Program Committee

Akihiro Suda is a software engineer at NTT Corporation, a Japan-based telecommunication company. He has been a maintainer of several opensource container software such as Moby, BuildKit, containerd, runc, and Lima. He has previously talked at several FLOSS conferences such as KubeCon, DockerCon, FOSDEM, ApacheCon, and Open Source Summit.

Carles has been a firmware developer at several hardware, semiconductor and software companies for over 20 years, with a focus on microcontrollers. For the last 10 years he has worked at Nordic Semiconductor, where he was part of the team that brought to market Nordic’s first ever Bluetooth Low Energy chip, and has remained a member of the software development team since. During this time at Nordic he has also co-authored a book on Bluetooth LE and contributed to different areas of the software development effort, driving an internal push to contribute an existing proprietary Bluetooth LE Controller implementation as an open source component to the Zephyr project. With the controller now part of the Zephyr codebase, he widened his focus beyond Bluetooth Low Energy, helping ensure that Zephyr becomes the best possible open source all-purpose RTOS available.

Chris Xie serves as the Head of Open Source Strategy at Futurewei, where he leads various strategic open source initiatives. His involvement in diverse open source communities has established him as a knowledgeable and strategic thought leader. Chris plays an active role in several key projects and committees, contributing to organizations like LF Research, LF Energy, Green Software Foundation, and OpenSSF, as well as the Todo Group (OSPO). Earlier in his career, Chris started a software startup company as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur , focusing on decentralized computing. Chris holds patents in network management and distributed systems, reflecting his strong technical expertise. Recognized for his cross-cultural leadership, he has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle Business News.

Clare Dillon is an open source and InnerSource advocate and is currently part of the organizing team of CURIOSS, a community for university and research institution OSPOs. Alongside her work at CURIOSS, Clare is a member of the Lero (Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software) OSPO team. From 2021-2023, Clare served as the inaugural Executive Director of InnerSource Commons, a global non-profit foundation supporting open collaboration methods in corporate software development. In 2021, Clare co-founded Open Ireland Network, a community for those interested in advancing open source at a national level in Ireland. 

Dr. David A. Wheeler is an expert on open source software (OSS) and on developing secure software. He is the Director of Open Source Supply Chain Security at the Linux Foundation and teaches a graduate course in developing secure software at George Mason University (GMU). Dr. Wheeler has a PhD in Information Technology, a Master’s in Computer Science, a certificate in Information Security, a certificate in Software Engineering, and a B.S. in Electronics Engineering, all from George Mason University (GMU). He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He lives in Northern Virginia.

Dr. Dawn Foster works as the Director of Data Science for CHAOSS where she is also a board member / maintainer. She is co-chair of CNCF TAG Contributor Strategy and an OpenUK board member. She has 20+ years of experience at companies like VMware and Intel with expertise in community, strategy, governance, metrics, and more. She has spoken at over 100 industry events and has a BS in computer science, an MBA, and a PhD. In her spare time she enjoys reading science fiction, running, and traveling.

Dr. Youakim Badr is Full Professor of Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence at the Pennsylvania State University – Great Valley.
Dr. Badr’s current research strategy aims designing and deploying “Trustworthy AI Service Systems.” He investigates research challenges and business problems from a multidisciplinary and systemic perspectives, focusing on the following research areas: AI analytics systems, Trustworthy AI systems, Composable AI systems.

Elena Zannoni is an Senior Director of Linux Engineering at Oracle, with focus on Toolchain and Tracing. Elena has presented at many Linux Foundation conferences on various development related topics, like Tracing, BPF, DTrace, CTF, and more. Elena has been part of the LPC committee, and part of the OSS/LinuxCon Program committee for several years.

Eric Egan has an M.S. in computer science and has worked as a release manager and technical trainer at the Linux Foundation.

Georg Link is an Open Source Strategist. Georg’s mission is to make open source more professional in its use of community metrics and analytics. Georg co-founded the Linux Foundation CHAOSS Project to advance analytics and metrics for open source project health. Georg is an active contributor to several open source projects and has presented on open source topics on many occasions. Georg has an MBA and a Ph.D. in Information Technology. As the Director of Sales at Bitergia, Georg helps organizations and communities with adopting metrics and making open source more sustainable. In his spare time, Georg enjoys reading fiction and hot-air ballooning.

Greg is among a distinguished group of software developers who maintain Linux at the kernel level. In his role as Linux Foundation Fellow, he continues his work as the maintainer for the Linux stable kernel branch and a variety of subsystems while working in a fully neutral environment.

CoFounder and CTO @ Union.ai and co-author of Flyte.org, the LF AI&Data Workflow orchestrator.

Dr. Ibrahim Haddad is the Executive Director of the LF AI & Data Foundation . Throughout his career, Haddad has held technology and portfolio management roles at Ericsson Research, the Open Source Development Labs, Motorola, Palm, Hewlett-Packard, the Linux Foundation and Samsung Research. He writes and speaks on topics ranging from legal compliance to using open source as an R&D tool to drive collaboration and innovation. [@IbrahimAtLinux]

Jake has been wrassling with computers since he first laid eyes on a TRS-80 lo these many years ago. After graduating with a Computer Science degree and a brief dabble in grad school, he did systems programming for a (too) long list of startups, mostly in Colorado. He wrote software for around 20 years and, since 2007, now he writes about software — Linux and free software, in particular — at LWN.net. He lives with his wife and a loony dog near the beach in Baja California Sur.

I manage communities for Red Hat focused on automotive, edge, IoT, and emerging hardware (RISC-V). I worked for the Linux Foundation as a program manager for two years, and prior to that I spent 7 years as the program & community manager for the Yocto Project at Intel.

Jonathan Corbet is the kernel documentation maintainer, co-founder of LWN.net, a member of the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board, and the lead author of Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition.  He lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

For more than 19 years I have been helping organizations being Lean\Agile and modernizing their App Portfolios and Software Development Life Cycle. Using DevOps, Cloud, PaaS, Containers, Microservices, API we increased delivery velocity and reducing TCO.
Passionate by Open Source, as a pragmatic leader I’m used to work with partners and technologies from everywhere and building bridges between traditional IT and innovative approaches.

As a community member, I have been engaged in various non-profit communities to contribute and promote Open Source. Throughout my career I have been active on producing content as Blog posts, articles, videos about technologies.

Kate Stewart is a Senior Director of Strategic Programs, responsible for the Open Compliance programs encompassing the SPDX, FOSSology, OpenChain, and other compliance-related projects. Kate was one of the founders of SPDX, and is currently the specification lead. Since joining The Linux Foundation, she has also launched Real-Time Linux and Zephyr Project.

With almost 30 years of experience in the software industry, she has held a variety of roles and worked as a developer in Canada, Australia, and the US and for the last 20 years has managed software development teams in the US, Canada, UK, India, and China. She received her Master’s in computer science from the University of Waterloo and her Bachelor’s of computer science (co-op program) from the University of Manitoba.

Kathy Giori has spent her career of more than 30 years working in technology companies in the SF Bay Area. Her current focus to pay that career success forward is to spend much of her time supporting MicroBlocks, as head of Global Partnerships and Outreach. MicroBlocks is a non-profit STEM organization that has developed the first truly “live” open source physical computing tool for programming microcontrollers.

As part of her industry career she was most recently Director of Product Engineering at ZEDEDA, and held numerous executive and product roles at Mozilla, Arduino, Qualcomm, Etak/Sony, SRI, and four startups, two of which she co-founded and led as CEO. Kathy volunteered as a TechWomen professional mentor for the last 4 years and continues to collaborate with fellows. She has given numerous talks at Linux Foundation and other industry events, has organized technology workshops, and is often promoting the benefits of open hardware and software to industry, since bridging open communities with industry drives faster innovation. She received her bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, and her master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford.

Keqiu leads the AI Training & Pipeline Platform team at LinkedIn, empowering AI engineers to develop and deploy larger models faster. Prior to joining the AI Platform team, Keqiu led efforts in scaling LinkedIn’s Hadoop infrastructure.

As a Lead Developer Advocate at Dell Technologies, Laura Santamaria loves to learn and explain how things work to bridge the gaps in engineering disciplines. She is the curator for A Minute on the Mic, a cohost for The Hallway Track podcast, and the ex-host of Quick Bites of Cloud Engineering on YouTube. As a community member, she co-hosts Austin DevOps and Cloud Austin, taught Python for Women Who Code Austin for many years, organizes DevOpsDays Austin, is a member of the PyTexas Foundation, and has been a returning program committee member for Open Source Summit’s Cloud Open track. Outside of tech, Laura runs, plays with her dogs, throws discs, and watches clouds—the real kind.

Lauren is an award-winning author, analyst, and designer of data systems for the U.S. Federal government. Career highlights include leading service design for an agency database with 46 million+ unique data points, PDF parsing for a website migration from PHP to Drupal, and designing the first service models for Chief Data and AI Offices.

Lauren currently supports the U.S. Coast Guard’s first Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAO), where she leads design activities to align data mesh, governance, AI, and analytics with the Coast Guard’s key priorities. Her first book, “Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up”, was adapted into a LinkedIn Learning course.

Lauren is a founding editor of Springer’s AI and Ethics journal and a former area editor for Data and Policy, an open access journal with Cambridge University Press. She has presented at venues/with partners including Princeton and Columbia Universities, the U.S. State Department, and Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. 

Prior to joining Steampunk, Lauren was an associate principal analyst at Gartner, where she covered the impact of emerging tech like AI and blockchain on small business owners. Lauren has written for Harvard Data Science Review, Financial Times, and The Guardian, among other publications. She has also peer reviewed technology research and books published by the GovLab at NYU, O’Reilly Media, and The Atlantic Council. 

Lauren is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a former member of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Distinguished Speakers Program, and a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, where she helps judge the Webby Awards. She is on 2 nonprofit boards and volunteers with The Linux Foundation.

Dr. Malini Bhandaru is a Cloud Security Architect and Intel Sr. Principal Engineer. Her focus areas are confidential compute and cloud to edge security. She has worked for over a decade in open source on projects such as Confidential Containers, EdgeX Foundry, KubeFlow, OpenStack, and OpenDaylight.  At Intel, she first worked on Xeon server power and performance architecture and over her career on applications spanning autonomous driving, health care, and telco. Malini holds over 20 patents, has served on the Open Source Summit, ONES, KubeCon  program committees and is a frequent conference speaker. She has a Ph.D. in Machine Learning, is a STEM coach and loves gardening.

Marta Rybczynska has network security background, 20 years of experience in Open Source including 15 years in embedded development. She has been working with embedded operating systems like Linux and various real-time ones, system libraries and frameworks up to user interfaces. Her specialties are architecture-specific parts of the Linux kernel. In the past, Marta served as Vice-President and treasurer for KDE e.V. She has been involved in various Open Source projects, and also contributing kernel-related guest articles for LWN.net. In 2021, she founded Syslinbit, an Open Source consulting company. She has experience with presentations on both scientific and free software conferences, including LinuxCon, Open Source Summit, Embedded Linux Conference, Akademy, FOSDEM and FOSS-north.

Maureen Helm is a Distinguished Engineer in the Software Engineering Solutions Group at Analog Devices, focusing on embedded microcontroller software. She is an upstream maintainer in the Zephyr Project and former chair of the Technical Steering Committee.

Nicole has worked in different projects developing safety relevant embedded software before starting as an independent safety assessor. With now more than ten years of experience as a functional safety expert, she supported several customers to show their compliance with ISO 26262 and/or other safety standards. Currently she is utilising her experience regarding the development of highly reliable software to enable both closed and open source solutions to be used in critical products, focusing on safety, security and licence compliance.

Nigel is a Senior Developer Advocate based in Austin, Texas. He was drawn to the craft of software engineering because of the agency it provides people to build and interact with worlds of their own creation. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies and his passions in technology are community building, High Performance Computing, and free and open source software (and hardware).

Nithya A. Ruff is the Head of Amazon’s Open Source Program Office. Open Source has proven
to be one of the world’s most prolific enablers of innovation and collaboration and Amazon’s
customers increasingly value open source innovation and the and cloud’s role in helping them
adopt and run important open source services. She drives open source culture and
coordination inside of Amazon and engagement with external communities. Prior to Amazon,
she started and grew Comcast and Western Digital’s Open Source Program Offices. Open
Source Program Offices are a critical part of a company’s digital transformation and innovation
journey.

Nithya has been director-at-large on the Linux Foundation Board for the last 5 years and in
2019 was elected to be Chair of the influential Linux Foundation Board. She works actively to
advance the mission of the Linux Foundation around building sustainable ecosystems that are
built on open collaboration. She is a passionate advocate and a speaker for opening doors to
new and diverse people in technology and can often be seen speaking and writing on this topic.
Nithya graduated with an M.S. in Computer Science from NDSU and an MBA from the
University of Rochester, Simon Business School and is an aspiring corporate board director and
governance enthusiast. You can follow her on twitter @nithyaruff and you can find her
on https://www.linkedin.com/in/nithyaruff/

Phil is a Principal Engineer for Amazon Web Services (AWS), focused on core container technologies that power AWS container offerings like Fargate, EKS, and ECS. Phil is currently an active contributor and maintainer for the CNCF containerd runtime project, and participates in the Open Container Initiative (OCI) as the member of the Technical Oversight Board (TOB). Phil has also been a long-time core contributor and maintainer on the Docker/Moby engine
project where he contributed key features like user namespace support and multi-platform image capabilities.

Phil enjoys helping others understand and apply container and cloud native concepts and speaks worldwide at industry conferences and meetups, and is a member of the CNCF Ambassadors program. He maintains a blog on container topics at https://integratedcode.us and you can find him on Twitter tweeting away as @estesp.

Bob is the tech lead & manager of the supply chain integrity group in Google’s Open Source Security Team. He and his team directly contribute to critical OSS secure software supply chain projects (including sigstore that he co-founded), as well as help drive adoption of best practices throughout the broader open source ecosystem.

Rose Judge is a Senior Open Source Engineer at Broadcom (formerly VMware) where she works on the supply chain security team to improve gaps around SBOM creation, quality, distribution and policy. She is also an open source project maintainer, Chair of the SPDX Steering Committee and Chair for the Linux Foundation’s Automating Compliance Tooling Technical Advisory Council.

Sasha helps maintain the Linux Kernel Stable and LTS trees. He is currently employed by Google where he helps make Linux better. Previously, Sasha was employed by Microsoft and the Ksplice team in Oracle.

Stefano Stabellini is a Fellow at AMD, where he leads system software architecture and the virtualization team. Previously, at Aporeto, he created a virtualization-based security solution for containers and authored several security articles. As Senior Principal Software Engineer in Citrix, he led a small group of passionate engineers working on Open Source projects. Stefano has been involved in Xen development since 2007. He created libxenlight in November 2009 and started the Xen port to ARM with virtualization extensions in 2011. Today he is a Xen Project committer, and he maintains Xen on ARM and Xen support in Linux and QEMU.

Steven Rostedt currently works for Google on the ChromeOS baseOS performance team. He is the main developer and maintainer for ftrace, the official tracer of the Linux kernel, as well as the user space tools and libraries that interact with the Linux tracing interface. Steven is also one of the original developers for the Real Time patch (PREEMPT_RT) and still helps maintain the stable releases of the Real Time patch set. He also develops ktest.pl (in the kernel) and created the “make localmodconfig” option.

Theodore Ts’o is the first North American Linux Kernel Developer, and
started working with Linux in September, 1991. He also served as the
tech lead for the MIT Kerberos V5 development team, and served as a
chair of IP Security working group at the IETF. He previously served
as CTO for the Linux Foundation, and is currently employed at Google.
Theodore is a Debian Developer, and is the maintainer of the ext4 file
system in the Linux kernel. He is the maintainer and original author
of the e2fsprogs userspace utilities for the ext2, ext3, and ext4 file
systems.

Thomas Petazzoni is the CEO of Bootlin, a consulting company specializing in embedded Linux engineering and training with a strong open-source DNA. Thomas was formerly an embedded Linux engineer at Bootlin, giving him a solid technical background in the field. Thomas is also the co-maintainer of the Buildroot embedded Linux build system and has contributed over 900 patches to the official Linux kernel.

Thomas Steenbergen helps organizations manage open source in a strategic and efficient manner that meets their business needs. Previously he was the Head of Open Source Program Office at EPAM Systems and HERE Technologies. He is maintainer of OSS Review Toolkit, SPDX, TODO group and a regular contributor to FINOS’s Open Source Readiness and OpenChain. He is a frequent speaker and panelist at various global open source conferences and is always happy to start a conversation around anything open source. See also github.com/tsteenbe for contact and project details.

Tim Bird is a Principal Software Engineer for Sony Corporation, where he helps Sony improve the Linux kernel for use in Sony’s products. Tim is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Linux Foundation. Tim is active in technical projects related to embedded Linux testing and standards, and is the maintainer of the Fuego test system.  He created the Embedded Linux Conference, and has been working with Linux for over 25 years.