Florence Hudson is a proven leader and C-level executive in technology, business, research and academia. She has led multi-billion-dollar business strategies and execution. She has been an independent director on for-profit and not-for-profit boards. Florence Hudson is a former IBM Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, and Internet2 Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer. She is currently Special Advisor for Next Generation Internet at the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub at Columbia University enabling US-EU collaboration for the European Commission's Horizon 2020 initiatives, and is Special Advisor for the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence at Indiana University leading cybersecurity research transition to practice efforts. She is Founder & CEO of FDHint, LLC, specializing in advanced technology and diversity & inclusion consulting, including blockchain, artificial intelligence, big data, connected healthcare, Internet of Things, and Smart Cities. She serves on the Editorial Board for the open peer-reviewed journal "Blockchain in Healthcare Today", and is Co-Founder of the IEEE-Industry Standards and Technology Organization "Blockchain in Healthcare Global". She has a BSE in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University, beginning her career at Grumman and NASA, and has attended executive education at Harvard Business School and Columbia University.

Rúnar is a software engineer in Boston, the author of a book, Functional Programming in Scala, and co-founder of Unison Computing. He received his education in computer programming and electrical engineering at Reykjavík Tech in the 1990s. In the intervening decades, he has done diverse programming work, including antivirus research, software for agriculture and animal breeding, real estate, IT, finance, genomics, telecom, and data science. He has worked with many programming languages including Pascal, C, Java, Haskell, Scala, and Ruby, and he's currently working on the Unison language.

Sara-Jane Dunn is a Scientist at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. She studied Mathematics at the University of Oxford, graduating with a MMath in 2007. She remained in Oxford for her doctoral research, as part of the Computational Biology group at the Department of Computer Science. In 2012, she joined Microsoft Research as a postdoctoral researcher, before transitioning to a permanent Scientist role in 2014. In 2016, she was invited to become an Affiliate Researcher of the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Stem Cell Institute, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on uncovering the fundamental principles of biological information-processing, particularly investigating decision-making in Development.

Joe Armstrong is a retired computer scientist. He got his grey hairs inventing Erlang, starting a few companies, writing a few books, doing some research and teaching people to program.

His hobbies are playing the piano, chopping wood and grumbling.

Gregory Young coined the term “CQRS” (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) and it was instantly picked up by the community who have elaborated upon it ever since. Greg is an independent consultant and serial entrepreneur. He has 15+ years of varied experience in computer science from embedded operating systems to business systems and he brings a pragmatic and often times unusual viewpoint to discussions. He’s a frequent contributor to InfoQ, speaker/trainer at Skills Matter and also a well-known speaker at international conferences. Greg also writes about CQRS, DDD and other hot topics on codebetter.com.

Liz Keogh is a Lean and Agile consultant based in London. She is a well-known blogger and international speaker, a core member of the BDD community and a passionate advocate of the Cynefin framework and its ability to change mindsets. She has a strong technical background with 20 years’ experience in delivering value and coaching others to deliver, from small start-ups to global enterprises. Most of her work now focuses on Lean, Agile and organizational transformations, and the use of transparency, positive language, well-formed outcomes and safe-to-fail experiments in making change innovative, easy and fun.

Jaana B. Dogan works on making Google production services more monitorable and debuggable. Previously, she worked on the Go programming language at Google and has a decade-long experience in building developer platforms and tools.

Luca is a Program Manager in the Visual Studio Customer Success Team. His team is dedicated to making customers successful especially on DevTest Labs and .NET Core. In the past he worked on a few things in Microsoft (SQL Server, ADO.NET, LINQ, C#, F#, VS IDEs, ...) and Credit Suisse London. He now lives in Xabia, Spain.

Helena did her academic work in scientific research before getting in software engineering. Formerly at Apple working on platform infrastructure for distributed data/analytics/ml (aaS) at massive scale, VP of Product Engineering at Tuplejump building a multi-tenant stream analysis machine learning platform, Senior Cloud Engineer at CrowdStrike working on cloud-based realtime Cyber Security threat analysis, and Senior Cloud Engineer at VMware automating cloud infrastructure for massive scale. She is a keynote speaker, and has given conference talks at Kafka Summit, Spark Summit, Strata, Reactive Summit, QCon SF, Scala Days, Philly Emerging Tech, and is a contributor to several open source projects like Akka and FiloDB. She is currently a Principal Engineer at Lightbend.

Jessica Kerr is a developer and philosopher of software. At Atomist, she works on development and delivery automation: she writes code to let us write code to help us update and deliver code. At software conferences, she speaks about languages (Java, Scala, Clojure, Ruby, Elm, now TypeScript), paradigms (functional programming, DevOps), and now symmathesy. Her interests include resilience engineering, graceful systems, and Silly Things (which her daughters find on the internet). Find her work at blog.atomist.com, the podcast Greater than Code, and on twitter at her true name: @jessitron. 

Lili Cosic is a Software Engineer at RedHat, working on the operator-framework, enabling the community to make any application Kubernetes native. Previously she worked at Weaveworks on the Weave cloud integration with Kubernetes and before that, she found her passion for Kubernetes operators at Kinvolk helping develop the Habitat Operator. In her free time, Lili enjoys experimenting with Kubernetes, distributed systems, as well as writing operators for fun and not profit and dislikes writing about herself in the third person.

Shirley Wu is a freelance software engineer specializing in data visualization. She combines her love of art, math, and code into colorful, interactive data visualizations.  Her work can be found at sxywu.com