Ted Dunning is Chief Applications Architect at MapR Technologies and committer and PMC member of the Apache Mahout, Apache ZooKeeper, and Apache Drill projects and mentor for these Apache projects: Spark, Storm, Stratosphere, and Datafu. He contributed to Mahout clustering, classification, and matrix decomposition algorithms and helped expand the new version of Mahout Math library. Ted was the chief architect behind the MusicMatch (now Yahoo Music) and Veoh recommendation systems, built fraud-detection systems for ID Analytics (LifeLock), and has issued 24 patents to date. Ted has a PhD in computing science from University of Sheffield. When he's not doing data science, he plays guitar and mandolin. Ted is on Twitter at @ted_dunning. Ellen Friedman is a consultant and commentator, currently writing mainly about big data topics. She is a committer for the Apache Mahout project and a contributor to the Apache Drill project.

With a PhD in Biochemistry, she has years of experience as a research scientist and has written about a variety of technical topics including molecular biology, nontraditional inheritance, and oceanography. Ellen is also co-author of a book of magic-themed cartoons, A Rabbit Under the Hat. Ellen is on Twitter at @Ellen_Friedman.