Program Committee

Anas Nashif is a Principal Software Engineer at Intel. He is the upstream maintainer of various Zephyr subsystems and areas and the chair of the Zephyr Technical Steering Committee. Anas has been involved with Zephyr since 2015.

Andrew leads Arm’s Open Source Office, encompassing internal and external open source engagements. As a member of Arm’s Open Source Software leadership team, he is responsible for building the relationships between Arm engineering and open source projects. Andrew is the current Chair of the Yocto Project, and sits on the Xen Advisory Board, the FreeBSD Foundation Board and has served on the openSUSE Board. With nearly 20 years of experience in the Open Source arena working for the likes of Fujitsu, EMC, Sun  Microsystems as well as local government. Prior to immersing himself in open source he spent nearly a decade in the aviation space and is slowly returning to it as a private pilot.

Benjamin Cabé is a technology enthusiast with a passion for empowering developers to build innovative solutions. He has over 15 years of experience leading developer engagement initiatives with some of the top communities and companies in the IoT, embedded, and AI space. He has invented an award-winning open source and open hardware artificial nose that he likes to use as an educational platform for people interested in diving into the world of embedded development. He is currently a Developer Advocate for the Zephyr Project at the Linux Foundation and lives in Toulouse, France, where he enjoys baking sourdough bread with the help of his artificial nose.

Cara Delia is the Sr Principal Community Architect with responsibility for spearheading initiatives in financial services related open source software communities to grow Red Hat’s presence.Additionally, advocate for open source principles and assist Red Hat’s customers in those upstream communities to contribute. 

Cara has over 15 years in marketing and community engagement with the primary focus being in the financial services industry. Cara holds a B.S. in Political Science from Virginia Polytechnic & State University.

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.

Dan Cauchy is the General Manager of Automotive at The Linux Foundation and the Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux, a cross-industry effort to build an open software platform for automotive applications. Cauchy has over 22 years of experience spanning the automotive, telecom, networking, and mobile business verticals. Prior to his current position, he was the VP and GM of MontaVista’s Automotive Business Unit (acquired by Mentor). During this period, Cauchy served on the Board of Directors of the GENIVI Alliance and was responsible for the creation of the GENIVI Compliance Program, which he chaired for three years. He also has extensive startup experience and served as the Director of Product Management at Atrica (acquired by Nokia-Siemens Networks) and the Director of Architecture and Strategy at BlueLeaf Networks (now Picarro). Cauchy also previously held senior management and engineering leadership positions at Cisco Systems, Newbridge Networks (acquired by Alcatel), and Nortel.

David has worked on Zephyr for about 6 years, with a focus on the security team. He is currently the Security Chair, severs as the TSC representative for Linaro, and is the Silver Member Governing Board representative.

David Leach has been a software engineer through various technology fields for almost 40 years. He joined Freescale Semiconductors (now NXP Semiconductors) in 2015 as a software architect to help lead connectivity and various standards engagements. For the last several years, he has been participating in NXP’s open-source software activities and is currently leading the MCU Open-Source Software team in the Security & Connectivity Business Line.

I am a Linux kernel engineer located in Portland, Oregon. I focus on support for ARM and RISC-V SoCs in Linux as well as RISC-V architecture features like the RISC-V QoS spec (CBQRI). I serve on the board of directors for the BeagleBoard.org Foundation, and I’m an ambassador for RISC-V International.

I’m an embedded software/firmware engineer and a passionate open source developer. I started working on various open source projects back in the late 1990s and have not stopped since. I am mostly committed to writing low-level, hardware-near device drivers and communication protocols. Over the years I have been working on various, in-house embedded Linux and FreeBSD BSPs but nowadays my work (and my spare time) has shifted to working on the Zephyr Project, a small real-time operating system (RTOS) for connected, resource-constrained embedded devices.

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 Beri is the founder and CEO of Golioth, a straightforward commercial IoT development platform built for scale. Jonathan has spent more than a decade building IoT solutions at companies like Google, Nest, Particle & WeWork. If you really want to get him going, ask him how he would build a real holodeck.

Kate Stewart works with the safety, security and license compliance communities to advance the adoption of best practices into embedded open source projects. She has launched the ELISA and Zephyr Projects, as well as supporting other embedded projects. With more than 30 years of experience in the software industry, she has held a variety of roles in software development, architecture, and product management, primarily in the tooling and embedded ecosystem working with international teams.

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.

Kerim is a senior developer advocate at HashiCorp, where he focuses on coaching operators and developers on sustainable practices around infrastructure and orchestration workflows.

He enjoys the challenge of codifying the fragile bits of complex systems but is also excited to no longer be on-call, all the time.

Before he joined HashiCorp, Kerim worked on Industrial IoT for the Amsterdam airport and helped cultural institutions navigate the journey from offline to online collections.

When Kerim isn’t working, he’s either spending time with his daughter, enjoying aerial photography, or baking a cake or two.

Marlow is a Cloud Software Architect working on resource management for Kubernetes at Intel. She also is a chair for the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG. Marlow has expertise in resource management, the AI/ML Kubernetes cloud compute ecosystem, embedded systems, high performance compute system tools, kernel drivers, tracing libraries, and security. Marlow’s interests lie in optimizing the cloud native ecosystem for both heterogenous systems and also for HPC/AI/ML compute with an eye for both performance and sustainability.

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.

Michael Gielda is VP Business Development at Antmicro, Marketing Committee Chair of the Zephyr Project and Chair of Outreach for CHIPS Alliance. A Computer Science graduate, he worked as a researcher in the fields of IoT and embedded systems before going on to found Antmicro. Michael is involved in many open source software and hardware projects related to software-driven tools and methodologies, AI, FPGA, ASIC development (among other things). He is working to build collaborations between projects with common goals, and expanding the lessons learned from the success of open source software into other fields.

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.

Niki Manoledaki is a Software Engineer at Weaveworks working on various open source cloud native tools. She is an advocate for environmental sustainability initiatives at Weaveworks as well as the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG and GitOps WG. She was previously a maintainer of eksctl, the official AWS EKS CLI.

Philipp Ahmann is a technical business development manager at Robert Bosch GmbH with focus on Open Source activities. He represents the ELISA project of the Linux Foundation as ambassador and TSC chair. In 2023 he also became advisory board member of the Linux Foundation Europe. He has more than 10 years of experience in the field of Linux automotive SW base platforms working as engineer, team leader for testing and as project manager. All of these projects utilized complex multi-core chipsets. In his current position he contributes to a project focusing on embedded Linux and open source software in industrial applications and wider IoT scope beyond Automotive.

Steve VanderLeest (PhD in computer engineering, University of Illinois) is a Technical Fellow at The Boeing Company. Previously, he was Principal Engineer for Multicore Solutions at Rapita and professor of engineering at Calvin University. A senior member of the IEEE, he has written dozens of publications on avionics safety. He served as principal investigator for Small Business Innovation Research contracts with the US Navy, Army, and DARPA.

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.

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.

Walt Miner has worked for The Linux Foundation as the Community Manager for Automotive Grade Linux since 2014. Walt has spoken at Automotive Linux Summit, Embedded World Conference in Nuremberg, Embedded Linux Conference, LinuxCon North America, and Open Source Summit North America and Europe. Walt has over 30 years of embedded software development and management experience in the automotive, mobile phone, and defense industries.

Yoshitake Kobayashi is the General Manager of Advanced Software Technology Office at Toshiba Corporation. A part of his team provides a Linux distribution 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 Project, hosted by The Linux Foundation.