Program committee
Fran Bennett
Francine is a data scientist, and the CEO and cofounder of Mastodon C. Mastodon C are agile big data specialists, who offer the open source big data technology and data science skills which help organisations to realise the potential of their data, and who are currently building the Witan city data platform with the Greater London Authority.
Before founding Mastodon C, she spent a number of years working on big data analysis for Google, helping them to turn lots of data into even more money. She enjoys good coffee, running, sleeping as much as possible, and exploring large datasets.
Holden Karau
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 She is the co-author of Learning Spark, High Performance Spark, and another Spark book that's a bit more out of date.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.
Georgi Knox
Georgi is a back-end Engineer who works on the Platforms team at GitHub. Originally from Sydney, Georgi now lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her current nerd crush is on distributed systems and Go. When not geeking out she likes to loose convincingly in her shuffleboard league, drink single-origin flat whites and dress up her cats in costumes.
Grant Ingersoll
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.
Sean Treadway
Sean currently heads the architectural evolution of SoundCloud backed by a diverse history of engineering and operating desktop, server and web applications. He tackles the challenges of scaling to multi-millions of users while maintaining rapid development at SoundCloud - a social sound platform for anyone to record, promote and share their sounds on all devices, including the web.
Tugdual Grall
Tugdual Grall is a Technical Evangelist at MapR, an open source advocate and a passionate developer. He currently works with the European developer communities to ease MapR, Hadoop and NoSQL adoption. Before joining MapR, Tug was Technical Evangelist at MongoDB and Couchbase. Tug has also worked as CTO at eXo Plaform and JavaEE product manager, and software engineer at Oracle.
Tugdual is Co-Founder of the Nantes JUG (Java User Group) that holds since 2008 monthly meeting about Java ecosystem. Tugdual also writes a blog available at tgrall.github.io. Twitter/Github : @tgrall
Gary Dusbabek
An Apache Cassandra committer and PMC member, Gary Dusbabek is a life-long programmer specializing in distributed systems. Past experience includes working with large-scale text and image indexes in the newspaper industry and building a multi-data center distributed metrics and monitoring system for a large Cloud provider. Gary is the principal architect behind the open source Blueflood metrics platform and is currently building platforms for clients at Silicon Valley Data Science.
Owen O'Malley
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.
Ema Orhian
Ema is a passionate Big Data Engineer and Consultant contributing to open source projects. She is one of the co-founders of the Big Data Research Group, a group that provides open source solutions and proof of concepts in the Big Data area. Ema is actively involved in organizing technical events, speaker at local and international conferences and meetups.
Ted Dunning
Ted has been involved with a number of startup with the latest being MapR Technologies where he is Chief Application Architect working on advanced Hadoop-related technologies. He is also a PMC member for the Apache Zookeeper and Mahout projects. Opinionated about software and data-mining and passionate about open source, he is an active participant of Hadoop and related communities and loves helping projects get going with new technologies.
Steve Loughran
Steve is a member of technical staff at Hortonworks, where he works on leading-edge developments within the Hadoop ecosystem, including service availability, cloud infrastructure integration, and emerging layers in the Hadoop stack. Previously, he worked at HP Laboratories. He is the author of Ant in Action, a member of the Apache Software Foundation, an active committer on the Hadoop core projects; a lapsed committer on Apache Ant and Axis. He lives and works in Bristol, England. For fun he falls off bicycles in the local woodland.
Erik Hatcher
Erik Hatcher co-authored “Lucene in Action” and “Java Development with Ant”. Erik is an active member of the Lucene community – a leading Lucene and Solr committer, member of the Lucene Project Management Committee, member of the Apache Software Foundation as well as a frequent invited speaker at various industry events.
Erik is a co-founder of LucidWorks, dedicated to Lucene/Solr support, services, and training.
Michael Stack
Michael is on the Apache HBase and Hadoop Project Management Committees and an Apache Software Foundation member. He works for Apple's Open Source Technologies group out of San Francisco.
