishers. In his 14 years at Tyndale, he has worked on dozens of Bibles including the NLT Study Bible, the Chronological Life Application Study Bible, The Wayfinding Bible, and most recently, the Filament Bible. He’s been an avid user and early adopter of digital Bible tools since he bought the Logos library system on CD-ROM in 1995 as a teenager.

Dan Farrell’s background is in mechanical engineering and design. He currently serves as a senior art director of Bibles at Tyndale House Publishers. He believes God uses the Bible in powerful ways to rescue, heal, and bring light into the darkest places.

Mark Ward

Topic: Visualizing Textual Critical Data for English-Speaking Laypersons: Lessons from KJVParallelBible.org

Mark L. Ward, Jr. received his PhD from Bob Jones University in 2012; he now serves the Church as an academic editor at Lexham Press, the publishing imprint at Faithlife. His most recent book is Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible.

Peter Venable, PhD and Rick Brannan

Topic: What Makes a Word “Important”? Identifying Important Words in the Bible

Peter Venable taught himself to code as a kid and later, discovering a fascination with linguistics, combined the two to earn a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. This is his tenth year at Faithlife. He is a husband and father and enjoys travel, making music, hiking, reading, and strategy games.

Rick Brannan is an information architect at Faithlife in the Content Innovation department. The people in Content Innovation manage and produce all the data that makes Logos Bible Software sing: Morphological data, Syntax data, and Interlinear and Reverse Interlinear data (and all other datasets focused on the Bible). Rick writes code to help produce and refine some of this data and supervises the scholars, coders, and curators who do the heavy lifting. He’s worked at Faithlife for 25 years and is looking forward to at least another 25.

Rev. Gary Carr

Topic: Welcome to The Faith Museum

Gary serves as an executive on the National Conference on Ministry to the Armed Forces in Washington, DC. He is a national leader in law enforcement chaplaincy and credentials military chaplains for The Wesleyan Church and The Church of God. His has two courses on preaching available through Logos Mobile Ed. Gary holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Asbury, Duke, and Fuller Theological Seminary. He lives in Colorado Springs, CO.

Michael Hite

Topic: Root Frequency as a Tool to Unlock Major Book Themes and Emphasis

Michael currently serves as an instructor and vice president of operations for the Bear Valley Bible Institute International in Denver, Colorado. He’s been on staff at the school since 2002 where he teaches General Epistles, the Gospel of Mark, Teaching Strategies, and Ministry Technologies. His background as a marketing communication professional and graphic designer enhances his technology expertise in areas like presentations, website design for ministry, and more. Michael holds a BA in biblical studies from Bear Valley and is currently working toward his master’s in Bible studies. He preaches and teaches around the country and also while doing short-term mission work, primarily in Tanzania and Cambodia.

Steven Runge

Topic: Logos 8 Workflows and Pedagogy

Steve has served as a scholar-in-residence at Faithlife since completing his Doctor of Literature in Biblical Languages from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa in 2006. He also serves as a research associate affiliated with the Department of Ancient Studies, University of Stellenbosch. He earned an MA of theological studies in biblical languages from Trinity Western Seminary in Langley, BC, and a BA in speech communication from Western Washington University.

Robert Rouse

Topic: The Graphe as a Graph

Robert Rouse is an Air Force Academy graduate, former Tableau Zen master, and analytics consultant. He creates and shares data visualizations through Viz.Bible to inspire curiosity about the interconnected stories in Scripture.

Joseph Carter

Topic: Digital Bibles and the Kinesthetic Learner

Joe Carter has been married for 14 years and is the father of seven children. He’s a UI/UX designer and QA software tester at Olive Tree Bible Software and is a Bible study (and Bible study software) enthusiast. Finding and fixing software and usability problems are some of his primary passions.

Kent Shaffer

Topic: The Fringe Future of Scripture

Kent helps Christians collaborate and share. He founded Open Church as a data engine for missional impact, resource sharing, and big data analysis. He also founded Create Good to turn data into actionable impact for specific cities or sectors. It’s a blend of prayer, research, and relationship building that improves key players individually and collectively. Together these initiatives are creating an ecosystem that connects ministries, funders, and specialists around their passions to solve the global Church’s biggest needs.

Previously, Kent managed a boutique creative agency. He has given strategic counsel to groups such as Geneva Global, YouVersion, and Saddleback Church as well as the Lausanne Movement, JESUS Film, Zondervan, and OneHope. Kent also launched and sold a few tech startups and spent a decade writing about theology and effective ministry at ChurchRelevance.com, one of the top 100 most-read Christian blogs. His ministry roots began as a missionary’s kid in Peru and evolved into 10+ years of youth and children’s ministry at Church on the Move and Life.Church.

Benjamin and Shira Levy

Topic:  Light to the Nations—Multi-Lingual Audio Visual Hebrew Reader

Benjamin and Shira Levy are the founders of Bible in Hebrew, LLC, and have been creating and providing Hebrew software and tools for Bible study to people all over the world for the last three decades. They live in South Florida with their three children who are involved in developing the company’s web app and advancing Hebrew literacy.

Isaiah Hoogendyk

Topic: Lexical Data for a Brave Digital World

Isaiah Hoogendyk received a BA in classical languages from Hope College and an MA in linguistics from Trinity Western University. He’s a biblical data engineer and editor for Faithlife, contributing to reverse interlinear Bible creation in many capacities and creating the analytical lexicons for the Septuagint, Hebrew Old Testament, and Vulgate, among other interrelated Bible projects. When not wrangling massive amounts of biblical data, he enjoys spending time with his wife and three kids, attending Latin Mass, roasting (and drinking!) coffee, and occasionally brewing beer.

Jennifer Miles

Topic: The Rise of Multimodality: Instascripture and a Shrinking Biblical Framework

Jen has spent the last 10 years consulting and speaking on digital ministry strategies. During that time, she worked with over 70 online churches and ministries around the world to develop social media strategies designed to share the gospel and disciple people at a distance. Today, you’ll find Jen working at Faithlife as a product manager. She’s also wrapping up her Doctor of Ministry in Semiotics and Future Studies and teaching others how to use biblical orality to share the gospel. When not working, she’s hanging out with her family, remodeling her house, or reading a good book.

Rick Brannan

Topic: Identifying Important Bible Cross-References

Rick Brannan is an information architect at Faithlife in the Content Innovation department. The people in Content Innovation manage and produce all the data that makes Logos Bible Software sing: Morphological data, Syntax data, and Interlinear and Reverse Interlinear data (and all other datasets focused on the Bible). Rick writes code to help produce and refine some of this data and supervises the scholars, coders, and curators who do the heavy lifting. He’s worked at Faithlife for 25 years and is looking forward to at least another 25.

Adam Graber

Topic: Crowdsourcing Scripture, Then and Now

Adam Graber develops Bibles at Tyndale House Publishers and is finishing a master’s in digital theology at Durham University in the UK. He’s written for Christianity Today, Relevant, Christ and Pop Culture, and Second Natural Journal. He’s been interviewed by the New York Times, appeared on podcasts like Social Media Church and Christianity Today’s “Quick to Listen,” and published the ebook From Pews to Podcasts: What Technology Wants for the Church. He’s about to release a new podcast, “Device & Virtue.” Adam has spoken at BibleTech before, as well as AIMM’s Congo Collaboration about how faith and technology shape each other—and us. He’s currently working on a second book and still gets Netflix DVDs in the mail.

Mark Ward

Topic: Tagging Meaning and Not Just Form

Mark L. Ward, Jr. received his PhD from Bob Jones University in 2012; he now serves the Church as an academic editor at Lexham Press, the publishing imprint at Faithlife. His most recent book is Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible.

Dr. Joshua Mann

Topic: Your Technology Is Talking: How (and What) the Bible’s Medium Communicates

Dr. Joshua Mann runs Expositus, a research and education nonprofit working in the area of digital humanities. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at CODEC Research Centre for Digital Theology at the University of Durham (UK). He has a PhD in New Testament from the University of Edinburgh and is interested in how technology impacts faith and our understanding of the Bible. He is currently writing a book for Routledge on the history of Bible software.

Drayton Benner

Topic: Speedy, Sleek Searching

Drayton Benner is the founder and president of Miklal Software Solutions, where he combines computational sophistication in natural language processing, machine learning, and information retrieval with expert-level knowledge of ancient languages. He has both published and presented at academic conferences on biblical studies and computer science, and the intersection between the two. Benner had extensive experience in scientific software development and in Bible software before founding Miklal. He studied mathematics and computer science as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, holds a master’s in Old Testament from Regent College (Vancouver, BC, Canada), and master’s and PhD degrees in Northwest Semitic philology from the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations Department.

Reuben Evans

Fragments of Truth Q & A

Reuben Evans is the Executive Producer at Faithlife Films & Faithlife TV. He’s produced and directed multiple feature-length documentaries including the just-released Authorized, as well as Fragments of Truth (2018) that played in 600 theaters nationwide. He’s currently directing a new documentary The Unseen Realm (2019), along with the children’s animated show Bible Agent 7 on FaithlifeTV.com.

Jason Thacker

Topic: Man and Machine: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Humanity

Jason Thacker serves as an associate research fellow and creative director at The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is a graduate of The University of Tennessee in Knoxville and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. His writing has been featured in Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, Baptist Press, Facts & Trends, and Light Magazine. He is also the author of a forthcoming book on artificial intelligence and human dignity published by Zondervan. He is married to Dorie, and they have two sons.

James Tauber

Topic: Corpus-Driven Greek Language Learning

James Tauber is a python and web developer and founder of Eldarion. Trained in linguistics, classical philology, and educational measurement, Tauber has worked on the application of digital methods to the study of biblical Greek for 25 years with a particular focus on morphology, vocabulary, and scaffolded reading.

Joshua Mathias

Topic: Bible Verse Recommendations for Writers using Machine Learning

Joshua spent two years preaching about Christ in Mexico. He studied computer science and Spanish translation at Brigham Young University, then computational linguistics at The University of Washington. Equipped with professional experience in web development and translation technology, Joshua founded Writealyze at the beginning of 2019. Writealyze is the platform for his master’s thesis research on Bible verse recommendation for writers as well as other tools for Scripture study, writing, and translation.

Peter Venable

Topic: Alexa, What Does the Bible Say…?

Peter taught himself to code as a kid. He later discovered a fascination with linguistics and combined the two to earn a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. This is his tenth year at Faithlife. He is a husband and father and enjoys travel, making music, hiking, reading, and strategy games.

Kenny Jahng

Topic: Seeing the Future Now: Examining the Glacial Pace of Digital Engagement with the Bible

Kenny Jahng serves as a marketing strategist for the .BIBLE Top-Level Domain team at American Bible Society. Kenny is also the founder and CEO of Big Click Syndicate, a strategic communications agency that works with nonprofit, cause-related, and Christian ministries. The Big Click Syndicate team has worked with brands such as American Bible Society, California Baptist University, Princeton Theological Seminary, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, and the United Methodist Church. Kenny also recently launched www.Butler.Church to provide social graphics and content for churches. Connect with Kenny at http://www.KennyJahng.com or follow his #DailyKJTV vlog on LinkedIn.

Andi Wu and Randall Tan

Topic: The CLEAR Approach to Bible Translation

At Microsoft, Andi Wu applied technology to solving linguistic challenges. His work in computational linguistics and natural language processing started with syntactic parsing and gradually branched into machine translation, machine learning, and linguistic-based search. Over the past 14 years, he has focused on creating treebanks of the original Hebrew and Greek texts and their translations, tree-aligning the translations to the originals, acquiring lexical knowledge from the data, and developing meaning-based search of biblical texts. He’s passionate about producing accurate, readable, and balanced Bible translations for languages throughout the world.

Randall Dan has a master’s in biblical, theological studies and a doctorate in New Testament from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY. Prior to joining Global Bible Initiative, he was the assistant professor of biblical studies at Kentucky Christian University. Randall’s focus has been on developing new and improved digital resources that bridge the gap between the original Greek and Hebrew texts to modern audiences all around the world in their native languages. His passion is to make the Bible more understandable and accessible to all people groups around the world.

Mark Ward

Topic: A Media Ecology of Bible Software

Mark L. Ward, Jr. received his PhD from Bob Jones University in 2012; he now serves the Church as an academic editor at Lexham Press, the publishing imprint at Faithlife. His most recent book is Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible.

Sean Boisen

Topic: Mapping the World of Theology

Sean Boisen is the director of the Content Innovation team at Faithlife, where he leads the development of semantic knowledge bases for reference, search, navigation, and digital library integration (along with other activities in text and natural language processing and digital content creation). Before joining Faithlife in 2007, Sean was a senior scientist and director in human language technology at BBN Technologies, where he worked in natural language processing, text categorization and retrieval, and speech to text transcription, primarily serving the federal R&D market. Sean holds an MA in computational linguistics from UCLA.

Stephen Smith

Topic: Designing for Agency in Bible Study

Stephen Smith is senior director of digital products at HarperCollins Christian Publishing where he works on Bible Gateway and other Bible-centered initiatives. He also runs Openbible.info to make free Bible data available to others.