Speakers

Julia Bennett is a member of the data engineering team for personalization at Netflix that delivers recommendations made for each user. The team is responsible for building large scale data processing used in training and scoring of the various machine learning models that power the Netflix UI experience. They have recently been working on moving some of the company’s core datasets from being processed in a once-a-day daily batch ETL to being processed in near real time using Apache Flink. Before joining Netflix, Julia completed her PhD in mathematics from The University of Texas At Austin.

Studied Computing at Imperial College London which included a year-long exchange program to ETH Zurich. Wrote Master's Thesis as part of the Strymon group under the supervision of Vasia Kalavri and John Liagouris. In September 2019 began a Backend Engineer position at Monzo, London. Interested in Stream Processing and Data-Intensive Applications.

Jamie has been working with data for 13+ years, began his data career as an ETL developer, and now finds himself in the world of stream processing.
Over the past 4 years Jamie has been leading stream processing implementations, from the design of the dataflows, to building the engineering capabilities to support the implementation, across two banks, in two geographical locations.

Michał Ciesielczyk is a Machine Learning Engineer at Deep.BI. He is responsible for researching, building and integrating machine learning tools with a variety of technologies including Scala, Python, Flink, Kafka, Spark, and Cassandra. Previously, he worked as an assistant professor at Poznan University of Technology, where he received a Ph.D. in computer science and was a member of a research team working on numerous scientific and R&D projects. He has published more than 15 refereed journal and conference papers in the areas of recommender systems and machine learning.

Gyula is a Software Engineer in the Flink Engineering team at Cloudera working on integrating Flink into the Cloudera platform. 

He has been a committer and contributor since the early days of Flink streaming and has used Flink in large scale production at King for almost 4 years delivering innovative real-time applications at a global scale.

Gyula grew up in Budapest where he first started working on distributed stream processing and later became a core contributor to the Apache Flink project. Gyula has been a speaker at numerous big data related conferences and meetups, talking about stream processing technologies and use-cases.

Marios Fragkoulis is a postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft, working on scalable stream processing. He holds a PhD in main memory data analytics from the Athens University of Economics and Business and an MSc degree from Imperial College London. Marios is the co-developer of dgsh, the directed graph shell.

Senior software engineer at Criteo. Working with Big data technologies for the last 8 years and currently developing a rule-based engine for invalid traffic detection based on Flink.

Kenny has 18 years of experience with various database platforms behind some of the busiest datasets in the world. Most recently he Co-Founded ObjectRocket. He has had roles as Chief Technologist, Architect, Director, Manager, Developer, and DBA. He was a key member of the early teams that scaled Paypal and then eBay, ran one of the largest PostgreSQL installations on the planet, and was a very early adopter and Entrepreneur using MongoDB. He is an active database community member, speaker, and evangelist.

Loves vi.

Roman Grebennikov is a passionate software developer from Russia with hands-on experience in software development, JVM and high-performance computation. During last years he has focused on the delivery of functional programming principles and practices to real-world data analysis and machine-learning projects.

Philipp is a Research Associate at Technische Universität Berlin and a PhD candidate supervised by Volker Markl. His research interests include data stream processing, query compilation, and the exploitation of modern hardware. Before joining TU Berlin, he has worked for several companies and collected experiences in frontend and backend software development. At the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, he joined a streaming systems oriented research project involving Apache Flink as a research assistant.

He graduated with a M.Sc. in computer science in March 2019 at TU-Berlin. Prior to that, he received his B.Sc degree at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.

Sijie Guo is the founder of StreamNative. StreamNative is an infrastructure startup, focusing on building cloud native event streaming systems around Apache Pulsar. Previously, he was the tech lead for the Messaging Group at Twitter, and worked on push notification infrastructure at Yahoo. He is also the VP of Apache BookKeeper and PMC Member of Apache Pulsar.

2010 ~ Now Alibaba Inc.

2007 ~ 2010 Baidu Inc.

Dr. Steffen Hausmann is a Specialist Solutions Architect for Analytics with Amazon Web Services. He has a strong background in the area of complex event and stream processing and supports customers on their cloud journey. In his spare time, he likes hiking in the nearby mountains.

Fabian Hueske is a committer and PMC member of the Apache Flink® project and has been contributing to Flink since its earliest days. Fabian is a co-founder of Ververica, a Berlin-based startup devoted to fostering Flink, where he works as a software engineer and contributes to Apache Flink®. He holds a PhD in computer science from TU Berlin and is currently writing a book about “Stream Processing with Apache Flink®”.

Vasia is a postdoctoral fellow at the Systems Group of ETH Zurich and will soon be moving to Boston University as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. She is interested in distributed stream processing, large-scale graph analytics, and the intersection of the two. Vasia is a PMC member of Apache Flink and co-author of O’Reilly’s “Stream Processing with Apache Flink”.

I am a PhD student at TU Berlin and researcher at DFKI.

Experienced Software Engineer with 15 years of professional experience building scalable, distributed, high-performance web applications, backend services and big data applications. Experience working with high scale systems like Apple's IdMS and Ooyala's recommendation engine.

Languages - Java, Scala, Python

Big Data - Apache Spark, HBase, Elastic Search, Couchbase NoSQL, Cassandra, Flink

Machine Learning - Content and Collaborative filtering algorithms for video recommendations based on Spark

Dongwon Kim is a big data architect at SK telecom. During his post-doctoral work, he was fascinated by the internal architecture of Flink and gave a talk titled “a comparative performance evaluation of Flink” at Flink Forward 2015. He introduces Flink to SK telecom, SK energy, and SK hynix to fulfill various needs for real-time streaming processing from the companies and shares the experiences at Flink Forward 2017 and 2018. He is recently working on a web service to promote the wide adoption of streaming applications companywide.

As Head of Product for Ververica Platform Konstantin is responsible for Ververica's commercial product, an enterprise-ready stream processing platform based on Apache Flink. Previously, he was leading the solutions architecture team and helping our clients as well as the Open Source community to get the most out of Apache Flink and Ververica Platform. Before joining Ververica he worked as a Senior Consultant with TNG Technology Consulting, where he supported their clients mainly in the areas of Distributed Systems and Automation. Konstantin has studied Mathematics and Computer Science at TU Darmstadt specializing in Stochastics and Algorithmics.

Aljoscha Krettek is a co-founder at Ververica where he works on the Flink APIs in the open source. He is also a PMC member at Apache Flink and Apache Beam. Before working on Flink, he studied Computer Science at TU Berlin, he has worked at IBM Germany and at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose. Aljoscha has spoken at Hadoop Summit, Strata, Flink Forward and several meetups about stream processing and Apache Flink before.

Aaron Levin is a mathematician-turned-radio-DJ-turned software engineer working on Stripe’s real-time data team (✨Streaming✨). Aaron used to live in Berlin, but now lives in Canada’s Berlin (Montréal - not to be mistaken with Berlin, Ontario).

Bowen is a committer of Apache Flink and Senior Software Engineer at Alibaba. He is currently focusing on advancing Flink as a unified data processing system and developing Flink's metadata and batch capabilities. Bowen is the host of Seattle Flink Meetup, he frequently organizes meetups and events, and give talks on Flink.

Software engineer at Pinterest focusing on large scale data analytics with work experience in Spark, Hive, Flink and HBase.

Before joining, Ben Liu graduated from Stanford University as an MS student in Statistics with a background in Computer science.

Max Meldrum is a researcher and systems engineer at RISE SICS in Sweden. His interests lie within distributed systems and areas it intersects with. That being, dataflow processing frameworks (e.g., Flink), scheduling, and data management. Max is one the core developers of Arcon, a distributed Rust-based dataflow runtime capable of executing stream and batch workloads efficiently at native hardware speeds.

Robert Metzger is a PMC member of the Apache Flink project and a co-founder and an engineering lead at Ververica. He is the author of many Flink components including the Kafka and YARN connectors. Robert studied Computer Science at TU Berlin and worked at IBM Germany and at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose. He is a frequent speaker at conferences such as the Hadoop Summit, ApacheCon and meetups around the world.

Max is a software engineer and PMC member of Apache Flink and Apache Beam. During his studies at Free University of Berlin and Istanbul University, he worked at Zuse Institute Berlin on Scalaris, a distributed transactional database. Inspired by the principles of distributed systems and open-source, he helped to develop Apache Flink at Ververica and, in the course of, joined the Apache Beam community to create the Flink Runner. After maintaining the SQL layer of the distributed database CrateDB, he is now working on the portability aspects of Apache Beam.

David is a Big Data devops in the Data Convergence team at OVH. He works on building architectures for OVH products around data (ingestion, analytics, storage, processing). He was introduced to Big Data with Hadoop 6 years ago and fell in love with it’s dynamic ecosystem. Since then he’s been working with every kind of system dealing with data with loads of technical challenges on his way.

Roshan is a technical lead at Uber's stream processing platform team (Athena) and looking into problems of stream processing at scale. He was previously at Hortonworks where he architected Storm 2.0's new high performance execution engine and authored Hive's transactional streaming ingest APIs. He is a committer on Flume, Streamline and Storm. He is also author of Castor, an open source C++ library that brings the Logic paradigm to C++.

More than 10 years of experience in the industry.

Currently part of the SRE Kafka team in Criteo which builds Streaming Platform.

Worked for Grammarly in the past. Likes JVM and functional programming. Fun of improving development productivity.

Piotr Nowojski is a Software Engineer in Ververica and Flink committer working mostly on Flink’s runtime code. Previously, he was a Software Engineer in Teradata working on Presto – distributed batch SQL query engine.

Yann is a senior software engineer in the Data Convergence team at OVH, working on creating products around data ingestion, data lakes and analytics platforms. More focused on the backend side of thing, he is passionate about API design, modularity and performance, a passion that he shares with his students as a teacher in Brest’s University (in France).

Massimo Perini is graph analytics aficionado with deep scientific knowledge and engineering experience in the field. Massimo is currently researching online graph embedding techniques within a multi-MSc degree in Data Science from KTH in Sweden, Politecnico di Milano and Torino in Italy, while also holding a joint Computer Engineering BSc with Tongji University in China. He has been a finalist at the Xilinx Open Hardware 2018 and the winner of the Italian Statistics and Probability Competition in 2013. His general interests lie in the fields of machine learning, big data and real-time data processing.

Wojtek works as FreshMail’s CTO and independent consultant and trainer. He loves various aspects of data-driven business culture transformations and development of data and software architectures in such companies. He is also a great supporter of fostering an organization-wide learning culture.

In FreshMail he leads the product development team and works on some core business solutions, often applying Machine Learning and AI to solve problems. There, together with the team, he works on a new generation of an anti-abuse engine (fighting spam, phishing, and other attacks) that uses data stream processing, ML & AI on the scale of tens of dozens of millions of emails every day. He is a creator of some ML/AI workshops, including public ones.

For almost 10 years he co-founded the Ministry of Ideas, where he was consulting a data-driven organization's transformations and implementation of tools and processes supporting it. As the consultant and trainer he worked, among others with The Coca-Cola Company, the American Bankers Association, Macy's, Bloomingdales, Heineken, Saks 5th Avenue, BP, Boots, Polo Ralph Lauren, Homebase, Porsche, HSBC, Intel, Oracle and others. Outside of the professional life, he is an enthusiast of mountain sports - downhill, enduro, free-touring, freeride snowboarding and travel, expeditions and photography.

Jiangjie (Becket) is currently a software engineer at Alibaba where he mostly focus on the development of Apache Flink and its ecosystem. Prior to Alibaba, Becket worked at LinkedIn to build streams infrastructures around Apache Kafka after he received Master degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 2014. Becket is a PMC member of Apache Kafka.

Lakshmi is a software engineer on the streaming platform team at Lyft. The team builds and supports the core infrastructure that enables several product teams at Lyft to easily and reliably spin up Flink jobs to perform aggregations on real-time data. Most recently, she has been spending time re-architecting the platform to a Kubernetes based deployment. Prior to Lyft, Lakshmi worked in fin-tech land, building a search and information retrieval platform for Goldman Sachs.

Till is a PMC member of Apache Flink and engineering lead at Ververica. His main work focuses on enhancing Flink’s scalability as a distributed system. Till studied computer science at TU Berlin, TU Munich and École Polytechnique where he specialized in machine learning and massively parallel dataflow systems.

Leire has been a Software Engineer at Workday for the last 4 years, although it has been over a decade that she is immersed into Software development, performing multiple roles as developer, tech lead and mentor.

Leire is passionate about building quality code, from conception through implementation, testing and delivery. Being the newest member of the Data Streaming Platform team in Workday, she's excited to be given the opportunity to work with Apache Flink and explore the possibilities and challenges that it has to offer.

When not behind a computer, Leire enjoys ‘all things outdoors’, with a bit of circus arts on the side.

Big Data changed my life. I started working with the elephant and his friends in 2013 in one of the first big data projects in Spain for Deutsche Bank. Until now I had the opportunity to work with several teams and different countries from Mapreduce through Spark and from 2017 until the present with Flink designing and developing innovation solutions.

My current role is Big Data & Innovation Architect at Indizen Technologies. Spanish company located in Madrid and Málaga specialized in R&D for financial services.

Senior software engineer at Criteo. Started his career working as a Freelance on Web Development. He then joined Criteo in 2015 to work as a Software Engineer in the Invalid Traffic Detection Team.

Christophe Salperwyck started as a software engineer and then moved to machine learning. He specialised on machine learning on streaming data during his PhD in Orange. He is also interested in designing algorithms that scale such as CourboSpark, an adaptation of Spark decision tree for time series for EDF. There he also worked on creating a data lake for the 30 years of historical power plant data, mainly in HBase: 1000B points/100 TB of data.

Innovative and technological enthusiastic with a broad career (+18 years) as Technical Expert and Leader, lately focused on helping companies to take advantage of Big Data Technologies in their business.

Caito is a software engineer who loves woodworking, dance, and terrible puns.

Klas Segeljakt is a next-gen compilers researcher and PhD student at KTH in Sweden, currently investigating the space of programming languages and hardware acceleration for data processing. He is known for his contributions to Arc, an intermediate representation aiming to bridge the worlds of batch and stream processing, independently of the frontend language (e.g. SQL) or backend system executing the optimized code (e.g., Flink).

Tzu-Li (Gordon) Tai is an Apache Flink PMC member and software engineer at Ververica. His main contributions in Apache Flink includes work on some of the most widely used Flink connectors (Apache Kafka, AWS Kinesis, Elasticsearch). Gordon was a speaker at conferences such as Flink Forward, Strata Data, as well as several Taiwan-based conferences on the Hadoop ecosystem and data engineering in general.

Sherin is a Software Engineer at Lyft. In her career spanning 8 years, she has worked on most parts of the tech stack, but enjoys the challenges in Data Science and Machine Learning the most. Most recently she has been focussed on building products that would facilitate advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning through Streaming.

She is passionate about getting more people, especially women, interested in the field of data and has been trying her best to share her work with the community through tech talks and panel discussions. Most recently she gave a talk about Flink Streaming, at Connect 2019(a Women Who Code event) in San Francisco.

In her free time she loves to read and paint. She is also the president of the Russian Hill book club based in San Francisco and loves to organize events for her local library.

Oytun is the co-founder and CTO of MotaWord, the world’s fastest business translation platform. Majored in linguistics, he is a software engineer by vocation. He grew an interest in collaborative workflows which MotaWord implements fully, and the automation of human collaboration. His most recent toys are Apache Flink, inline skating and kites.

Jonas is a Research Associate at Technische Universität Berlin and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). His research interests include data stream processing, sensor data analysis, and data acquisition from sensor nodes. Jonas authored several publications related to data stream gathering, processing and transmission in the Internet of Things and will complete his PhD in March 2019 under the supervision of Volker Markl. Before he started his PhD, Jonas wrote his master thesis at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) / RISE in Stockholm under supervision of Seif Haridi and Volker Markl and advised by Paris Carbone and Asterios Katsifodimos. Prior to that, he received his B.Sc. degree at Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW Stuttgart) and worked several years at IBM in Germany and the USA. Jonas is an alumnus of "Software Campus", "Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes" and "Deutschlandstipendium"

Writing code and tinkering with computers for a living, writing code and tinkering with computers for fun. Still uncertain whether he’s a Software Engineer, a Systems Engineer or a Software Reliability Engineer, keeps telling people he’s one of the computer guys at Yelp. Mainly interested in distributed systems and stream processing, has a taste for open-source software.

Timo Walther is a committer and PMC member of the Apache Flink project. He studied Computer Science at TU Berlin. Alongside his studies, he participated in the Database Systems and Information Management Group there and worked at IBM Germany. Timo works as a software engineer at Ververica. In Flink, he is mainly working on the Table & SQL API.

I am a senior engineer of Alibaba Group and works on Alibaba Big Data Processing Platform for over 3 years. My work mainly focus on distributed computing, streaming computing, and distributed resource management. I have designed and developed Alibaba Distributed Computing Platform, which has been deployed among hundreds of thousands of nodes in production supporting millions of business jobs every day.

Master's degree from Chongqing University. Currently a senior big data engineer at HanSight. Mostly interested in applying machine learning technologies on fast accurate anomaly detection in streaming processing system. I’m currently researching on how to build a flexible AutoML process based on big data processing frameworks. I’m also the main contributor of the UEBA product of our company.

Patrick Wiener currently works at the FZI Research Center for Information Technology in Karlsruhe. His research interests include Distributed Computing (Cloud, Edge/Fog Computing), IoT, and Stream Processing. Patrick is an expert for infrastructure management such as containers and container orchestration frameworks. He has worked in several public-funded research projects related to Big Data Management and Stream Processing in domains such as logistics and geographical information systems.

Seth Wiesman is a Solutions Architect at Ververica, where he works with engineering teams inside of various organizations to build the best possible stream processing architecture for their use cases.

University of Waterloo alumni of 2012, master degree of software engineering, former Flink Forward Berlin 2017 speaker. I’m a senior big data processing architect and currently the leader of UEBA product development at HanSight, the leading cyber security company in China and the only Asian vendor in Gartner Peer Insights “Voice of the Customers” SIEM Customers’ Choice 2019. My skills span multiple big data processing frameworks (e.g., Flink, Spark, Kafka, Zookeeper), data intensive applications design and machine learning technologies. Currently I’m focusing on powering machine learning process with an AutoML architecture that enhances feature reusability, feature standardization, consistency of model training/serving and user experience, and that as a result fills the gap between data engineering and data science.

Jin is a software engineer on Uber’s Driving Safety team. In particular, she works with safety-related activities that happen on-trip, including detecting distracted driving behavior and potential car crashes. She has a Computer Science degree from the University of Southern California. Previously, she worked at Mercedes-Benz R&D North America to collect streaming telematics data for business insight and product improvement. Both inside and outside her work, she enjoys cultivating her interest in driving, cars, and machine learning.

I work at realtime compute team in Alibaba, and mostly focus on building a unified, high-performance SQL engine based on Apache Flink.

Andrey Zagrebin is a Software Engineer at Ververica. Andrey’s work focuses primarily on Apache Flink’s distributed coordination and state backends. Previously, he worked as a Software Engineer at T-Mobile building a large scale infrastructure for batch and real-time analytics of customer experience. Before that, he worked at LinkResearchTools, where he developed an SEO web crawler and at Qubit Digital where he built multiple distributed streaming applications.

Philipp Zehnder is a research scientist at the FZI Research Center of Information Technology and PhD student at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Philipp holds a master degree in Computer Science from KIT. He was a student assistant at FZI, where he was working on the ProaSense FP7 project. His current research interests are in the areas of Distributed Stream Processing and Streaming Machine Learning. He received a Microsoft Azure for Research Award for his current research work focused on the development of distributed machine learning pipelines.

Sebastian Zontek is the CEO, CTO and co-founder of Deep.BI, Predictive Customer Data Platform with real-time user scoring. He is an experienced IT systems architect with particular emphasis on the production use of open source systems for big data such as Flink, Cassandra, Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Druid in BDaaS solutions (Big Data as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service), and PaaS (Platform as a Service). Previously, CEO and main platform architect at Advertine. The Advertine network allowed to match product ads with the user preferences, predicting their purchasing intent using ML and NLP techniques.

Regina Chan is a Senior Engineer at Goldman Sachs in the Data Architecture team building solutions to service the firm’s growing demand for data. She is one of the original members of the Data Lake team building it from the ground up and has been leading the effort in rebuilding using Flink.

Steven is a software engineer on the Data Processing Platform at Pinterest. He primarily works on Pinterest’s streaming platform, Xenon, and has helped Pinterest move from a Mesos-based micro-batch stream processing model to true streaming with Flink on YARN.

Vahid is a Software Engineer and a member of the Logging Platform team at Pinterest. He is an Apache Kafka committer and focuses on enhancing the logging pipeline at Pinterest. He is currently building a platform for querying Kafka data streams using Flink. Previously, Vahid worked as a member of the Open Technologies organization at IBM.

Mike Mintz is a software engineer on Stripe’s Streaming team. Mike previously worked in the trading industry, where it was valuable to have a unified system for historical backtesting and live trading. Mike is originally from Anchorage, Alaska, but now lives in San Francisco.

Stephan Ewen is CTO and co-founder at Ververica where he leads the development of the stream processing platform based on open source Apache Flink. He is also a PMC member and one of the original creators of Apache Flink. Before working on Apache Flink, Stephan worked on in-memory databases, query optimization, and distributed systems. He holds a Ph.D. from the Berlin University of Technology.

Sören is a a software engineer in the graph analytics team at Neo4j. His interests cover working with graphs in big data environments as well as query execution engines. Prior to joining Neo4j, he was studying at Leipzig University and wrote his master thesis about Cypher on Flink.

In this session we share tips for developing an effective connector for Apache Flink. Topics include how to develop data sources and data sinks for the Flink Steaming API and the Table API, and how to support data serialization, parallelism, exactly-once semantics using checkpoints, event time, and metrics.

Haemee Park is a big data engineer at SK telecom. She studied Computer Science and Management of Technology at Korea University. She previously worked at Oracle as a technical consultant and at Samsung Life Insurance as a DBA. Currently, she is focusing on developing PdM solution based on Flink.

Rahul Pathak is currently General Manager of Databases, Analytics, and Blockchain at AWS. He owns Amazon Managed Blockchain, Athena, EMR, DocumentDB, Neptune, and Timestream at AWS. During his 7+ years at AWS, Rahul has focused on managed database and analytics services. Prior to his current role, he was the GM for AWS Glue and Lake Formation, Principal Product Manager for Amazon Redshift, a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. He has also worked on Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon RDS, and Amazon RDS Provisioned IOPS. Rahul has over twenty years of experience in technology and has co-founded two companies, one focused on digital media analytics and the other on IP-geolocation. He holds a degree in Computer Science from MIT and an Executive MBA from the University of Washington.

Matyas has been working at Cloudera and assisting customers on their big data journey since 2016. After being a member of the Support, then the Professional Services team he has joined Engineering as a founding member of the Cloudera Flink team. He focuses on enterprise requirements including security and operations. Before joining Cloudera he was responsible for delivering classical software development projects in the Telecommunication and Financial sectors. He is a wine enthusiast and a hobby winemaker. He is married and proud owner of a 'sausage dog', Ziggy.

Aizhamal is an open source enthusiast and a committer to Apache Airflow. She helps build healthy open source communities and improve contributor experience, and advocates for documentation and recognition of non-code contributions. In her free time she watches too many movies, follows football (she’s a fan of Messi), dances salsa and bakes lava cakes.

As the Chief Technology Officer of Cloudera in Asia Pacific, Andrew is responsible for working closely with enterprises to transform their businesses by unlocking the potential of their data running on any cloud from the edge to AI. A trusted advisor and partner to many prominent Executives across the region, Andrew helps businesses to maximize ROI by identifying complex business problems, reducing them to deliverable solutions and achieving business objectives.Andrew joined Cloudera as part of the merger with Hortonworks in early 2019 and has a 20+ year career leading from the intersection of business and technology to drive strategic planning, tactical development, and implementation of leading-edge technology solutions across enterprises globally.He is recognized for being a hands-on-leader with a customer focus with deep technical expertise and a reputation for integrity, quality, efficiency and reliability. Andrew is a highly sought after speaker and can often be seen presenting at many thought-leading industry events. He also teaches at a number of universities in North America and has also authored a book titled “Streaming Data” http://manning.com/psaltis/.

Abdelkrim is a senior data streaming specialist at Cloudera with 10 years experience on several distributed systems (big data, IoT, peer to peer and cloud). Previously, he held several positions including big data lead, CTO, and software engineer at several companies. He was a speaker at various international conferences and published several scientific papers at well-known IEEE and ACM journals. Abdelkrim holds a PhD, MSc, and MSe degrees in computer science.

Jan Kunigk holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from DHBW Mannheim and started his career with distributed systems at IBM in 2005. Ever since then he has been busy with (Tera) bytes flying by. He led T-Systems' introduction of Hadoop hosting services in 2013 and joined Cloudera in 2014. At Cloudera, Jan has helped customers in all industries to be successful with large scale data processing projects in all industries as a solutions architect. Currently, Jan serves as Field Chief Technology Officer for EMEA. He is also a co-author of O'Reilly's "Architecting Modern Data Platforms".

Enrico works as a tech lead of the Data Infrastructure at Yelp, designing, building and maintaining data streaming and real-time processing infrastructure. Since 2013 he’s been working on real-time processing systems, designing and scaling Yelp's data pipeline to move and process in real-time hundreds of terabytes of data and tens of billions of messages every day. Enrico loves designing robust software solutions for stream processing that scale and building tools to make application developers’ interaction with the infrastructure as simple as possible. At Yelp, Enrico has led the teams that build and maintain the Kafka and Flink deployments and the overall data pipeline. Enrico has previously spoken about Apache Flink, Apache Kafka and Apache Beam at Flink Forward SF, Berlin Buzzwords, Techsummit.io, ApacheCon and several meetups.

Ryan Nienhuis is a technical product manager who helps customers use the technology to deliver business value. He has created and managed cloud services products focused on analytics. Ryan has worked on the Amazon Kinesis team at AWS for the past five years, where he defines products that make it easier for customers to work with real-time, streaming data in the cloud. Previously, Ryan worked at Deloitte Consulting, helping customers in banking and insurance solve their data architecture and real-time processing problems. Ryan holds a BE from Virginia Tech.

Sergei is the Product Manager for Cloud Dataflow, Google’s serverless, fully-managed service for streaming analytics. Dataflow offers advanced resource usage and execution time optimization techniques including autoscaling and fully-integrated batch processing.  Sergei holds an MBA degree from the Wharton School, and a Computer Science degree from the Technical University of Munich, Germany.

Reuven Lax is a senior staff software engineer at Google. He has been at Google since 2006 and involved in designing and building Google's streaming data processing infrastructure since 2008, serving as technical lead for MillWheel and leading development of Dataflow's streaming engine. 

Dawid Wysakowicz is a Flink committer, currently working as a Software Engineer at Ververica. Recently his main area of interest is detecting patterns in streams of data with Flink Complex Event Processing library. Previously worked at GetInData, where he’s been implementing real-time streaming solutions based on Apache Flink. His journey with highly distributed and scalable solutions started in 2015 while writing a Master Thesis on Distributed Genomic Datawarehouse.

Hassene Ben Salem is Chief Engineer for Airbus AirSense where he works on developing solutions for real-time tracking and airspace situational awareness. Before joining Airsense, he was one of the original members of the advanced analytics team building it from the ground up and has been leading the efforts in setting up the analytics and AI practices within Airbus Defence and Space first as a Data Scientist then as a Product Owner and Lead Architect. Prior to that, he received his M.Sc. in Computer Science from École Polytechnique with a focus on Systems Architecture

Andrew Torson is a Principal Data Engineer with Salesforce. His current work is focused on real-time ML based anomaly detection and application performance monitoring for the Salesforce cloud software. Before joining Salesforce, he was a data engineering lead working on the Smart Pricing platform in the Walmart Labs, generating real-time algorithmic price decisions for the global Walmart e-commerce catalog. Andrew is a Scala enthusiast and an active Flink developer with a long industry track-record. He holds a PhD degree in Operations Management from the New York University and M.Sci in Applied Mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Michael is a co-founder and CTO of Cogility, currently spearheading the efforts in Cogynt’s development. Having over 10 years of experience in behavioral analytics, distributed systems, big data and model-driven systems, Michael has played a key role in integrating Flink into the Cogynt platform presented today.

Chip has spent 20 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.

Patrick Lucas is a Senior Data Engineer at Ververica working on the team developing Ververica Platform. Previously, he worked on and led various infrastructure teams at Yelp in San Francisco, and prior to that worked at the Cyber Technology and Information Security Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. Patrick studied Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Holger is leading all things growth which we define as Community as well as Commercial growth since both are essential to the success of the company but also the wider Flink Community. Holger has been in the IT industry since almost 20 years now for organisations such as Citrix, VMWare and Neo4j and is passionate about Open Source deep tech technologies and Open Core business models.

Igal is a Team Lead of the Applications API team at Ververica, where he mostly works on expending the use of stream processing to new frontiers, previously he was working on Apache Flink, and the Ververica Platform. His interests are around distributed systems, writing clean and testable code.