Vikram Dhillon is a software developer, bioinformatics researcher, and software coach at the Blackstone LaunchPad in the University of Central Florida. He has been working on his own start-up involving healthcare data security. He lives in Orlando and regularly attends developer meetups and hackathons. He enjoys spending his spare time reading about new technologies such as the blockchain and developing tutorials for machine learning in game design. He has been involved in open source projects for over 5 years and writes about technology and start-ups at opsbug.com.
Miro Kopecky is a passionate JVM enthusiast from the first moment he joined Sun Microsystems in 2002. Miro truly believes in a distributed system design, concurrency, and parallel computing, which means pushing the system's performance to its limits without losing reliability and stability. He has been working on research of new data mining techniques in neurological signal analysis during his PhD studies. Miro's hobbies include autonomic system development and robotics.
Pavan Narayanan is an applied mathematician and is experienced in mathematical programming, analytics, and web development. He has published and presented papers in algorithmic research to the Transportation Research Board, Washington DC and SUNY Research Conference, Albany, NY. An avid blogger at https://datasciencehacks.wordpress.com, his interests are exploring problem solving techniques—from industrial mathematics to machine learning. Pavan can be contacted at <[email protected]>.
He has worked on books such as Apache mahout essentials, Learning apache mahout, and Real-time applications development with Storm and Petrel.
Doug Ortiz is an independent consultant who has been architecting, developing, and integrating enterprise solutions throughout his whole career. Organizations that leverage his skillset have been able to rediscover and reuse their underutilized data via existing and emerging technologies such as Microsoft BI Stack, Hadoop, NOSQL Databases, SharePoint, Hadoop, and related toolsets and technologies.
Doug has experience in integrating multiple platforms and products. He has helped organizations gain a deeper understanding and value of their current investments in data and existing resources turning them into useful sources of information. He has improved, salvaged, and architected projects by utilizing unique and innovative techniques.
His hobbies include yoga and scuba diving. He is the founder of Illustris, LLC, and can be contacted at <[email protected]>.
Shivani Rao, PhD, is a machine learning engineer based in San Francisco and Bay Area working in areas of search, analytics, and machine learning. Her background and areas of interest are in the field of computer vision, image processing, applied machine learning, data mining, and information retrieval. She has also accrued industry experience in companies such as Nvidia , Google, and Box. Shivani holds a PhD from the Computer Engineering Department of Purdue University spanning areas of machine learning, information retrieval, and software engineering. Prior to that, she obtained a masters from the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, majoring in Computer Vision and Image Processing.