William Benton leads a team of data scientists and engineers at Red Hat where he has focused on enabling machine learning workflows and data processing pipelines in cloud-native environments. After stints in academia doing HPC and static bytecode analysis, he vowed never to touch anything looking like scientific code or the JVM again; in a pleasant professional irony, he’s liking both much better this time around. Will lives in the midwestern United States with his wife and three children and spends some of his spare time chasing light on bicycles or capturing it with cameras.

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 She is the co-author of Learning Spark, High Performance Spark, and another Spark book that's a bit more out of date.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.

Vasia Kalavri is a Postdoctoral researcher at the ETH Zurich Systems group, where she is working on distributed data processing, data center performance, and graph streaming algorithms. She is a PMC member of Apache Flink and a core developer of its graph processing API, Gelly. Vasia has a PhD in Distributed Computing from KTH Stockholm and UCLouvain, Belgium, and she has previously interned at Telefonica Research and data Artisans.

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.

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.
 

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 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.

Simon is a Elasticsearch & Apache Lucene core committer and Apache Software Foundation Member. He has been involved with Lucene since 2006 and has contributed to several other open source projects within and without the Apache Software Foundation. During the last couple of years he worked on design and implementation of scalable information retrieval systems and search infrastructure. His main interests are performance optimizations and concurrency. He studied Computer Science at the University of Applied Sciene Berlin. He is a co-founder & member of technical staff at Elasticsearch and a co-founder of the BerlinBuzzwords conference.

Isabel is member of the Apache Software Foundation. She is co-founder of the Berlin Buzzwords conference, the Apache Hadoop Get Together in Berlin, and was co-organiser of the first NoSQL meetup in Europe. Isabel co-founded and is active committer of Apache Mahout. She is actively engaged with communities of several big data and search related Apache projects, e.g. Apache Lucene, and Apache Hadoop. She is regular speaker at renown conferences on topics related to free software development, scalability, Apache Lucen, Apache Hadoop and Apache Mahout. Isabel would like to thank Elasticsearch GmbH for supporting the conference by donating part of my working hours to Berlin Buzzwords preparation.