Ellen Friedman is Principal Technologist with MapR Technologies, who provide a large scale data platform for AI & Analytics. Ellen is also a committer for Apache Drill and Apache Mahout projects.  With a PhD in Biochemistry, she has experience as a research scientist and has written about technical topics such as molecular biology, oceanography, machine learning and other big data topics. She is co-author on O'Reilly publications including "Machine Learning Logistics",  "AI & Analytics in Production” “Introduction to Apache Flink" and "Streaming Architecture.

Holden is a transgender Canadian open source developer advocate @ Google with a focus on Apache Spark, BEAM, and related "big data" tools. She is the co-author of Learning Spark, High Performance Spark, and another Spark book that's a bit more out of date. She is a committer on the Apache Spark, SystemML, and Mahout projects. She was tricked into the world of big data while trying to improve search and recommendation systems and has long since forgotten her original goal.

Monica Sarbu is currently leading the Ingest team at Elastic that is responsible for the popular open source projects Beats and Logstash, as well as turn key solutions built on top of the Beats platform. She is the founder of the Packetbeat open source project and the Beats co-creator.

The solutions she leads at Elastic, for logging, monitoring, and security, all work by collecting large amounts of data into Elasticsearch and extracting domain-specific insights from the data. When she’s not busy with the data grokking, she enjoys spending time with her daughter and travelling the world.

Grant is the CTO and co-founder of Lucidworks, co-author of “Taming Text” from Manning Publications, co-founder of Apache Mahout and a long-standing committer on the Apache Lucene and Solr open source projects. Grant’s experience includes engineering a variety of search, question answering and natural language processing applications for a variety of domains and languages. He earned his B.S. from Amherst College in Math and Computer Science and his M.S. in Computer Science from Syracuse University. In his spare time, he cycles and rock climbs.

Owen is a software architect who has worked exclusively on Hadoop since the project's start. He was the first committer added to Hadoop and was the original chair of the Hadoop Project Management Committee. In July 2011, he helped co-found Hortonworks, which is accelerating development and adoption of Hadoop for the enterprise. Before working on Hadoop, he worked on Yahoo Search'sWebMap project, which builds a graph of the known web and applies many heuristics to the entire graph that control search. Prior to Yahoo, he wandered between testing, static analysis, distributed configuration management, and software model checking. He received his PhD in Software Engineering from University of California, Irvine.