Program committee

The Berlin Buzzwords program committee is responsible for the eclectic and high-quality conference program. It handles all issues related to the Call for Submissions, the review and the establishment of the final conference program. The program committee members are experts in their fields and represent different areas within the domain of the Berlin Buzzwords program.

The program committe consits of 13 experts on Apache and Open Source Developing as well as software architects and engineers. They all work in different enterprises with different technologies, e.g. Elasticsearch, Hadoop etc., all united in the Apache and Open Source structure. Last year, the program committee received 130 submissions from various regions around the world. Berlin Buzzwords has a wide range of topics around scalable search, NoSQL databases and processing of large amounts of digital data. From beginner-friendly presentations on data analysis topics to in-depth technical presentations on scalable architectures, the conference offers more than 50 presentations by more than 60 speakers.

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 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.

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.

Erik Hatcher

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.

Corporate-Design: Extragestaltung, Margarethe Hausstätter
Ilustration: cyan, Berlin