Ellen Friedman is a solutions consultant, speaker and author, currently writing mainly about big data topics. She is a committer for the Apache Drill and Apache Mahout projects.  With a PhD in Biochemistry, she has years of experience as a research scientist and has written about a variety of technical topics including molecular biology, nontraditional inheritance, and oceanography. O'Reilly publications include "Time Series Data Bases", "Real World Hadoop", Practical Machine Learning: Innovations in Recommendation" and in preparation title "New Designs for Streaming Architectures".