Open Source Summit North America

Anurag Sinha is a Senior Staff Software Engineer and Manager at Google, where he leads engineering for Commerce AI Native Integrations. He is currently focused on building and scaling the Universal Commerce Protocol (ucp.dev), an initiative aimed at transforming how commerce operates in an AI-first world.

With over a decade of experience in engineering leadership, Anurag has a proven track record of architecting intelligent, scalable systems that serve billions of users. Before his current role, he led teams at Google focused on AI-powered shopping experiences across Search and Ads.

Prior to joining Google, Anurag spent nearly ten years at PayPal, where he served as a Senior Engineering Manager and Architect for core checkout and payment platforms. His work there involved delivering unified APIs and high-availability services that powered millions of daily transactions across PayPal, Venmo, and Braintree.

Belle Guttman leads the Agentic AI Engineering teams at AWS responsible for the Strands Agents SDK, AgentCore Developer Experience, and agentic chat in Q Developer products. With a background in software engineering, she has spent her career solving complex technical problems with simple solutions for her customers.

Brendan Burns is a co-founder of the Kubernetes open source project and Technical Fellow & Corporate Vice President for Azure cloud-native open source and the Azure management platform including Azure Arc. He is also the author and co-author of several books on Kubernetes and distributed systems. Prior to Microsoft he worked on Google web search infrastructure and the Google cloud platform. He has a PhD in Robotics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a BA in Computer Science and Studio Art from Williams College.

Deepyaman is a data practitioner turned software engineer focused on building open-source data tooling. He was a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Voltron Data on the Ibis team, and later worked on data orchestration and ecosystem integration at Dagster Labs. Prior to that, he was a Founding Machine Learning Engineer at Claypot AI, building a real-time feature engineering platform, and at QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, where he led data engineering teams and asset development across multiple industries.

He is an active contributor to the open-source data ecosystem, serving as a maintainer of Kedro (a Python framework for building production-ready data pipelines) and Pandera (a lightweight Python data validation library), and a committer of Ibis (a Python dataframe library that interfaces with any data system). He also represents Kedro on the LF AI & Data Technical Advisory Council.

Dirk is the Founder of DH Consulting. Prior to that, Dirk was VMware’s Chief Open Source Officer, where he lead the company’s Open Source Program Office, directing the efforts and strategy around use of and contribution to open-source projects and driving common values and processes across the company for VMware’s interaction with the open-source communities. Before joining VMware, Dirk spent almost 15 years as Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist. Before that, among other roles, he worked as Chief Technology Officer of SuSE and Unix Architect of Deutsche Bank.

Dirk has been an active developer and contributor in several dozen open source projects since the early 1990s, today most of his work is on the Subsurface dive log project and many of the related open source projects around that. Dirk holds a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Würzburg, Germany. He lives in Portland, OR.

Jacob is a member of the Valkey Technical Steering Committee and an engineer on Google Cloud’s Memorystore team.

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.

Lin is the Head of Open Source at Solo.io, and a CNCF TOC member and ambassador. She has worked on the Istio service mesh since the beginning of the project in 2017 and serves on the Istio Steering Committee and Technical Oversight Committee. Previously, she was a Senior Technical Staff Member and Master Inventor at IBM for 15+ years. She is the author of the book “Istio Ambient Explained” and has more than 200 patents to her name.

Linus was born on December 28, 1969, in Helsinki, Finland. He enrolled at the University of Helsinki in 1988, graduating with a master’s degree in computer science. His M.Sc. thesis was titled “Linux: A Portable Operating System” and was the genesis for what would become the most important collaborative software project in history. In August 1991, Linus announced that he was developing the Linux kernel, proclaiming, “it won’t be big and professional.” Never in the history of technology has someone been so wrong. In spite of his humble proclamation, Linux has become the world’s most pervasive operating system. Today the Linux kernel forms the basis of the Linux operating system and powers billions of Android devices, powers ChromeOS, and has permeated almost every industry and form factor. Smartphones, TVs, appliances, cars, nuclear submarines, air traffic control, stock exchanges, and scientific research all run Linux. Linux also provides the underpinnings of the internet and the cloud computing industry. In 2005, citing a lack of free and open-source version control tools that met his needs for performance and scale, Linus famously created Git in only 10 days. Today Git is widely used in software development and for other version-control tasks such as configuration management and has become popular as an integral part of the DevOps culture. In 2000, Linus was listed by Time Magazine as Number 17 in the Time 100: Most Important People of the Century. Again, in 2004, Time Magazine named him one of the Most Influential People in the world. He was honored in 2008 with the Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland, “in recognition of his creation of a new open-source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel.” He is also the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award. A true tech titan, he was admitted to the Computer History Museum Hall of Fellows, joining the ranks of the tech elite including Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, Tim Berners-Lee, Gordon Moore, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Steve Wozniak, and others. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.

Madelyn Olson is a co-creator and maintainer of Valkey, a high-performance key-value datastore, and Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS). She focuses on building secure and highly reliable features, with a passion in working with open-source communities.

Robin Bender Ginn is the Executive Director of the OpenJS Foundation, the open and neutral home to grow and sustain the JavaScript and web ecosystem.

Rohit John Varghese is the director of systems engineering and product at Contoro Robotics, a company developing AI-driven logistics robots for shipping container unloading. He has been part of the founding team of two successful startups that together have raised over $25 million in funding. His work spans exoskeletons, human–robot interaction, teleoperation, and AI-enabled robotic systems, and he is always curious to explore any domain to its first principles.

Rohit has served as faculty at The University of Texas at Austin, where he taught graduate courses in robotics, and as an industry mentor for National Science Foundation (NSF) programs. He also leads the development of the Robot MCP server, an open-source project that connects AI models with robotic systems using Model Context Protocol.

Sean Dague is the Chief Services Architect at IBM Quantum, where he focuses on making quantum computing securely and reliably accessible through the cloud. He has helped shape the architecture and operational model that allows users—from enterprise teams to learners—to access IBM quantum systems in practical ways, including designing core scheduling and fair-share mechanisms that balance demand with system availability.

Sean has a long history of open source leadership and contribution. He has contributed to numerous projects through IBM’s Linux Technology Center, including work spanning Xen and OpenStack, and he served on the OpenStack Technical Committee. He also remains active in the broader maker and automation community, including the Home Assistant ecosystem.

Outside of work, Sean can usually be found hiking or biking around New York’s Hudson Valley.

Stephen Chin is VP of Developer Relations at Neo4j, member of the LF AI & Data Foundation and Open AI Alliance, and author of several titles with O’Reilly, Apress, and McGraw Hill. He has keynoted numerous conferences around the world including AI DevSummit, Devoxx, DevNexus, JNation, JavaOne, Shift, Joker, swampUP, and Open Source India. Stephen is an avid motorcyclist who has done evangelism tours in Europe, Japan, and Brazil, interviewing developers in their natural habitat. When he is not traveling, he enjoys teaching kids how to do AI, embedded, and robot programming together with his daughters.

Jim’s career spans three of the largest technology trends to rise over the last decade: mobile computing, cloud computing and open source software. Today, as executive director of The Linux Foundation, he uses this experience to accelerate innovation in technology through the use of open source and Linux.

At The Linux Foundation, Jim works with the world’s largest technology companies, including IBM, Intel, Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, and others to help define the future of computing on the server, in the cloud, and on a variety of new mobile computing devices. His work at the vendor-neutral Linux Foundation gives him a unique and aggregate perspective on the global technology industry.

Jim has been recognized for his insights on the changing economics of the technology industry. His writing has appeared in Businessweek, Wired, and other top technology journals, and he is a regular keynote speaker at industry events. He advises a variety of startups, including Splashtop, and sits on the boards of the Global Economic Symposium, Open Source For America, and Chinese Open Source Promotion Union.