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 PhD candidate at KTH, Stockholm, doing research on distributed data ​processing, systems optimization, and large­-scale graph analysis. She is a PMC member of Apache Flink and a core developer of Flink's graph processing API, Gelly. Vasia has a MSc in Distributed Computing from KTH, Stockholm and UPC, Barcelona, and a diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from NTUA, Athens. She has previously worked as a teaching assistant at KTH, where she developed and taught training courses for engineers. She has also interned at Telefonica Research and worked as a web developer.

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.