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.

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.

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.