Holden Karau is transgender Canadian, and anactive open source contributor. When not in San Francisco working as asoftware development engineer at IBM's Spark Technology Center, Holdentalks internationally on Spark and holds office hours at coffee shops athome and abroad. She makes frequent contributions to Spark, specializing inPySpark and Machine Learning. Prior to IBM she worked on a variety ofdistributed, search, and classification problems at Alpine, Databricks,Google, Foursquare, and Amazon. She graduated from the University ofWaterloo with a Bachelor of Mathematics in Computer Science. Outside ofsoftware she enjoys playing with fire, welding, scooters, poutine, anddancing. Most recently, Andy Konwinski co-founded Databricks. Before that he was a PhD student and then postdoc in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley, focused on large scale distributed computing and cluster scheduling.

He co-created and is a committer on the Apache Mesos project. He also worked with systems engineers and researchers at Google on the design of Omega, their next generation cluster scheduling system. More recently, he developed and led the AMP Camp Big Data Bootcamps and first Spark Summit, and has been contributing to the Spark project. Patrick Wendell is an engineer at Databricks as well as a Spark Committer and PMC member. In the Spark project, Patrick has acted as release manager for several Spark releases, including Spark 1.0. Patrick also maintains several subsystems of Spark's core engine. Before helping start Databricks, Patrick obtained an M.

S. in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. His research focused on low latency scheduling for large scale analytics workloads. He holds a B.S.E in Computer Science from Princeton University Matei Zaharia is the creator of Apache Spark and CTO at Databricks. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley, where he started Spark as a research project. He now serves as its Vice President at Apache.

Apart from Spark, he has made research and open source contributions to other projects in the cluster computing area, including Apache Hadoop (where he is a committer) and Apache Mesos (which he also helped start at Berkeley).