Steve Loughran (@steveloughran) works at Hortonworks on leading-edge developments within the Hadoop ecosystem.

Projects he's worked on recently include OpenStack integration, the YARN service model, and formal specifications of the Hadoop Filesystem APIs.

He's the lead developer on Hoya, the YARN service to run existing Hadoop applications within in a YARN cluster.

He is the author of Ant in Action, a member of the Apache Software Foundation, an active committer on the Hadoop project and a lapsed committer on Apache Ant and Axis.

Why should steve be the speaker? because his talks are all either shallow and entertaining or seminal and profound -sometimes even both. Whatever: memorable