Ted Dunning is Chief Applications Architect at MapR Technologies and active in the open source community, being a committer and PMC member of the Apache Mahout, Apache ZooKeeper, and Apache Drill projects, and serving as a mentor for the Storm, Flink, Optiq, and Datafu Apache incubator projects. He has contributed to Mahout clustering, classification, matrix decomposition algorithms, and the new Mahout Math library, and recently designed the t-digest algorithm used in several open source projects. 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 24 issued 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 solutions consultant and well-known speaker andauthor, currently writing mainly about big data topics. She is a committerfor the Apache Mahout project and a contributor to the ApacheDrill project.

With a PhD in Biochemistry from Rice University, shehas years of experience as a research scientist and has written about avariety of technical topics including molecular biology, nontraditionalinheritance, oceanography, and large-scale computing. Ellen is alsoco-author of a book of magic-themed cartoons, A Rabbit Under theHat. Ellen is on Twitter at @Ellen_Friedman.