Program Committee

Abigail Afi Gbadago is a software engineer, technical writer and an organizer across a number of open source communities. 
She is passionate about community building and sharing her experiences through global speaking engagements, workshops and articles. 

Aeva Black is a queer and non-binary hacker. After nearly twenty five years of contributing to and leading open source projects while working in the private sector, Aeva now leads open source security for the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Akihiro Suda is a software engineer at NTT Corporation. He has been a maintainer of Moby (dockerd), BuildKit, containerd, runc, etc. He is also a founder of nerdctl and Lima (CNCF project).

Aleks Jones is a technical trainer and course author at the Linux Foundation, focusing on emerging technologies like WebAssembly and cybersecurity. As an editor for the Evil Tux blog, she evaluates technical articles, sharing insight on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. In her leisure, she participates in capture the flag competitions.

Alexander is currently employed by Intel as Principal Engineer, Cloud Software, focusing on various aspects in Kubernetes: Resource Management, Device plugins for hardware accelerators, Cluster Lifecycle and Cluster APIs. Alexander has over 25+ years of experience in areas of Linux distributions, SCM, Networking, Infrastructure, Release Engineering, Cloud Orchestration, Continuous Integration & Delivery. Alexander is an active member of Kubernetes SIG-Node and CNCF TAG-Runtimes.

Alexios Zavras (zvr) is the Chief Open Source Compliance Officer of Intel Corp. He has been involved with Free and Open Source Software since 1983, and is an evangelist for all things Open. Besides his duties in Intel, he is an active participant in a number of industry-wide efforts around compliance issues, like SPDX and OpenChain.

He has a PhD in Computer Science after having studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Greece and the United States.

Alexey Brodkin is currently serving as Senior Engineering Manager at Synopsys Inc., where he manages the development of runtime software for ARC processors. A dedicated advocate for open-source software, Alexey has devoted a substantial part of his career to contributing to projects such as the Linux kernel, Zephyr RTOS, U-Boot, etc. Beyond individual contributions, he has also taken on roles as a mentor and team leader, fostering collaboration and innovation within the open-source community.

Alolita Sharma is a OpenTelemetry GC member and CNCF Observability TAG co-chair. She also serves on the CNCF Governing Board and is a CNCF End User Technical Advisory Board member from Apple. She leads Apple’s AIML observability teams. She contributes to OpenTelemetry, CNCF, Unicode, W3C. Previously, Alolita led observability, search engineering and open source strategy at AWS and has managed engineering teams at IBM, PayPal, Twitter, Wikipedia. She has also served on the OSI, SFLC.in, Unicode Consortium boards.

Ana is the OSPO Program Manager at the Linux Foundation project TODO Group, formed by an open community of practitioners who aim to create, share knowledge, and develop best practices practices on open source management in organizations and ¡ run successful Open Source Program Offices. Formerly she worked at Bitergia, where she finished her MSc in Data Science, whose final thesis focused on measuring DevRel’s success within Open Source development communities.

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.

Dr. Andreas Fehlner works as software engineer for artificial intelligence in pre-development with a focus on transferring ideas in the field of AI to working products at TRUMPF Laser. He is passionate about the goals of Open Source for AI. As an elected member of the ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) Steering Committee, he is committed to establishing this standard. He also represents ONNX within the Technical Advisory Council (TAC) of the LF AI & Data project. He also is one of the Chairs of the Trusted AI Committee of the LF AI & Data project. 

Engineer, architect, advisor and technology leader based in Seattle, Washington. Current research areas are on LLM inference, open AI, containers & serverless. CNCF Ambassador at the Linux Foundation and community lead of Cloud Native Seattle. Packt tech advisory board. Guest lecturer and industry mentor at the University of Washington. 

Intrapreneur. Has managed, built, and scaled several tier-1 products, new initiatives 0-1, businesses, and teams spanning various technical domains. Include AWS Bedrock (Anthropic LLM model inference), S3, App Runner (Founding engineer & TLM), Fargate, Alexa AI (Founding engineer of Healthcare domain), Payments (manage $110B ARR Bill Run), and Elastic Container Service (ECS). 

Part-time advisor and researcher as well as a public speaker and author. Drive cloud-native solutions adoption across organizations and actively contribute to open-source programs, including Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Flux, Envoy, OpenTelemetry, gRPC, Firecracker, Kafka, containerd, and RocksDB. 

Serve as Program Committee member for prestigious global academic and industry conferences: The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), PyTorch Con, Open Source Summit, KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, DockerCon etc.

Senior speaker at Amazon and author, casually writing blog posts in spare time on technical topics, academia, open source, organizational behavior (OB), and sociology. Pickleball fan.

Homepage: https://pengandy.com/

Anita is a Developer Advocate and technical writer with a track record leading great efforts in open source and cloud communities on a global scale. Her dedication extends to fostering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) within the tech ecosystem.

Annania Melaku is a Technical Program Manager at NGINX, part of F5, where her focus is on NGINX and F5 open source and community. Her previous role as OSS Compliance Lead in the Comcast Open Source Program Office, was focused on automating solutions for open source license compliance and delivery. She has experience in the defense & aerospace industry as well as in the telecommunications industry. Annania has worked various roles spanning software engineering, systems engineering, cybersecurity, and program management. She is passionate about open source, collaboration, innovation, diversity, and inclusion. Annania serves on the TODO Group Steering Committee and was on the 2023 Open Source Summit North America Program Committee. Her educational background includes a M.S. in Engineering Management and Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University. She enjoys art, spending time with family, plants, good food, speakeasies, and all things real-estate (architecture, home remodeling, interior design, & real estate).

Ariel Jolo is an Open Source community expert, known for his contributions to tech events and employer branding. He is the founder of Sysarmy and Nerdearla, the largest technology event in Latin America that began in Argentina in 2014 and has since expanded to other countries, including Mexico and Chile.

In addition to his professional endeavors, Ariel has participated in various tech-related events and discussions, contributing to the broader conversation on technology and community engagement.

Arun Azhakesan heads the Secure Development and Compliance team that drive open-source compliance activities at Siemens Healthineers. He is co-project lead for Eclipse SW360 and an active member of the LF OpenChain Project and multiple open source communities that focus on developing open source-based tools for open source compliance.

Ayumi Watanabe is a core member of OpenChain Japan community and known as an evangelist who is certified by the Linux Foundation Japan. Her strong point is a knowledge of many tools for SBOM generation and management, a wide range of experiences as an OSS management consultant, and strong connection with communities regarding OSS compliance. She is also a member of Hitachi OSPO.

Bandan is an engineer at Red Hat focused on systems architecture and virtualization. His primary interests are in performance optimization and in investigating new usecases for emerging technology in virtualization such as confidential computing. Bandan is part of the Red Hat Research program and has co-published papers in topics related to fuzzing and systems security.

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.

Catherine is a software developer passionate about building solutions at the intersection of technology, product and open source 

She thrives in using technology to build user-centric products & solutions that make a positive impact in people’s lives. 

Her diverse skillset has enabled her to adapt and contribute rich perspectives to product and engineering teams.

She also enjoys mentoring people, and contributing to technical communities through Open Source initiatives. 

Chan works closely with technologists to successfully open source and innersource their work and builds community through developer relationships. She is a certified Project Management Professional, holds a Master’s degree in Spatial Analytics, and has experience in program managing federally-funded, health-related, and data-driven research and software development projects. During her free time, she explores adventures like rock climbing, snowboarding, hiking the backcountry, and meditating.

Chris Aniszczyk is an open source executive and engineer with a passion for building a better world through open collaboration. He’s currently a CTO at the Linux Foundation focused on developer relations and running the Open Container Initiative (OCI) / Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Furthermore, he’s a partner at Capital Factory where he focuses on mentoring, advising and investing in open source and infrastructure focused startups.

At Twitter, he created their open source program and led their open source efforts. For many years he served on the Eclipse Foundation’s Board of Directors representing the committer community and the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee. In a previous life, he bootstrapped a consulting company, made many mistakes, lead and hacked on many eclipse.org and Linux related projects

Chris Xie is a global open source strategist and advocate for sustainable technology and responsible AI. As Head of Open Source Strategy at Futurewei, he brings extensive expertise from Fortune 500 companies and startups, blending technical vision with strategic leadership.

Chris holds key roles in open source organizations, including:
• Chair, ORES Working Group at LF Energy (open renewable energy systems)
• Chair, SCER Working Group at Green Software Foundation (sustainable computing)
• Chair, Marketing Advisory Committee at LF Energy
• Board Advisor, LF Research

His work spans open source policy, governance, and global collaboration, focusing on Responsible AI, Renewable Energy, and the Decentralized Internet. Through initiatives like the Open Source Congress, he helps shape policy, research, and innovation to drive an inclusive and sustainable digital future.

Christopher Robinson (aka CRob) is the Chief Security Architect for the Open Source Security Foundation. With over 25 years of Enterprise-class engineering, architectural, operational and leadership experience, CRob has worked at several Fortune 500 companies with experience in the Financial, Medical, Legal, and Manufacturing verticals, and spent 6 years helping lead the Red Hat Product Security team as their Program Architect.

Chuck Wolber is a Boeing Associate Technical Fellow primarily focused on Linux Operating System engineering for airborne avionics. He has developed multiple DO-178C certified Linux platforms currently in service on Boeing production aircraft. Chuck has been a Linux user since 1995 and has served as president and board member of the Tacoma Linux Users Group. Chuck is co-author of the book Linux Toys and is credited with contributions to multiple early editions of the Red Hat Linux Bible. Chuck holds a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.S. in Computer Science.

Clare Dillon is an open source and InnerSource advocate and currently works with CURIOSS, a community for university and research institution OSPOs. Clare is also a researcher with Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software and a member of Lero’s 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. Clare is a qualified coach and frequently speaks on topics relating to open collaboration and the future of work.

Cornelius helps teams at Deutsche Bahn, the German railway company, to use and contribute to open source software. He has a background from more than two decades in the open source community and industry. Originally a software developer he now focus on management of open source.

Daniel Goldscheider is founder and Executive Director of the OpenWallet Foundation. Before that he was CEO of yes.com, an open banking scheme, and co-founded Mediaguide with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers as well as Aureus Private Equity.

He is a Vice Chair of the Supervisory Board of Valamar Riviera d.d., Croatia’s largest tourism company and served on the board of Identity Trust Management AG and the Global Footprint Network.

Daniel Izquierdo is a researcher and co-founder of Bitergia and currently holding the position of CEO, he is focused on the quality of the data, research of new metrics, analysis and studies of interest for Bitergia customers via data mining and processing. Daniel earned a PhD in free software engineering in 2012 focused on the analysis of buggy developers activity patterns in the Mozilla community. He is board member at CHAOSS community, President of the InnerSource Commons Foundation, and board member at the Apereo Foundation.

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.

Divya is a Principal Technology Advocate at SUSE, advocating for and contributing to its projects. She is a Kubernetes documentation maintainer and a co-chair for the SIG Community under the Bytecode Alliance. As one of the KCNA exam creators and a lead for the Asian chapter of the CHAOSS Project, she is invested in making technical communities & technologies more accessible & inclusive.

Dr. Wolfgang Gehring is an Ambassador for Open and Inner Source and has been working on enabling and spreading the idea within Mercedes-Benz. A software engineer by trade, Wolfgang’s goal is to help enable Mercedes-Benz to fully embrace FOSS and become a true Open Source company. He has a passion for communities, leads Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation’s Open Source Program Office, is a member of the Mercedes-Benz FOSS Center of Competence, and a Director of the Eclipse Foundation.

In his free time, Wolfgang likes to engage in conversations about soccer and is an avid traveler and scuba diver. He calls Albert Einstein’s birth city of Ulm his home in Southern Germany.

Linux kernel engineer focused on ARM and RISC-V SoCs.

Passionate open-source advocate for 20+ years. Leading operational teams at Percona. Organizer of Sysarmy, a tech community with 10+ years of history, and Nerdearla, one of Argentina’s leading tech events.

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.

I have a unique background that melds modern software development skills with project management and creative experience. This enables me to efficiently shepherd the software development process from ideation to deployment and beyond.

As a teaching assistant at Northeastern University I guided students through the process of learning software engineering. I achieved this by leveraging my ability to communicate complex, technical and abstract concepts.

Founder of Knative serverless project, maintainer of Minder (OpenSSF) and member of sigstore oncall. Currently at Stacklok; previously at Google and VMware, recovering SRE, ongoing runner.

👋 Hi, I’m Ezequiel Lanza (Eze), and I’m passionate about helping people explore the thrilling realm of artificial intelligence. As a regular AI conference presenter, I take pride in creating impactful use cases, tutorials, and guides to assist developers in adopting open source AI tools.

With a solid foundation in engineering and a decade of experience assisting customers and developers in the software realm, I bring a wealth of practical knowledge to the table. Currently, I’m writing my thesis as I pursue a Master’s in Data Science from Universidad Austral in Argentina (Yeah, it was AI before ChatGPT:) ).

I’m usually an AI speaker at conferences like Open Source Summit, Kubecon, All Things Open, ODSC and AAAI among other relevant AI events. 

Fabiano Fidencio, a Cloud Orchestration Software Engineer at Intel, has a strong passion for easing the usability of the projects he works on. For the past few years, he’s served as an Architecture Committee member of the Kata Containers project and has been involved with Confidential Containers from its early stages.

Fabio works as a Software Engineer for Google on the ChromeOS Embedded Controller project. He is an electronics hobbyist and embedded enthusiast, a Zephyr subsystem maintainer and release engineering team member.

Fatima is a Developer Evangelist at GitLab and the voice of the community. She loves coding challenges and storytelling. Before GitLab, she was a backend developer, Drupal core contributor, and mentoring lead. In 2018, she received the Women in Communications & Technology (WCT) Rising Star leadership award for her efforts in teaching and advocacy. When she’s not playing board games, beating escape rooms, or playing co-op adventures with friends, you can find Fatima reading by the ocean.

India’s First!!! Technical Trainer, Author, Maintainer, Moderator and Kubestronaut at The Linux Foundation

Gabriele Paoloni is an Open Source Community Technical Leader at Red Hat where he defines best methodologies and requirements to qualify Linux for functional safety usage.

He is a passionate technologist and has strong experience in both functional safety and Linux Kernel development, including previous roles leading FuSa software architecture for Intel platforms, CCIX vice chairman of the TDL working group and HiSilicon PCIe Linux maintainer.

Gabriele received a master’s degree with honours in electronic engineering from the University of Rome.

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.

Working in the telecom industry in the last two decades it was possible for Gergely to see the evolution from vendor specific hardware to virtualisation and cloud and a to cloud native. Currently Gergely is part of the OSPO team of Nokia CTO which is reponsible for open source. In the last year Gergely’s was working in Anuket, Nepio and several CNCF projects on the relationship of cloud native and telecoms. 

Glenn ten Cate is a seasoned security expert, holding key roles in the past and currently a Senior Cyber Security Instructor at The Linux Foundation. With a track record in security consultancy and training, Glenn is also an author to the Security Knowledge Framework and the OpenSSF. His skills span across security, Linux, and secure coder, complemented by multilingual proficiency in English, German, and Dutch. Glenn’s recognition includes nominations for WASPY in Innovation/Sharing and Best Innovator categories, and an Honorable Mention for the SKF project by Black Duck® Rookies of the Year.

Greg Kroah-Hartman is among a distinguished group of software developers who maintain Linux at the kernel level. In his role as a 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. He also works closely with Linux Foundation members and projects, and on key initiatives to advance Linux.

Greg created and maintains the Linux Driver Project. He is also currently the maintainer for the Linux stable kernel branch and a variety of different subsystems that include USB, staging, driver core, tty, and sysfs, among others. Most recently, he was a Fellow at SUSE.

Greg is an adviser to Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab and a member of The Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board. He has delivered a variety of keynote addresses at developer and industry events, and has authored two books covering Linux device drivers and Linux kernel development.

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.

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]

After 20 years of working as a software engineer, Jake stopped writing software and started writing *about* software—and more—at LWN.net. 17 years later, he’s still at it. He lives in Baja California Sur, México with his wife and a loony dog.

Jay has 20+ years of IT/information security experience dedicated to cyber risk, security, privacy, and compliance. He provides a combined tactical and strategic balance towards the implementation of security and compliance requirements that aligns to an organization’s broader business strategy. Jay believes we should exceed the standard for our customers and partners and take the community approach to understanding business needs. Jay is a trusted advisor, and proud US Army retiree

My name is Jerome Ju and I’m a software developer living in Toronto and loving the world of open source. My open source journey started with the Eclipse Adoptium project where I had the chance to learn from cross-project CI/CD designs. Currently, I’m at Google contributing to Tekton Pipeline OSS projects. This is my second year working on Tekton and I am honored to have been involved in the v1 software release, feature flags migration and etc. exciting projects. When I’m not coding, I’m either shredding snow on my snowboard, aiming for the bullseye in archery, or experimenting with new gelato flavours.

Jim Spohrer is a student of service science and open-source, trusted AI. He is a retired industry executive (Apple, IBM), who is a member of the Board of Directors of the non-profit International Society of Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP) and ServCollab. At IBM, he served as Director for Open Source AI/Data, Global University Programs, IBM Almaden Service Research, and CTO IBM Venture Capital Relations Group. At Apple, he achieved Distinguished Engineer Scientist Technologist (DEST) for authoring and learning platforms. After MIT (BS/Physics), he developed speech recognition systems at Verbex (Exxon), then Yale (PhD/Computer Science AI). With over ninety publications and nine patents, awards include AMA ServSIG Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions to the Service Discipline, Evert Gummesson Service Research, Vargo-Lusch Service-Dominant Logic, Daniel Berg Service Systems, and PICMET Fellow for advancing service science. In 2021, Jim was appointed a UIDP Senior Fellow (University-Industry Demonstration Partnership).

Founding member of the Ericsson Open Source Program Office, working in the telecom industry with standardisation, IP, open source compliance, open source strategy and process management. Currently serving as the governing board chair person of the OpenChain Projects.

Jonathan Corbet is the kernel documentation maintainer, co-founder of LWN.net (and the author of its Kernel Page), 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.

Jono Bacon is a leading community and collaboration speaker, author, and podcaster. He is the founder of Jono Bacon Consulting which provides community strategy/execution, workflow, and other services. He previously served as director of community at GitHub, Canonical, XPRIZE, and OpenAdvantage. His clients include Huawei, GitLab, Microsoft, Intel, Google, Sony Mobile, Deutsche Bank, Santander, HackerOne, Mattermost, SAP, FINOS Foundation, The Executive Center, data.world, Creative Commons, and others. He is the author of ‘People Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, brand, and teams’ and The Art of Community, a columnist for Forbes and opensource.com, founder of the Community Leadership Summit, founder of Conversations With Bacon, and co-founder of Bad Voltage. He is an advisor to AlienVault, Moltin, data.world, Mycroft, Open Networking Foundation, and Open Cloud Consortium.

Jory Burson is the VP of Standards for the Linux Foundation, where she helps projects identify opportunities for standardization and collaborate on specifications. She is an open source developer-turned-standards practitioner, who is passionate about bringing the best of open source and standards-making best practices to bear in open projects. With over a decade of experience in the field, Jory has worked with several private and non-profit organizations including OASIS Open, W3C, Ecma International, and the web standards consultancy Bocoup, to name a few. She is known for her expertise in web standards, open source governance, and community management.

Jory has played a role in shaping the open source ecosystem through her work with critical open source projects such as jQuery, Node.js, and MDN Content. Jory is a passionate advocate for open source software, diversity, and inclusion in the tech industry.

Josh Bressers is the Vice President of Security at Anchore. Josh has helped build and manage product security teams for open source projects as well as several organizations. Josh is the co-lead of the OpenSSF SBOM Everywhere project and co-hosts the Open Source Security Podcast and the Hacker History Podcast. He also is the co-founder of the Global Security Database project to bring vulnerability identification into the modern age.

Karen Chu leads efforts focused on the Swift community for OSPO at Apple. Having participated in the cloud native community since 2015, she is a CNCF Ambassador, Helm community manager/maintainer, emeritus Kubernetes Code of Conduct Committee member, meet-up organizer, and conference organizer. She has also worked on The Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes book series. When she’s not connecting dots in the community, you can find her pursuing photography, cooking, and sipping on chai lattes.

Working within the Chief Technology Office in building an Open Source Program Office for the Dutch Tax and Customs administration. 

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.

Katherine Druckman is an Open Source Evangelist at Intel where she enjoys sharing her passion for a variety of open source topics. She is a long-time open source advocate, developer, and podcaster, and is currently the host of Open at Intel and a co-host of the FLOSS Weekly and Reality 2.0 podcasts. Previously, Katherine spent over a decade as Director of Digital Experience at Linux Journal. A passionate Drupalist since she first downloaded a tarball in 2005, she has also been a Drupal contributor and a Software Engineer.

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.

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

Before he joined HashiCorp, Kerim worked on Industrial IoT for the Amsterdam airport and helped museums bring more of their collections online.

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

Kersten Rocket joined the Linux Foundation in Jan of 2024 as a Senior Documentation Architect for the RISC-V International team. With over 25 years of experience, Kersten is a proud support of clear, concise documentation and the Oxford comma. 

In her spare time, Kersten enjoys walking her dogs, reading, and writing. You can find her children’s books online at various sites. She lives in Minnesota with her family.

As a Principal Engineer at Red Hat, Laura Santamaria loves to learn and explain how things work to bridge the gaps in engineering disciplines. She is the host of [Technically Leadership](https://packetpushers.net/podcast/technically-leadership/), a podcast on the Packet Pushers network, as well as a cohost for the the [Cloud Native Compass](https://cloudnativecompass.fm/) podcast and was the curator for [A Minute on the Mic](https://aminuteonthemic.com), a cohost for [The Hallway Track](https://thehallwaytrack.fireside.fm/) podcast, and the host of [Quick Bites of Cloud Engineering](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyy8Vx2ZoWlohOiedbaQqT5xYRkcDsm10). As a community member, she co-hosts multiple meetups in the Austin, Texas, area, including Cloud Austin. For many years, she taught Python for the Women Who Code Austin meetup, as well. She is an organizer for DevOpsDays Austin and PyTexas and advises KCD Texas, all community-run conferences, as well as a global core member for the DevOpsDays community. For the past few years, she has been a returning program committee member for Open Source Summit’s Cloud Open track that explores cloud infrastructure and cloud apps. Outside of tech, Laura runs, reads, and watches clouds—the real kind.

Lauren is an award-winning author, analyst, and digital systems designer for the U.S. government. She currently works on the founding Digital Service team at the State of Maryland’s Department of Labor, where her team is building the first cloud-native platform to provide paid caregiver leave in Maryland. Lauren’s first book, Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up, was published by The Pragmatic Programmers and adapted into two LinkedIn Learning courses. She also wrote an essay for the book 97 Things Every Application Security Professional Should Know, published by O’Reilly Media, and co-edited the textbook Mitigating Bias in Machine Learning, published by McGraw Hill. Lauren is a former community correspondent for OpenSource.com, wrote a chapter on inclusive communities for The Open Source Way guidebook, and speaks at open source events around the world, including DrupalCon North America, the Open Source Summits in North America and Europe, and All Things Open.

An internationally known open source strategist and community engagement expert, Leslie Hawthorn has spent her career creating, cultivating, and enabling open source communities. She has driven open source strategy in Fortune 10 companies, pre-IPO startups, and Foundation Boards including senior roles at Red Hat, Google, the Open Source Initiative, and Elastic. She currently leads the team responsible for industry community strategy within Red Hat’s Open Source Program Office in the Office of the CTO.

Lucy is a former frontend software engineer (and JavaScript apologist) turned Developer Advocate. Their work is focused on developer education and community building in Intuit’s open source and API strategy.

Marc-Etienne Vargenau is a member of the Open Source team at Nokia.

He has worked as an Open Source developer for many years. Among other projects, he contributed to FusionForge (https://fusionforge.org/) and PhpWiki (https://sourceforge.net/projects/phpwiki/).

He is contributing to the SPDX standard since version 1.1.

As part of Nokia OSPO, he helps ensuring compliance of Nokia usage and contributions to Open Source software. He works on tooling to automate handling of Open Source.

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.

Mary Hardy has more than a decade of specialized experience as an in-house open source attorney for large tech companies, advising on all aspects of the use of, creation of, and interaction with open source. She helps enable the responsible contribution to and adoption of open source AI. She has advised on large-scale Linux kernel contributions, corporate merger and remediation strategies on open source, and authored and delivered open source training to thousands of engineers.

Masae is a Staff Open Source Program Manager, leading the company’s open source business and community strategy alignment, and strategy consultations. Previously she led numerous programs that include large-scale DX/IT transformation as part of M&A at Cisco, security compliance process implementation, consumer platform development on Linux/Android/iOS at multiple companies including NEC and Renesas. She began her career as a software developer in Japan, then worked in the US/Microsoft, now lives in the UK with English husband and son.

Matthew Crawford has been working at Arm since 2017 mainly focussing on the Third Party Intellectual Property strategy and process management. His professional accomplishments include working to make Arm OpenChain conformant in 2019; involvement in the Google Summer of Code as a mentor and working with the SPDX community. He joined the OpenChain board in 2022 and has a strong passion for open source hardware and software governance, trust and security. Since 2022 Matthew has worked in AI compliance and leads Arm’s AI Office

Maryblessing is a dedicated community architect and passionate advocate, with strong analytical and engagement skills in tech communities. She’s passionate about a sustainable tech ecosystem with a commitment to championing diversity, inclusion, and belonging within workplaces and the broader tech community.

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.

Mirko Boehm is a Free and Open Source Software contributor, community manager, licensing expert and researcher, with contributions to major Open Source projects like the KDE Desktop (since 1997, including several years on the KDE e.V. board), the Open Invention Network, the Open Source Initiative and others. He is a visiting lecturer and researcher on Free and Open Source Software at the Technical University of Berlin. Mirko Boehm has a wide range of experience as an entrepreneur, corporate manager, software developer and German Air Force officer.

He joined the Linux Foundation in June 2023 as Senior Director for Community Development for LF Europe, where he focuses on driving engagement and collaboration between all European Open Source stakeholders.

Mirko speaks English and German and lives in the Berlin area.

Nancy Rausch is an R&D Manager and Data Scientist in Research and Development at SAS Institute. She leads a team of research engineers that focus on the application of AI and machine learning methods for Data Management. She is also a researcher in SAS’ energy technology sector, with a focus on leveraging machine learning methods for energy forecasting. 

Natali Vlatko (she/her) is an Open Source Architect at Cisco, specializing in open software, policy, compliance, and governance, and is a SIG Docs Co-Chair for Kubernetes. She plays on the fun computer in her spare time. Her academic background is in Egyptology and Archaeology; specifically, burial customs across the various kingdoms of Ancient Egypt. Ask her about dead stuff.

Nate is the CNCF’s Head of Mentorship and Documentation. He leads the TechDocs team, which includes a group of writers, designers, and web developers. Together, they deliver high-quality documentation that supports the cloud-native ecosystem. Nate and the TechDocs team help CNCF projects organize and write documentation, ensuring clarity, consistency, and accessibility.

Beyond his work in documentation, Nate also oversees the CNCF mentorship programs. Working with the TAG Contributor Strategy Mentoring Working Group, he helps CNCF projects prepare for mentorship programs such as LFX Mentorship, Google Summer of Code, and Outreachy. He also administers CNCF’s participation in the LFX Mentorship program, working with the Linux Foundation to foster the growth and development of new contributors.

Before joining CNCF, Nate worked as a Senior Creative Technologist at AKQA, where he helped build, install, and support interactive installations for retail spaces, conferences, and other events. His diverse background includes technical writing, systems administration, and embedded software development roles.

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 utilizing 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 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).

Nikhita is a principal software engineer at Broadcom (previously VMware) and a core maintainer of the Kubernetes project. She is a vice chair of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee overseeing all technical matters of the cloud native ecosystem and has won the CNCF Top Committer Award for her technical contributions. Nikhita has also been a chair of the global KubeCon+CloudNativeCon conference, which gets over 10,000 attendees. Apart from this, she was a member of the Kubernetes Steering Committee and the technical lead for a Kubernetes Special Interest Group (SIG) in the past. Nikhita has even been featured in Forbes India 30 under 30 and Business Insider as one the ‘top 21 developers transforming Silicon Valley’.

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/

Norio Kobota is a Senior Open Source Strategist in Sony Group Corporation. He is the chair of Open Source Software License Committee in Sony and works to improve OSS compliance and relationships with OSS communities. He represents Sony as a board member of OpenChain Project. And he is participating the SPDX Project and contributing the SPDX Lite.

Olivier Charrier obtained a Master’s degree in Software Engineering (DESS) from Bordeaux University in 1989. Prior to joining Wind River, Olivier worked for Alsys/Aonix developing and integrating Ada development environment for embedded systems.

After an almost 4 years in the Ada95 engineering center of Aonix located in San Diego, California, Olivier moved back to a South European role, providing consulting on integrating Ada COTS development environment for Mission Critical Space programs.

Olivier Joined Wind River in June 2001 as Senior Field Application Engineer for the South-western region of Europe dedicated to the Aerospace & Defence Market, supporting Thales, Airbus and Safran groups as well as their subcontractors.

In 2007 he became EMEA Aerospace & Defence Principal Engineer to support and coordinate EMEA wide A&D programs, provide consulting on Integrated Modular Avionics and the use of COTS Software Development environment and Operating Systems for Safety Critical systems, also participating in the definition of Wind River corresponding solutions in particular for Safety Certification using Multi-Core systems. In the same timeframe he joined the SAE/ARINC APEX Software Subcommittee to participate in the elaboration of the ARINC 653 standard.

Since January 2017 Olivier has been extending his scope to contribute to other markets, like Railway, Nuclear, Medical and Automotive, worldwide.
In 2021, Olivier joined the Linux Foundation’ s ELISA Project (Enabling Linux In Safety Applications) and recently became one of its Ambassadors.

Paul is a consultant at Codethink, with more than 30 years of experience in the automotive, semiconductor and mobile device sectors. He’s passionate about software engineering processes and the role that open source software and communities are playing in their evolution. His current focus is on the Trustable Software Framework, and the use of Linux and open source tools in the development of safety-related applications for the Automotive industry. He is a certified functional safety practitioner and a member of the technical steering committee for the ELISA project (Enabling Linux in Safety Applications).

Paul Gustafson is CEO of Expert Support Inc., Silicon Valley’s technical documentation services firm. Learn more the company here: https://expertsupport.com, and more about Paul here: https://expertsupport.com/technical-writing-company/paul-gustafsons-bio/ or here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/psgustafson/. 

Pete Brink is a Principal Consultant at UL Solutions and is based in Portland, Oregon.

Pete started his career in 1987 working on Jet Engine control systems and then did embedded systems development on print servers, cable scanners, in-circuit emulators, and satellite modems. Pete then worked at Intel where he developed a variety of PC-based technologies (multimedia, storage, USB) and culminated his Intel career by leading Intel’s ADAS demo at the 2015 CES. Pete then moved to PolySync where he was a Principal Engineer/Director of Engineering focused on creating a software infrastructure to enable autonomous driving. This was followed by a stint working on industrial lasers at nLIGHT.

Pete’s experience with software engineering, including safety-critical software, began with the work on jet engine control systems, but then expanded to be generalized across a wide range of high-quality and reliability products. For many products, up-time was a major consideration, including the embedded communications work across a variety of industries. Pete’s opportunity to reenter the safety-critical world began when he was the lead for the Intel ADAS work. Pete has been working continuously on safety critical software systems since 2012, doing either software development, management, software process control and evaluation or training on software engineering topics.

Since joining UL, Pete has been active in both safety and cybersecurity and has had several clients. He currently has a CFSX in ISO 26262, CASP in ISO 21448 (SOTIF) and CCSP in ISO 21434.

In addition to his engineering experience, Pete has also been an active contributor to the IEEE-CS Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBoK), the Software Engineering Competency Model (SWECoM) as a result of establishing a software engineering curriculum at Intel. Pete also is a Program Evaluator (PEV) in Software Engineering (BSSE) for the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET.) Pete has now visited seven universities and evaluated their software engineering programs for accreditation.

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.

Philipp Ahmann is a Senior OSS Community Manager at ETAS GmbH (a Robert Bosch GmbH subsidiary), specializing in safety-critical and automotive-grade open source software. With over 15 years of experience in Linux-based automotive software platforms, Philipp has held various roles including Software Engineer, Technical Team Lead, and Project & Line Manager. He also has experience in technical business development and product management for embedded open source software within Bosch, with a focus on Linux & IoT products.

Currently, Philipp chairs the Technical Steering Committee for the ELISA Project (Enabling Linux in Safety Applications) at the Linux Foundation (LF) and leads the project’s Systems Working Group. He is further inaugural advisory board member of the Linux Foundation Europe.

I am a Software Engineer at IBM, where I play a key role in developing the IBM CI/CD Offering based on Tekton Pipelines. As a lead on the platform development team, my primary focus is on designing and implementing prescriptive pipelines that cater to the diverse needs of hundreds of teams across the organization. I am also a maintainer for Tekton Pipelines and have been serving on the program committee since 2022.

Rajas is a Senior Member of Technical Staff at VMware and a Tech Lead of Technical Advisory Group, Runtime in CNCF. He has served as the Co-Chair for Cloud Native AI Day Paris 2024. He is active in the AI working group in the CNCF landscape and has been a contributor to the Kubernetes project.

Robert Martin, a Senior Software and Supply Chain Assurance Principal Engineer at MITRE focused on the interplay of risk management, security, and assurance, author of over 60 standards, creator of CAPEC and CWE, and working on standardizing SBOMs and MITRE’s supply chain security System of Trust™.

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.

Ruth Ikegah is an Open-Source Program Manager, Community Manager, GitHub Star, and Technical Writer. She is sparked about onboarding beginners into the tech system, especially the open-source space. 

Ryan has been working on software security and quality for 27 years. In his career, he has implemented security features in open source software stacks, been an offensive security researcher, been a developer and security architect for numerous open source projects including 3 different Linux distributions as well as Android. He has also been responsible for defining software security & quality development policies for multiple Fortune 500 companies. These days, he is Deputy Chief Product Security Officer for Carrier where he is focused on improving software development practices, Chair of the OpenSSF Security Tooling WG, and also spends time doing work as an expert witness testifying on quality software development practices.

Samina Husain brings 25+ years of industry experience in various technology domains: from standards development, satellite systems, software products, telecom infrastructure, broadcast solutions, and consumer electronics. Her industry roles vary from product development, customer operations to executive management. Currently she is the Secretary General of Ecma International, based in Geneva, a not-for-profit industry association facilitating the timely creation of a wide range of global standards.

She received her Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree from Concordia University, Montreal, and her executive MBA in “Management of Technology” from University of Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. She is an IEEE senior member: Broadcast Technology Society, Vice-President; IEEE Future Directions Vice-Chair, Future Technology Forum Chair; and a member of IEEE European Public Policy (EPPC).

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

Seth is a long time standards program Executive Director and he was the executive who brought the JDF into partnership with the Linux Foundation. Seth worked for the Linux Foundation from 2018 – 2022 and continues to provide consulting to the Linux Foundation. Seth is also the co-founder of Standards Hub, which provides services and consulting to standards consortia.

Shane Coughlan is an expert in communication, security and business development. His professional accomplishments include building the largest open source governance community in the world through the OpenChain Project, spearheading the licensing team that elevated Open Invention Network into the largest patent non-aggression community in history and establishing the first global network for open source legal experts. He is a founder of both the first law journal and the first law book dedicated to open source. He currently leads the OpenChain Project and is a General Assembly Member of OpenForum Europe.

With a passion for community building and a focus on developer happiness, Shilla Saebi champions using open source and empowers technologists to create innovative solutions while collaborating with upstream open source communities. As the Sr. Director of Comcast’s Open Source Program Office, Shilla, drives the company’s open source strategy and advances collaboration within the broader tech ecosystem. Shilla has a wealth of experience in the open source world. Her commitment to open source extends beyond her work at Comcast, as evidenced by her role as a CNCF Ambassador and a member of the TODOGroup Steering Committee since 2021. She was involved with OpenStack for over five years, serving on both the User Committee Board and the Superuser Editorial Advisory Board, and is a maintainer of several open source projects. Shilla enjoys good music, traveling, coffee, outdoor activities, and art when she’s not working.

My name is Simon Hein, I’m living in southern Germany near Stuttgart. Currently I’m a embedded Software engineer and as functional safety engineer at Baumer as well as the safety chair and architect for the zephyr project. At my previous employer which was a automotive software supplier I worked mainly with the in-house AUTOSAR classic stack and customer driven middleware projects.

Shuah Khan is a Kernel Maintainer & Linux Fellow at The Linux Foundation. She is an experienced Linux Kernel developer, maintainer, and contributor. She authored, A Beginner’s Guide to Linux Kernel Development (LFD103) training course. She designed and leads the Mentorship program aimed at increasing diversity in open source and providing equitable access to learning resources.

She serves on the Linux kernel Code of Conduct committee and the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board.

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.

Stefka Dimitrova is a Senior Program Manager within the Source Strategy team, where she fosters community development and works on guidelines and tools to improve the health of open source projects. She has a business and financial background and has been working in the Software Development industry for the last 10 years, managing program-level tasks, process responsibilities, and continuous improvement initiatives. In her free time, Stefka loves rock climbing and hiking, and guides kids and teenagers in adventure programs and summer camps. She acts in an improv theater called “Playback” and is fascinated by human nature, psychology and personal development, in which she is an avid reader and learner.

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.

Supriya has been a leader with passion for developing people and teams, delivering highest quality products. She has 20 years experience in software industry with specialization in topics related to Open Source and InnerSource. Her other areas of expertise include strategic planning, change management, and development of new areas, specifically for multi-cultural and globally distributed teams. She is currently working as Open Source Program Office Manager at IKEA.

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 company specializing in embedded Linux and kernel engineering with a strong focus on open-source and upstream. He has contributed to the Linux kernel, particularly in hardware support, and is a co-maintainer of the Buildroot project. A seasoned trainer and speaker, he has delivered numerous courses and talks on embedded Linux.

Thomas Steenbergen specializes in strategic open source management, helping organizations align their open source practices with business objectives. An expert in open source adoption, community building, and compliance – including Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) – he previously led Open Source Program Offices at EPAM Systems and HERE Technologies. He is a maintainer of OSS Review Toolkit, SPDX, TODO group and a regular contributor to FINOS’s Open Source Readiness and OpenChain. A frequent speaker at global open source conferences, Thomas welcomes discussions on open source topics. For more information about the projects he is involved in and his contact details, visit github.com/tsteenbe. 

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.

As the VP of education, I’ve had the privilege of leading and nurturing an exceptional team of technology experts while embracing a dynamic set of responsibilities in growing our training program.

My passion revolves around introducing and championing emerging open source technologies. With an eye on cost control, I’ve successfully implemented transformative solutions, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity measures, and cloud-based applications. 

Collaboration is at the heart of my approach, forging strong working relationships across leadership teams, ensuring alignment with our organization’s strategic objectives. My focus lies in achieving the optimal organizational structure, integrating existing teams with acquired entities, and adapting to evolving business needs.

My technical experience spans training courses, application development, documentation, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and cybersecurity. Staying ahead of technological advancements and ensuring our training program remains at the forefront of industry developments is my commitment.

Attracting, developing, and retaining top-tier technical professionals is a personal passion. I continuously evaluate and enhance teams to ensure they possess the necessary skills to excel.

A physicist by training, Tobias Kaestner has always been fascinated by the intersection of the physical with the digital world. His professional career started as a SW team lead in a medical device start-up and since then he has served a couple of roles for 15+ years in this industry. He is one of the maintainers of the Bridle project, an effort to publish integration patterns of FOSS into embedded devices and to promote the adoption of FOSS in safety regulated environments.

Tom is a software engineer at Google where he’s a tech lead for a team working to improve the supply chain security of all Google developed software that doesn’t run on Google’s Borg infrastructure.

Tom was also heavily involved in the initial development of SLSA which is partially based on his work at Google.

Prior to working for Google Tom spent much of his career working on software security projects in the defense industry.

Former developer, embedded systems/ HMI, cloud and mobile dev, automotive software manager and open source evangelist, critical to hyped technology, currently Rust fan

Venil Noronha is currently a Senior Software Engineer at Stripe. He’s been a contributor to open source projects in the service mesh domain, like Istio and Envoy proxy.

Victory Brown is a design researcher, community builder, and experienced storyteller, interfacing with designers and design communities on the state of digital, ethical, and open design practices

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, which is hosted by The Linux Foundation.

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.

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.

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.