Dr. Nicole Forsgren

Research and Strategist, Google Cloud

Dr. Nicole Forsgren does research and strategy at Google Cloud following the acquisition of her startup DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) by Google. She is co-author of the book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, and is best known for her work measuring the technology process and as the lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She has been an entrepreneur, professor, sysadmin, and performance engineer. Nicole’s work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals. Nicole earned her PhD in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona, and is a Research Affiliate at Clemson University and Florida International University.

Chris Wright

Chief Technology Officer, Red Hat

Chris Wright is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Red Hat. Chris leads the Office of the CTO, which is responsible for incubating emerging technologies and developing forward-looking perspectives on innovations such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, distributed storage, software defined networking and network functions virtualization, containers, automation and continuous delivery, and distributed ledger. During his more than 20 years as a software engineer, Chris has worked in the telecommunications industry on high availability and distributed systems, and in the Linux industry on security, virtualization, and networking. He has been a Linux developer for more than 15 years, most of that time spent working deep in the Linux kernel. He is passionate about open source software serving as the foundation for next generation IT systems. He lives in sunny Portland, OR, where he is happily engaged in open source projects such as OpenDaylight, Open vSwitch, OPNFV, OpenStack, Open Container Initiative, and Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Christina Dunbar- Hester

Faculty Member, USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

Christina Dunbar-Hester is a faculty member at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.  She is the author of the forthcoming Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures (Princeton University Press), an ethnographic exploration of advocacy to address diversity issues in open technology communities like hackerspaces and open source software.  She is also the author of Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism (MIT Press, 2014), which examines activism to promote local community radio even in a “digital” age (and was the co-winner of the 2014 McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communications Technology Research).  She holds a Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University.

Arpit Joshipura

General Manager of Networking, The Linux Foundation

Arpit Joshipura brings over 25 years of networking expertise and vision to The Linux Foundation, with technical depth and business breadth. He has instrumented and led major industry disruptions across enterprises, carriers, and cloud architectures, including IP, broadband, optical, mobile, routing, switching, L4-7, cloud, disaggregation, SDN/NFV, and open networking, and has been an early evangelist for open source. Arpit has served as CMO/VP in startups and larger enterprises, including Prevoty, Dell/Force10, Ericsson/Redback, ONI/CIENA, and BNR/Nortel, leading strategy, product management, marketing, engineering, and technology standards functions.

Michele Gelfand

Distinguished Professor, University of Maryland

Michele Gelfand is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture--as well as its multilevel consequences for human groups. Her work has been cited over 20,000 times and has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Voice of America, Fox News, NBC News, ABC News, The Economist, De Standard, among other outlets.

Megan Byrd-Sanicki

Open Source Strategist, Google

Megan Byrd-Sanicki is a Google Open Source Strategist. With a decade of experience stewarding and advising open source projects and communities, Megan champions open source within Google and the industry at large.

Michal Migurski

Engineering Manager, Spatial Computing, Facebook

Michal is Engineering Manager of Spatial Computing at Facebook.

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.

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.

Shuli Goodman

Executive Director, Linux Foundation Energy

Shuli Goodman is the founder and Executive Director of LF Energy, a Linux Foundation project that supports open source innovation in the energy and electricity sectors. LF Energy’s ambition is to accelerate the energy transition and the decarbonization of the world’s economies. Having spent the early part of her career enabling some of the world's largest companies in the world to become Internet ready, she has brought her digital-first, cross-industry background to the electricity sector. With a doctorate in Organizational Systems focused on innovation and the energy transition, Shuli has a uniquely multi-disciplinary approach to solving complex, interdependent problems. She has nearly three decades experience in the startup and ongoing support of governance and multi-stakeholder engagement bodies that have been convened to enable decision-making and provide steering capacity for high-visibility and/or high-risk initiatives. Her goal is to inspire, train, and enable 10,000 developers, in the next 10 years, to digitally transform the world’s power systems.

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.

Drishtie Patel

Program Manager for Maps and Location, Facebook

Drishtie currently leads the Maps Data Team at Facebook, that powers most Maps Products for the Facebook family of apps. She focuses on bridging the gap between community and technology by bringing AI and other technologies such as OCR, vandalism detection and enhanced editing tools to the open mapping community to improve the coverage and accuracy of map data in the open. Prior to joining Facebook Drishtie co-founded the Missing Maps Project at the American Red Cross to focus on mapping the most vulnerable places in the developing world to help NGO's better respond to disasters and crises.

Chip Childers

Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Foundry Foundation

Chip has spent more than 18 years in large-scale computing and open source software. In 2015, he became the co-founder of the Cloud Foundry Foundation as Technology Chief of Staff. He was the first VP of Apache Cloudstack, a platform he helped drive while leading Enterprise Cloud Services at SunGard and then as VP Product Strategy at Cumulogic. Prior to SunGard, he led the rebuild of mission-critical applications for organizations including IRS.gov, USMint.gov, Merrill Lynch and SEI Investments. Chip is an experienced speaker at events like OSCON, LinuxCon North America, LC Japan, LC EU, ApacheCon, O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference, and many more. In his free time, Chip loves trail hiking with his black lab, sailing catamarans and sunfish, and trying to keep up with his young daughter.

Karl Weinmeister

Manager, Cloud AI Advocacy, Google

Karl is a Developer Advocacy Manager from Google’s Developer Relations Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning team. Karl has worked extensively in cloud and mobile, and was a contributor to one of the first AI-based crossword puzzle solvers that is still referenced today.

Jeff Clune

Senior Research Manager (Staff Scientist) in Uber AI Labs.

Jeff Clune is the Loy and Edith Harris Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Wyoming and a Senior Research Manager and founding member of Uber AI Labs, which was formed after Uber acquired a startup he helped lead. Jeff focuses on robotics and training deep neural networks via deep learning, including deep reinforcement learning. Since 2015, he co-authored a robotics paper on the cover of Nature and a deep learning paper on the cover of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he won an NSF CAREER award, his deep learning papers were awarded honors (best paper awards and/or oral presentations) at the top machine learning conferences (NeurIPS, CVPR, ICLR, and ICML), and he was an invited speaker at many universities and machine learning events. His research is regularly covered in the press, including the New York Times, NPR, NBC, Wired, the BBC, the Economist, Science, Nature, National Geographic, the Atlantic, and the New Scientist. Prior to becoming a professor, he was a Research Scientist at Cornell University and received degrees from Michigan State University (PhD, master’s) and the University of Michigan (bachelor’s).

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.

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.

Kairan Quazi

Student & Research Collaborator, Intel Labs

Kairan Quazi is a Research Collaborator with Intel Labs’ Anticipatory Computing Lab. His current project is focused on the next generation development of the Stephen Hawking ACAT. In the fall, Kairan will be entering 5th grade and his 2nd year at Las Positas College, where he is working toward his Associate degree in Mathematics. Kairan is an extroverted learner with a passion for current events and all things STEM. He is an advanced Python programmer with proficiency in over 12 coding languages and interfaces. He also enjoys reading, gaming, collecting Pokémon cards, traveling, and making friends. Kairan is a Davidson Institute Young Scholar and a member of the Johns Hopkins Study of Exceptional Talent. Kairan has been featured on Good Morning America, Huffington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous local and international media outlets. You can follow his adventures by subscribing to his YouTube vlog, “Kairan Quazi - Let’s Go Molecular!”, and via Twitter (KairanQuazi1) and Instagram (thepythonkairan).