As we start the preparations for another exciting edition of Berlin Buzzwords we would like to announce some changes to the program committee. We each year we receive hundreds of submissions from all over the world and our program committee take the time to look at all of them to curate the best possible program. It is truly a pleasure to work with such a great group and we would like to thank them all for the hard work that they do.

We would like to give special thanks to Vasia Kalavri who will be leaving the Program Committee this year. Her expertise and input greatly enriched the Program Committee and we wish her all the best with her future work.

We would also like to introduce a new member to the committee, 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 She is the co-author of Learning Spark, High Performance Spark, and another Spark book that's a bit more out of date.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. We are a big fan of Holden's work and are very excited to have her on the Program Committee.

Photo: cc-by-sa 3.0 Gregor Fischer