Program committee

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.

Vasia Kalavri

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.

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.

Leslie Hawthorn

An internationally known community manager, speaker and author, Leslie Hawthorn has spent the past decade creating, cultivating and enabling open source communities. She created the world’s first initiative to involve pre-university students in open source software development, launched Google’s #2 Developer Blog, received an O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2010 and gave a few great talks on many things open source. In August 2013, she joined Elasticsearch as Community Manager.

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 chair of the Apache HBase Project Management Committee and a member of the Hadoop PMC. St.Ack is a Software Engineer at Cloudera in San Francisco.

Simon Willnauer

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.

Jan Lehnardt

Jan is an Open Source developer. He works on all parts of the web stack and tries to make things easier for everyone. He’s a core contributor to Apache CouchDB, a co-curator for JSConf EU and lives in Berlin.

Isabel Drost-Fromm

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.

Jim Webber

Dr. Jim Webber is Chief Scientist with Neo Technology the company behind the popular open sou rce graph database Neo4j, where he works on graph database server technology and writes open source software. Jim is interested in using big graphs like the Web for building distributed systems, which led him to being a co-author on the book REST in Practice, having previously written Developing Enterprise Web Services - An Architect's Guide. Jim is an active speaker, presenting regularly around the world. His blog is located at http://jimwebber.org and he tweets often @jimwebber.

Jonathan Ellis

Jonathan is CTO and co-founder at DataStax as well as Project Chair of Apache Cassandra. Prior to his work on Cassandra, Jonathan built a multi-petabyte, scalable storage system based on Reed-Solomon encoding for backup provider Mozy.

Mike McCandless

Michael loves building software; he's been building search engines for more than a decade. In 1999 he co-founded iPhrase Technologies, a startup providing a user-centric enterprise search application, written primarily in Python and C. After IBM acquired iPhrase in 2005, Michael fell in love with Lucene, becoming a committer in 2006 and PMC member in 2008. Michael has remained an active committer, helping to  push Lucene to new places in recent years. He's co-author of Lucene in Action, 2nd edition. In his spare time Michael enjoys building his own computers, writing software to control his house (mostly in Python), encoding videos and tinkering with all sorts of other things.  He's currently building a bat house with his kids to hang outside on the chimney.