Aaron Beppu is a software engineer with the Search and Data team at Etsy.com. His primary focus is improving search through large-scala analysis and mining of clickstream data. Prior to coming to Etsy, he worked for Amazon on the Search Analytics team at A9.com.

Alex Lloyd is a Senior Staff Software Engineer in the storage infrastructure group at Google. In this role, he led the replication implementations for Megastore and Spanner, global storage systems that underpin a wide array of Google services. He is currently working on distributing multiversion concurrency control algorithms. Prior to his current role, Alex worked with the Blogger team. Before joining Google in 2004, Alex built mobile sync middleware at BEA Systems. As an undergraduate, his dormroom startup led him to his first job at Object Design, where he worked on visual templating tools. Alex has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Harvard University.

Alex Pinkin is a contributor to a few open source projects including JBoss Application Server. He currently works as a director of engineering at Bazaarvoice. His teams focus on big data problems, analytics, and search. Alex lives in Austin, TX where he enjoys sunny weather and outdoor life when he is not glued to a computer.

Andrzej Bialecki, Apache Lucene PMC Member, is a committer in the Lucene-java, Nutch and Hadoop projects. He has broad expertise, across domains as diverse as information retrieval, systems architecture, embedded systems, networking and business process/e-commerce modeling. He's also the author of the popular Luke index inspection utility. Andrzej holds a master's degree in Electronics from Warsaw Technical University.

Christian founded Atilika in 2009 to help Japanese companies apply advanced search technologies to their businesses.

Atilika is an innovation partner and proficient in the fields of search, recommendations, computational linguistics and data mining, and has experience applying these technologies to leading businesses within news media, publishing, advertisement and e-commerce in Japan.

Prior to starting Atilika, Christian spent 10 years at FAST (now Microsoft). In FAST R&D headquarters in Oslo, Christian led product development teams responsible for developing the FAST ESP (Enterprise Search Platform) product infrastructure. In 2005, he relocated to the Tokyo branch office and served in management and architecture roles.

Christian is a new Lucene/Solr committer and he's mostly working on Japanese support.

Christian holds an M.S. in computer science from the University of Oslo, Norway.

Christian Richter is the founder of altusInsight, a big data startup, making it easy for its customers to employ big data technologies to gain a competitive advantage in their market segment. Prior to this he built the backend infrastructure of MOG Inc., an on demand audio streaming service, and implemented a recommendation engine as a distributed system. A patent was awarded to him as a co inventor on identification of audio data during his work at Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.

Grant Ingersoll is a co-founder of Lucid Imagination as well as an active member of the Lucene community – a Lucene and Solr committer, co-founder of the Apache Mahout machine learning project and a long standing member of the Apache Software Foundation. Grant’s prior experience includes work at the Center for Natural Language Processing at Syracuse University in natural language processing and information retrieval. Grant earned his B.S. from Amherst College in Math and Computer Science and his M.S. in Computer Science from Syracuse University. Grant is also the co-author of the upcoming "Taming Text" from Manning Publications.

I'm a consultant in enterprise search at Findwise, a leading vendor-independent consultancy firm headquartered in Sweden, with offices in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Poland and UAE. At Findwise, I’ve been part of search projects using Solr at half a dozen customers, both as a developer and as technical lead and architect.

Aside from these projects, I’m also the lead developer and architect of the Hydra document processing framework.

Dr. Markus Weimer is a Principal Scientist working in the Cloud Information Services Laboratory (CISL), Server and Tools Business (STB) at Microsoft.

His research area is Machine Learning with an emphasis on large scale algorithms, applications and systems. In the past, Markus has worked on collaborative filtering and ranking, abuse prevention and detection models at Yahoo! Labs and applications of Machine Learning to the educational domain. Markus received his PhD (suma cum laude) from the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany in 2009 under the joint supervision of Alex Smola (Australian National University) and Max Mühlhäuser and joined Yahoo! Labs in the same year.

I've been building for the web for over 10 years, doing everything from web design and front-end development all the way through to back-end development.

I've worked with Javascript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, various XML technologies. In my day-to-day work I mainly work with Ruby, Rails, HTML/CSS, and Javascript. I've been exploring various kinds of data storage techniques for years, trying everything from RDF stores, through conventional SQL RDBMS, KV stores and Document databases, and I was one of the organisers of the 2010 NoSQL Europe conference. Last year I organised the first History Hack Day.

Along the way I've co-written a book on CSS (Friends of Ed's Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation), which is currently in its second edition and has been translated into Italian and Spanish, led a software team at the BBC, and spent five of the last ten years running design- and development-focussed consultancies. Recently, I was part of the small development team which built the Alpha prototype of the UK Government's landmark https://www.gov.uk/ project.

Between 2005 and 2011, Michael Brückner co-developed the content-based email spam filter of STRATO AG which processes several hundreds of million emails daily. In December 2011, he joined SoundCloud as Anti-Spam Engineer.

Michael is currently completing his PhD in machine learning at the University of Potsdam. His research focuses on supervised learning in adversarial environments where the construction of a prediction model establishes a game between a model builder and an adversarial data generator. He published and presented his findings at all major conferences on machine learning including the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), the international conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), and the international conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). He is reviewer of several conferences and journals on machine learning and computer security, such as ICML, KDD, NIPS, the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal, the Transactions on Data Privacy Journal, the Conference on Collaboration, Electronic Messaging, Anti-Abuse and Spam.

Michael Busch is the technical lead of Twitter's search infrastructure team. He designed and implemented Twitter's current real-time search index, which is based on Apache Lucene and serves more than 2 billion queries per day, while indexing more than 300 million documents per day.

Prior to Twitter Michael worked at IBM's Silicon Valley Lab on Enterprise Search and eDiscovery software. There he worked closely with IBMs research group on novel indexing technologies.

Michael contributed to Apache Lucene since 2005 and is committer on this project since 2006. During those years he added several features like posting payloads, multi-level posting list skipping and various indexing and search performance improvements. Most recently he helped implementing a new indexer threading model in preparation for Twitter's real-time indexing features.

Michael studied Computer Science at the University of Paderborn in Germany.

Michael Hunger has been passionate about soſtware development for a long time. He is particularly interested in the people who develop soſtware, soſtware craſtsmanship, programming languages, and improving code. For the last two years he has been working with Neo Technology on the Neo4j graph database. As the project lead of Spring Data Neo4j he helped developing the idea to become a convenient and complete solution for object graph mapping. He is also taking care of Neo4j cloud hosting efforts. Good relationships are everywhere in Michael’s life. His “real” life concerns his family and children, running his coffee shop and co-working-space “die-buchbar“, living in the depths of a text-based multi-user dungeon, tinkering with and without Lego® and much more. As a developer he loves to work with many aspects of programming languages, learning new things every day, participating in exciting and ambitious open source projects and contributing to different programming related books. Michael is also an active editor and interviewer at InfoQ.

Mircea Markus has joined JBoss's clustering team in 2007 as a core engineer. He has been working on various clustering components, such as JBossCache, PojoCache or JGoups. He is one of the founders of Infinispan project on on which he has been concentrating his efforts for the last three years. He has also the founder of project Radargun - a benchmarking framework data grids.

[2009-now] Research assistant at ZIB

Otis Gospodnetić is a coauthor of Lucene in Action (1st and 2nd edition). He has been involved with Lucene since 2000 and Solr since 2006. He is also a member of Nutch, and Mahout development teams, as well as Lucene Project Management Committee. Otis is an Apache Software Foundation member and the founder of Sematext, a products and services company focused on Search & Analytics using Solr, ElasticSearch, Lucene, Hadoop, HBase, Flume, Mahout, and other open-source technologies to serve customers world-wide.

Co-Founder and CTO of Nodejitsu.

Pavlo Baron is lead architect with codecentric AG. His passion are distributed systems and large data sets – the infrastructure behind what they call Big Data. Pavlo is frequent conference speaker and has written three German books: “Erlang/OTP”, “Pragmatic IT Architecture” and “Fragile Agile”.

Prior to Datameer, Peter consulted on a number of big data business intelligence projects with companies such as EMI Music and Krugle. Earlier, he was architect and developer for Deutsche Post and their ePost project, a distributed production system that processed more than 1 billion letters per year. Peter studied biology and has a Diploma (i.e., a Masters) in biochemistry and bioinformatics from the University of Köln.

CTO at GameDuell, biography will be added later

Robert Muir is a Lucene/Solr PMC Member and Committer. He earned his BS in Computer Science from Radford University and a MS in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. Prior to Lucid Imagination, Robert worked for Ntrepid Corporation.

Sean joined Basho Technologies in March 2010 after three years as a freelance web developer, in the course of which he worked on numerous startups and open-source projects, including the popular Radiant content management system which is built with Ruby on Rails. Prior to that, he studied Music Theory and Composition at the graduate level and directed a chorus after receiving bachelors degrees in Computer Science and Music from the University of Tulsa.

Sean brings his practical experience in building scalable web applications, passion for educating others, and broad theoretical knowledge of technical topics to the role of Software Engineer. He can often be found speaking at conferences and other events on Riak, and enjoys playing the piano in his free time.

Founder, ElasticSearch.

Steffen Bickel is principal engineer for local search and discovery at Nokia Berlin. His work centers around search relevance optimization, recommender systems, machine learning, and data analytics on large scale data. In a previous life, Steffen finished a PhD in machine learning and statistical prediction models.

Steve Loughran is a committer on Apache Hadoop

@steveloughran

(a more detailed Bio will be provided in April, once I have changed employers)

Torsten Curdt is a senior software developer. Just out of university he successfully co-founded a company which let him to contribute to open source. He was one of the core contributors of Apache Cocoon and also works on projects like Apache Commons. Today he is an elected member of the Apache Software Foundation, part of several PMCs and active citizen of the general open source world. His professional development let him to work with large systems and big data as well as projects in the mobile space. Torsten is a published author and speaker at conferences.

Uwe is committer and PMC member of Apache Lucene and Solr. His main focus is on development of Lucene Java. He implemented fast numerical search and is maintaining the new attribute-based text analysis API. He studied Physics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and works as managing director for SD DataSolutions GmbH in Bremen, Germany, a company that provides consulting and support for Apache Lucene and Solr. A primary customer of his company is “PANGAEA – Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data” where he implemented the portal's geo-spatial retrieval functions with Lucene Java. Uwe had talks about Lucene at various international conferences like the previous Berlin Buzzwords, Lucene Revolution, ApacheCon EU/US, Lucene Eurocon, and various local meetups.