Dr. Dominik Benz studied Computer Science with minor Psychology at the University of Freiburg, Germany. In his PhD at the Knowledge and Data Engineering Group (University of Kassel) he applied Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery methods to large datasets of Social Web Systems in order to discover emergent semantic structures. Since November 2012 he is working as a Big Data Engineer at Inovex GmbH, focussing on quality-driven development of Hadoop Applications in Business Intelligence contexts.

Alex Brasetvik is a founder and senior software engineer at Found AS - a company whose primary product is a hosted Elasticsearch service. Before working for Found, Alex earned his Master in Computer Science at NTNU, with an emphasis on database- and search engines. He has spent the past seven years on problem solving and solutions related to search, focusing on Elasticsearch in the last two years. His general distrust of things working according to their specifications comes in handy when reliability is what you need.

Nick is passionate about open source and open development, and has been involved with the Apache Software Foundation since 2003. Nick is chair of the Apache POI project, and as a member of the ASF helps out with mentoring of new projects, and with community development. When not coding, Nick can often be found helping to run and speak at BarCamps, Geek Nights and technology conferences.

An Apache Cassandra committer and PMC member, Gary Dusbabek is a life-long programmer specializing in distributed systems. His past experience includes working with large-scale text and image indexes in the newspaper industry and high-volume advertisement booking software. Recent work at Rackspace includes working on Cassandra full-time and being a founding member of the Cloud Monitoring team. Gary current works on the Rackspace Service Registry.

Dan Filimon is a senior undergraduate at Politehnica University of Bucharest, expected to graduate in July 2013. He's interested in Algorithms, Data Analysis and Machine Learning and his most recent work is on implementing, benchmarking and evaluating streaming k-means for Apache Mahout.

Zeno Gantner is the main author of the MyMediaLite recommender system package. While working on his PhD, he was leader of the workpackage "Recommender Algorithm Development" in the European research project "Dynamic Personalization of Multimedia" (MyMedia), with partners like BBC, British Telecom, and Microsoft.

In 2012 he moved to Berlin to co-found the Berlin Recommender-Stammtisch and to work at Nokia on HERE Maps search and places discovery.

Kris is a developer with a passion for combining technologies to create new possibilities for the people around him. Coming from a Java and GIS background and being a fan of open source software, Kris started working with distributed systems and graph databases in the last couple of years. He’s currently working on visualizing Big Data with the help of Hadoop and Neo4j. Kris has spoken at in-house knowledge sharing events and several local meetups. He also has experience doing handson training sessions at the dutch java user group.

Clinton is a South African doctor turned programmer who now lives in Barcelona and works for Elasticsearch.com. He was the first user of Elasticsearch and is the author of ElasticSearch.pm, the official Perl API and other Perl modules for Elasticsearch.

Michael works at MapR Technologies in the role of Chief Data Engineer, where he helps people to tap the potential of big data. His background is in large-scale data integration research and development, advocacy and standardisation. He has experience with NoSQL databases and the Hadoop ecosystem. Michael speaks at events, blogs about big data, and writes articles and books on the topic. Michael contributes to Apache Drill, a distributed system for interactive analysis of large-scale datasets.

Grant Ingersoll is a co-founder of LucidWorks as well as an active member of the Lucene community – a Lucene and Solr committer, co-founder of the Apache Mahout machine learning project and a long standing member of 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. Grant is also the co-author of the upcoming "Taming Text" from Manning Publications.

Michael Kaisser holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. For his thesis he developed methods to push web-search beyond the usual ten blue links. He now works as a Senior Researcher at AGT International on Social Media Analytics. In the past has worked at Microsoft Bing's Search Technology Centre Munich as a Program Manager on Query Alterations.

Edit Kiss has more than seven years of experience in the field of information retrieval and search. She started her second degree in computational linguistics with computer science and german linguistics as minors at the University of Munich, where she successfully graduated with a M. A honours. During her studies she spent a year at the Trinity College in Dublin, where she regularly participated at the computational linguistics search circle conferences. After completing her studies, she started her career as a consultant for Autonomy which is one of the global leaders in meaning based computing. She worked on completing several global projects which involves retrieving data from documents, emails, images and videos in different languages. Since 2011 she has been employed as a technical lead for search projects at MAN where she is currently working on the search solution for the after sales portal.

Author of Apache Solr Cookbook series and ElasticSearch Server books, father, consultant and co-founder of http://solr.pl blog where he tries to share his knowledge. Currently working as search consultant and software engineer at Sematext. Mainly focused on Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch, Hadoop and Mahout.

Jan Lehnardt 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.

Christian Moen is an Apache Lucene/Solr Committer and a software engineer at Atilika Inc., a Japanese corporation providing innovative products and services within search, natural language processing and big data to leading businesses world wide. Christian has 13+ years experience with search across a range of industries and holds an M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Oslo, Norway.

Owen has been contributing to Apache Hadoop since before it was called Hadoop. He was the first committer added to the project and has provided technical leadership on MapReduce, and security. Using Hadoop, in 2008 he set the world record for sorting a terabyte of data in 3.5 minutes and in 2009 he sorted a petabyte in 16.25 hours. He was also the founding chair of the Apache Hadoop Project Management Committee. For the last year, he has been working on Hive. He has a PhD in Software Engineering from the University of California, Irvine. Owen may be followed on Twitter: @owen_omalley.

Michael is an engineer on the Cloudera HBase team. He is the Chair of the Apache HBase project and a member of the Hadoop Project Management Committee. Michael got his start in big data ten years ago now when he went to work for the Internet Archive (archive.org).

Martijn van Groningen is a software engineer for Elasticsearch and an Apache Lucene committer. In the Lucene community he has made a significant contribution to the result grouping and joining features. As a core Elasticsearch engineer he works on all sorts of new features and improvements, also Martijn improved the document relation related features inside Elasticsearch (parent/child and nested objects).

Ariel Waldman is the founder of Spacehack.org, a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, and the global instigator of Science Hack Day, an event that brings together scientists, technologists, designers and people with good ideas to see what they can create in one weekend. She is also an interaction designer, a research affiliate at Institute For The Future, and an advisor for the SETI Institute‘s radio show, Big Picture Science. Previously, she worked at NASA’s CoLab program whose mission was to connect communities inside and outside NASA to collaborate. Ariel has also been a sci-fi movie gadget columnist for Engadget and a digital anthropologist at VML. In 2008, she was named one of the top 50 most influential individuals in Silicon Valley.