Jim Zemlin

Executive Director, The Linux Foundation

Jim's career spans three of the largest technology trends to rise over the last decade: mobile computing, cloud computing and open source software. Today, as executive director of The Linux Foundation, he uses this experience to accelerate innovation in technology through the use of open source and Linux. At The Linux Foundation, Jim works with the world’s largest technology companies, including IBM, Intel, Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, and others to help define the future of computing on the server, in the cloud, and on a variety of new mobile computing devices. His work at the vendor-neutral Linux Foundation gives him a unique and aggregate perspective on the global technology industry. Jim has been recognized for his insights on the changing economics of the technology industry. His writing has appeared in Businessweek, Wired, and other top technology journals, and he is a regular keynote speaker at industry events. He advises a variety of startups, including Splashtop, and sits on the boards of the Global Economic Symposium, Open Source For America, and Chinese Open Source Promotion Union.

Dr. Rumman Chowdhury

Global Lead for Responsible AI, Accenture Applied Intelligence

Rumman Chowdhury’s passion lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and humanity. She holds degrees in quantitative social science and has been a practicing data scientist and AI developer since 2013. She is currently the Global Lead for Responsible AI at Accenture Applied Intelligence, where she works with C-suite clients to create cutting-edge technical solutions for ethical, explainable and transparent AI. In her work as Accenture’s Responsible AI lead, she led the design of the Fairness Tool, a first-in-industry algorithmic tool to identify and mitigate bias in AI systems. The Fairness Tool has been utilized successfully at Accenture clients around the world. Dr. Chowdhury co-authored a Harvard Business Review piece on the tool. Rumman has been featured in international media, including the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, MIT Technology Review, BBC, Axios, Cheddar TV, CRN, The Verge, Fast Company, Quartz, Corrierre Della Serra, Optio, Australian Broadcasting Channel and Nikkei Business Times. She is a TedX speaker, a Forbes Tech contributing author and has been named by InformationWeek as one of 10 influential AI and machine learning experts to follow on Twitter. She was also named one of BBC’s 100 Women for 2017, recognized as one of the Bay Area’s top 40 under 40, and honoured to be inducted to the British Royal Society of the Arts (RSA). She has also been named by Forbes as one of Five Who are Shaping AI. Rumman serves as co-chair of the RSA’s Citizen AI Jury and actively participates in IEEE standards committees, the Partnership on AI, as an advisor to the UK House of Lords Parliamentary group on AI, and other global AI and ethics organizations. She has presented at multiple international governing bodies, including the United Nations, the OECD and the UK Parliament.

Linus Torvalds

Creator of Linux & Git

Linus was born on December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. He enrolled at the University of Helsinki in 1988, graduating with a master's degree in computer science. His M.Sc. thesis was titled “Linux: A Portable Operating System” and was the genesis for what would become the most important collaborative software project in history.In August 1991, Linus announced that he was developing the Linux kernel, proclaiming, “it won’t be big and professional.” Never in the history of technology has someone been so wrong. In spite of his humble proclamation, Linux has become the world’s most pervasive operating system. Today the Linux kernel forms the basis of the Linux operating system and powers billions of Android devices, powers ChromeOS, and has permeated almost every industry and form factor. Smartphones, TVs, appliances, cars, nuclear submarines, air traffic control, stock exchanges, and scientific research all run Linux. Linux also provides the underpinnings of the internet and the cloud computing industry.In 2005, citing a lack of free and open source version control tools that met his needs for performance and scale, Linus famously created Git in only 10 days. Today Git is widely used in software development and for other version-control tasks such as configuration management, and has become popular as an integral part of the DevOps culture.In 2000, Linus was listed by Time Magazine as Number 17 in the Time 100: Most Important People of the Century. Again, in 2004, Time Magazine named him one of the Most Influential People in the world. He was honored in 2008 with the Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland, “in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel.” He is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award. A true tech titan, he was admitted to the Computer History Museum Hall of Fellows, joining the ranks of the tech elite including Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, Tim Berners-Lee, Gordon Moore, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Steve Wozniak, and others.Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.

Yvonne Wassenaar

CEO, Puppet

Yvonne Wassenaar is the CEO of Puppet, a trusted enterprise provider of pervasive automation across traditional and cloud-native environments. She has more than 25 years of experience scaling companies globally and driving enterprise transformation with technology. Prior to Puppet, Yvonne served as CEO of Airware, CIO at New Relic, and held multiple leadership roles at VMware and Accenture. She is currently a board member of Forrester (FORR) and Harvey Mudd College. Amidst growing concerns with how modern technology could be used, Yvonne is championing it to drive a safer, more efficient and innovative planet.

Dirk Hohndel

VP & Chief Open Source Officer, VMware

Dirk is VMware’s Chief Open Source Officer, leading the company’s Open Source Program Office, directing the efforts and strategy around use of and contribution to open source projects and driving common values and processes across the company for VMware’s interaction with the open source communities. Before joining VMware, Dirk spent almost 15 years as Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist. Before that, among other roles, he worked as Chief Technology Officer of SuSE and Unix Architect of Deutsche Bank. Dirk has been an active developer and contributor in several dozen open source projects since the early 1990s, today most of his work is on the Subsurface dive log project and many of the related open source projects around that. He currently is a member of the Board of the Linux Foundation. Dirk holds a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Würzburg, Germany. He lives in Portland, OR.

Greg Kroah-Hartman

Linux Kernel Developer & Fellow, The Linux Foundation

Greg is among a distinguished group of software developers who maintain Linux at the kernel level. In his role as Linux Foundation Fellow, he continues his work as the maintainer for the Linux stable kernel branch and a variety of subsystems while working in a fully neutral environment.

Deborah Boyer

Project Manager, Civic Applications Team, Azavea

Deborah Boyer is a project manager at Azavea, a mission-driven American geospatial software company that creates software with a civic and social impact. She manages the development of projects with a community and sustainability focus including the Open Apparel Registry, a map of global apparel facilities. In addition to her technical work, Deb received a Master's Degree in Public History from Loyola University Chicago and also teaches digital humanities courses at Temple University and Villanova University.

Katie Shaw

Stakeholder Manager, Open Apparel Registry

Oliver Fink

Director, Interactive Data, HERE Technologies

Oliver Fink is the Director, HERE XYZ at HERE Technologies. He’s worked at HERE (previously under Nokia and NAVTEQ) for over 15 years to bring maps alive by making them more collaborative, open, and personal. Previously, he started EcoTec GmbH, where he served as managing director, worked as a Microsoft provider, and consulted for banks and other industry-leading business. After selling the company at the peak of the dot-com era, he worked as technical architect for Noblestar. Hooked to computers since the age of 10, he studied law and dropped out to start his own company long before such startups were fashionable. A technology scout for over 30 years, he’s explored cutting-edge tech in cities like London, Boston, San Francisco, and New York as well as a lot of smaller yet also mostly very nice places.

Priyanka Sharma

Director of Technical Evangelism, GitLab

Priyanka Sharma is the Director of Technical Evangelism at GitLab Inc. She also serves on the board of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and has deep expertise in DevOps and observability. A former entrepreneur with a passion for growing developer products through open source communities, Priyanka also advises startups at HeavyBit industries, an accelerator for developer products. Priyanka holds a BA in political science from Stanford University and loves reading, adventuring, and tending to her plants in her spare time.

Cheryl Hung

Director of Ecosystem, CNCF

Cheryl Hung is the Director of Ecosystem at the CNCF. Her mission is to increase the adoption of Kubernetes and cloud native by growing the community and advocating for end users. She founded and runs the Cloud Native London meetup. Previously Cheryl spent five years as a C++ engineer on Google Maps, before moving to a storage startup to lead Product and DevOps. She holds a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. Cheryl has spoken at many conferences including KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and Red Hat Summit. See oicheryl.com for past talks, podcasts and articles.

Todd Moore

VP, Open Technology, Cognitive Applications, IBM

Todd Moore, IBM VP of Open Technology, IBM Developer and Developer Advocacy, leads the global IBM team developing open source technologies and working in open communities. Using both digital assets and face to face interaction with developers, he seeks to build developer confidence and capabilities to solve Cloud Native, AI, Blockchain and Quantum computing challenges. Over his career, Todd and his team of developers have worked with leading open source communities such as the Apache Software Foundation, Linux Foundation, Eclipse, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Docker, CNCF, JS Foundation, Node.js and more to develop great code and spread best practices. He currently serves as Chairperson of both the OpenJS Foundation Board of Directors and the CNCF Governing Board. "If you consume open source code, you need to give back to the community just as much and more." are the words he lives by.

Erica Brescia

Chief Operating Officer, GitHub

Erica Brescia is the Chief Operating Officer at GitHub. Prior to that, she was the co-founder and COO of Bitnami. With over 1 million deployments per month, Bitnami provides the largest source of applications and development environments to the world’s leading cloud service providers, such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud Platform. In 2016, Erica was the recipient of the Top Women in Cloud award. In her free time, Erica serves on the board of directors of the Linux Foundation, and as an investment partner in X Factor Ventures, which empowers female- led business to succeed.

Kelly Hammond

Sr. Director of Engineering, Intel Corporation

Kelly Hammond is a senior director of engineering at Intel, and leads System Middleware Platform Software (SMPS) where she is responsible for optimizing big data solutions on the Intel® architecture platform, Linux OS system performance and benchmarking, and edge applications. Her teams work with many open source communities from Spark and Hadoop to OS libraries to the Robot Operating System project. The software spans Intel's a wide range of Intel's products, from Xeon to Atom to persistent memory solutions. Prior to her current role, she has led teams developing products within Intel ranging from Android phones, the first Ultrabook sensor systems, and pathfinding work with reinforcement learning for thermal solutions. She has a master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in system design and management, and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Washington. Prior to Intel, she worked at Northrup Grumman as a program manager and systems engineer for radars and satellite navigation systems.

Ricardo De Sa Earp

Group VP and GM of MDG, Microcontrollers & Digital ICs Group

Ricardo de Sa Earp is Group Vice President and General Manager of the Microcontrollers Division within ST’s Microcontrollers and Digital ICs Group and has held this position since July 2018. De Sa Earp started his career with Philips Consumer Electronics in Sao Paulo, Brazil, working in TV design. In 1993, he moved to the Electronics Division of Valeo, where he held positions in marketing and project management. De Sa Earp joined ST in 1997 as Strategic Marketing Manager in the ASD & IPAD Division at ST Tours (France). In 2003, he was promoted to the position of ASD & IPAD Division General Manager and successfully led the Division for 15 years. In July 2018, De Sa Earp he was invited to take the leadership of the Microcontrollers Division. Ricardo de Sa Earp was born in Petropolis, Brazil, in 1963. He graduated in Electronic Engineering from the Instituto Tecnologico de Aeronautica Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil, and completed his Master’s Degree in Electronic Engineering at the Technical University of Eindhoven, Holland. De Sa Earp also holds an MBA from INSEAD in France