The Berlin Buzzwords Program Committe is responsible for the content of the conference. Their day-and-night hard works and their expertise are the core of the quality of the Berlin Buzzwords Program.
In 2013, the Berlin Buzzwords program committee has done a wonderful job in reviewing, rating and scheduling the talks. In total, we had received over 120 submissions from various regions around the world, and this gave us a great opportunity to work out a very high quality program for Berlin Buzzwords. The conference presented more than 30 talks by international speakers specific to the three tags "search", "store" and "scale". Presentations ranged from beginner friendly introductions on hot data analysis topics to in-depth technical presentations about scalable architectures.
We have to say that it is truly a pleasure to work with such a great program committee, and most credits should be given to them. We know that without their collaboration, the success of this conference would simply not be possible.
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.
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.
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.
Grant Ingersoll
Grant is the creator of the Lucene Boot Camp training program, a regularly featured speaker at ApacheCon and other industry events. He has been an active member of the Lucene community & Lucene and Solr committer, co-founder of the Apache Mahout machine learning project, chairman of the Lucene Project Management Committee and a Vice President at the Apache Software Foundation. Grant's prior experience includes work at the Center for Natural Language Processing at Syracuse University in natural language processing and information retrieval. He earned his B.S. from Amherst College in Math & Computer Science and his M.S. in Computer Science from Syracuse University, NY.
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.
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.
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. Owen was the technology lead for both MapReduce and the project to add security to Hadoop. In 2009, he optimized Hadoop to set the record for the Terasort, Gray Sort, and Minute Sort benchmarks. 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.
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.
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 on large-scale distributed systems, including cloud computing infrastructures, dynamic Hadoop clusters and configuration management. 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.
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.
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.
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.
http://blog.mikemccandless.com
