Program Committee

Stephen is a Black engineering director and leader in open source communities.

He is Cisco’s first Head of Open Source, within the Emerging Technologies & Incubation division.

For Kubernetes, he has co-founded transformational elements of the project, including the KEP (Kubernetes Enhancements Proposal) process, the Release Engineering subproject, and Working Group Naming. Stephen has also previously served as a chair for both SIG PM and SIG Azure.

He continues his work in Kubernetes as a Chair for SIG Release, a Lead for WG Naming, and an owner of Enhancements subproject.

Across the wider CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) ecosystem, Stephen has the pleasure of being one of the Program Chairs for KubeCon / CloudNativeCon, the cloud native community’s flagship conference, a SIG Contributor Strategy Chair, and a maintainer for the Dex project.

He is a prolific contributor to CNCF projects, amongst the top 25 (as of writing) code/content committers, all-time.

In 2020, Stephen co-founded the Inclusive Naming Initiative, a cross-industry group dedicated to helping projects and companies make consistent, responsible choices to remove harmful language across codebases, standards, and documentation. He leads multiple workstreams here and maintains the initiative’s infrastructure.

He has previously held positions at VMWare (via Heptio), Red Hat, and CoreOS.

Stephen is based in New York City.

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.

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.

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.

Dawn is Director of Open Source Community Strategy within VMware’s OSPO. She is an OpenUK board member, Governing Board member / maintainer for CHAOSS, and co-chair of the CNCF Contributor Strategy TAG. She has 20+ years of experience at companies like Intel and Puppet with expertise in community building, strategy, open source software, governance, metrics, and more. Dawn holds a PhD, an MBA, and a BS in Computer Science. She has spoken at over 100 industry events, including many Linux Foundation events, KubeCon, OSCON, SXSW, FOSDEM and more. In her spare time she enjoys reading science fiction, running, and traveling.

Emily Fox is a DevOps enthusiast, security unicorn, and advocate for Women in Technology. She promotes the cross-pollination of development and security practices. She has worked in security for over 12 years to drive a cultural change where security is unobstructive, natural, and accessible to everyone. Her technical interests include containerization, least privilege, automation, and promoting women in technology. She holds a BS in Information Systems and an MS in cybersecurity. A member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and co-chair for KubeCon+CloudNativeCon China 2021, Europe 2022, and North America 2022, she is involved in a variety of open source communities.

Guess what? Emily is NOT A DEVELOPER – She is a Security Engineer with lots of exposure to development and sustainment.

Prior to joining the Federal government, Friedman was a noted cybersecurity and technology policy researcher. Wearing the hats of both a technologist and a policy scholar, his work spans computer science, public policy and the social sciences, and has addressed a wide range of policy issues, from privacy to telecommunications. Friedman has over a decade of experience in cybersecurity research, with a particular focus on economic, market, and trade issues. He is the coauthor of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2014).

His work has taken him between the technical and policy research world.  From 2014-215, he was a Research Scientist at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at George Washington University based in the Cyber Security Policy Research Institute. Before that, Friedman was a Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the research director for the Center for Technology Innovation. Prior to moving to Washington, he was Postdoctoral Fellow in the Harvard University Computer Science department, where he worked on cyber security policy, privacy-enhancing technologies and the economics of information security. Friedman was also a Fellow at the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, where he worked on the Minerva Project for Cyber International Relations. He has also received fellowships from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the Harvard Program on Networked Governance. He has a degree in Computer Science from Swarthmore College, and a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University.

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.

A “jackie of all trades” (and mistress of being herself), Tracy is a Technical Community Advocate at Isovalent focusing on all things Cilium, security, observability, and Anxiety Driven Development. When she isn’t leveling up her programming skills, hanging with her pup, or learning all she can about the next “Something-OPS”, she likes helping others have “lightbulb” moments. Tracy is active in the open source community and is a strong believer that open source is like gardening – pay attention to your conditions, and water only when needed. You can find her everywhere @tracypholmes.

Yoshitake Kobayashi is the Senior Manager of The Open Source Technology Department at Toshiba Corporation. The team provides a Linux based system and related technologies such as Database and Web application frameworks for various Toshiba products. His research interests include operating systems, distributed systems, and dynamically reconfigurable systems. Additionally, he is the Chair of the Technical Steering Committee for the Civil Infrastructure Platform.

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.

Brandon loves designing and implementing computer systems (with a focus on Security, Operating Systems, and Distributed/Parallel Systems). Brandon is a Co-chair of the CNCF Security TAG, and as a part of Google’s Open Source Security Team, he works on improving the security of the Open Source ecosystem. Previously at IBM Research, Brandon worked on various security areas such as: Container content protection via encryption and image signing, identity, and kernel attack surface reduction.

Thomas Petazzoni is the co-owner and CEO of Bootlin, an engineering company specialized in embedded Linux development and training. For the past 13+ years, Thomas has helped customers worldwide in their embedded Linux projects, by working on Linux kernel development, integration of embedded Linux BSPs, build systems as well as by teaching training courses on these topics. He has contributed to the Linux kernel and is one of the co-maintainers of Buildroot. Last but not least, Thomas is also a regular speaker at the Embedded Linux Conference.

Marta Rybczynska has a network security background and 15 years of experience 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 has served as Vice-President and treasurer for KDE e.V. She is the founder of Syslinbit, an Open Source focused company. Apart from that, she is involved in various Open Source projects. She is also contributing kernel-related guest articles for LWN.net. In addition to technical work, she is a public speaking trainer. She has experience with presentations on both scientific and free software conferences, including LinuxCon, Open Source Summit, Embedded Linux Conference, Akademy and FOSDEM.

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.

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.

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.