Program Committee

Abhishek is a Senior Software Engineer, Master Inventor at IBM Research and co-chairs the CNCF Batch System Initiative. He works closely with Red Hat as a Partner Engineer. He focuses on resource management, performance, and distributed computing for AI workloads in the cloud. He enjoys designing easy-to-use solutions for the cloud and has 40+ patents filed. When possible he likes to explore different adventure sports and take culinary vacations.

Principal Engineer in Microsoft Azure CTO’s office with 12 years of experience in distributed systems. Maintainer of Drasi, a CNCF Sandbox project for change detection and reaction across distributed data systems.

Speaker at KubeCon North America 2025 and will speak at Microsoft Build 2026. Served on the Program Committees for KubeCon India 2026 (Data + Storage track) and KubeCon Japan 2026 (AI + ML track), and as a reviewer for MLADS, Microsoft’s annual peer-reviewed Machine Learning and Data Science conference.

Co-organizer of the official CNCF Community Group for Seattle. Currently building agentic workflows, real-time RAG pipelines, MCP servers, and context engineering systems for large codebases at Microsoft. Active contributor to the Model Context Protocol community working group designing the events and triggers primitive.

Mentor for a 2026 Google Summer of Code project building ambient agents with Drasi and DAPR Agents, and also mentored an IoT related project under LFX Mentorship.

Previously a Staff Engineer on LinkedIn’s Stream Processing Infrastructure team — the birthplace of Kafka and Samza — and helped build multiple Azure services like Azure Migrate from the ground up.

Ana Jiménez Santamaría is an open source community leader and data scientist with 5+ years of experience at the Linux Foundation, working as Sr. project manager supporting global, multi-stakeholder IT ecosystems. She is also an Agentic AI Foundation Ambassador, helping developers and OSPO teams understand agentic AI projects and open standards such as MCP, Goose, and Agents.md

Ana is currently actively involved in TODO Group’s Agentic AI to Empower OSPOs Working Group and co-chairs the PyTorch Academic Outreach Working Group. Before joining the Linux Foundation, she worked at Bitergia on software development analytics. Ana holds a master’s in Data Science at Rey Juan Carlos University with a thesis in measuring the health of open source developer ecosystems

She has spoken at international events, including GitHub Universe, the premier United Nations OSPOs for Good Symposium (current United Nations OSS Week), KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, FOSS Backstage, OSPO Summit China, Open Compliance Summit Japan, DevRelCon Tokyo / London, OpenInfra Days, and Open Source Summit events across Asia, Europe, and North America

Anas Nashif is a Senior 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.

Tech leader with 10+ years in AI accelerator architecture and 20+ years industry experience. Expert in HW/SW/algorithm integration from concept to product. Collaborated with Fortune 500 clients on customized solutions. Innovation demonstrated through multiple AI optimization patents. Skilled in tech strategy, team leadership (80+ engineers), complex project management with hands-on approach to new technologies. Experience analyzing LLMs and optimization techniques including KV cache, Mixture of Experts (MoE), quantization and more, with comprehensive understanding of software/hardware architectural implications across diverse platforms, edge AI, RAGs, and AI agent implementations

Animesh Pathak is a Developer Relations Engineer focused on Database DevOps, APIs, testing, and open-source innovation. He works on enabling scalable DBDevOps practices and strengthening collaboration between application and data teams to drive secure, reliable software delivery.

He has contributed actively to open-source initiatives and has been a strong advocate for modern API testing approaches across engineering teams. His work spans developer advocacy, technical writing, and community engagement, where he translates complex DevOps concepts into practical, real-world implementations.

Animesh has spoken at DevOpsDays, open-source forums, and cloud-native community events, and continues to support the ecosystem through content, mentorship, and community-driven initiatives. His most meaningful work comes from creating tangible impact for developers and communities through code, content, and enablement.

Annie Talvasto is an award-winning international technology speaker and leader. She has spoken at over 100+ tech events worldwide, including KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and Microsoft Build & Ignite. She has been recognized with the CNCF Ambassador, Azure & AI Platform MVP awards. She has co-organized the Kubernetes & CNCF Finland meetup since 2017. In the past, she has also served as a track chair for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Program Chair for Secure AI Summit (powered by Cloud Native) and hosted Cloud Native Live, a weekly livestream by CNCF, for over 3 years.

Ara Pulido has been working on open source infrastructure and system engineering for more than 15 years. She worked for Canonical for 9 years, helping to make Ubuntu a great developer and IoT platform. After that, she worked 2.5 years full time on Kubernetes projects. Today, she is a Senior Staff Developer Advocate at Datadog and part of its Open Source Program Office.

Atish Patra is a Linux kernel developer at Meta and an open-source champion driving advancements in RISC-V Linux support, including boot process standardization, UEFI support, virtualization enablement, confidential computing, and performance monitoring. A vocal advocate for open-source innovation, he is a regular presenter at conferences like OSS/ELCE, LPC, and the RISC-V Summit. Atish maintains the RISC-V Supervisor Binary Interface (SBI) specification and co-maintains OpenSBI, an open-source runtime firmware for RISC-V that enables seamless compatibility across platforms and empowers developers globally.

Benjamin Cabé is a technology enthusiast with a passion for empowering developers to build innovative solutions. He has 20 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.

Manager of the AI Architecture team within Red Hat’s Open Source & AI Program Office leading the upstream community strategy for Red Hat contributions to open source AI communities. Her focus is building sustainable, collaborative ecosystems that accelerate innovation and security across the AI landscape.She has been an active contributor across multiple Linux Foundation initiatives, including the LF AI & Data, Agentic AI Foundation,FINOS, and the PyTorch community, helping shape open, community-driven approaches to AI development and governance.

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

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.

Cornelius Schumacher is a long-time contributor and leader in the open source community. He has worked on a variety of projects, from volunteer-driven to enterprise. Originally a developer, he has moved into topics of governance, open source compliance, and how to run open source projects well. Cornelius Schumacher works as Open Source Steward in the CTO team of DB Systel helping teams to successfully use and contribute to open source at Deutsche Bahn.

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.

Daniela Barbosa serves as General Manager Blockchain, Healthcare and Identity at the Linux Foundation and as Executive Director of Hyperledger Foundation with overall strategic and operational responsibility for staff, programs, expansion and execution of Hyperledger’s mission. Daniela has more than 20 years of enterprise technology experience, including serving for four years as Hyperledger Foundation’s Vice President of Worldwide Alliances with responsibility for the member community as well as broader industry and business community outreach and overall network growth. She started her career at Dow Jones where she worked with the top global brands across various sectors, including finance, consumer and energy, to architect and deliver enterprise systems, ontologies and semantic web solutions. In the early 2000s, Daniela became involved in the early web 2.0 community helping to advance the concept of digital identity and data portability as the pathway for people to reuse their data across interoperable applications.

Security Chair for Zephyr, work on security across Zephyr, and embedded systems.

Dr. Dawn Foster is an OSS strategy consultant. She is also on the board of CHAOSS and OpenUK, and was previously a co-chair of the CNCF Contributor Strategy Technical Advisory Group. She has 20+ years of experience at companies like VMware and Intel with expertise in community, strategy, governance, and metrics. 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, 3D printing, and traveling.

Dr. Deborah Dahl is an expert on Conversational AI and related standards. She has developed many natural language processing systems and has over 20 years of experience in standards work at the World Wide Web Consortium and the Linux Foundation AI and Data Foundation. Dr. Dahl has written many technical papers and four books, most recently Natural Language Understanding with Python, published in 2023.

Diego Gosmar serves as Chief AI Officer, specializing in Artificial Intelligence with a particular focus on Multi-Agent Systems, Generative Conversational AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Conversation Analysis, AI Agent Interoperability and Automation, as well as Sustainable and Ethical Conversational AI.
He leads AI Competence Centers in both the Customer Care and Supply Chain domains. 

Diego is member of the Voiceinteroperability.ai and Trustmarkinitiative.ai from the Linux Foundation AI & Data, two groups dedicated to the definition of standards and guidelines for Agentic Conversational AI ethical, scalable and responsible use. 

He is the author of the following publications related to AI (original researches):
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=list_works&hl=en&user=3HtoxzsAAAAJ

He has been a trainer and speaker over the past two decades at various international events focused on innovation, telecommunications technologies, and artificial intelligence.
Here it is a list of Diego’s speeches:
https://www.gosmar.eu/index.html#events

Previously, Diego has also led the international expansion of the XCALLY AI-Driven omnichannel software solution, reaching over 60 countries worldwide, managing partners and hundreds of customers scattered from Singapore to the Middle East and Japan, Europe, South Africa, United States, Brazil, and more. 

He is the Head of AI Advisor for several start-ups and Mentor at the I3P, the Polytechnic University of Turin Innovative Companies Incubator, including Clearbox.AI leading company specializing in Explainable AI and Synthetic Data generation for AI Ethical models.

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.

Linux kernel engineer working on being-up and upstreaming of RISC-V SoCs.

Elena Zannoni is a Senior Director of Linux Engineering at Oracle,
with focus on Toolchain, Tracing and Ksplice services. With 30 years
experience in the Linux area, Elena has presented at many Linux
Foundation conferences on various development related topics, like
Tracing, BPF, DTrace, CTF, and more. Some of the current most visible
projects in Elena’s team are writing a GCC backend for BPF and
SFrame. Elena has been part of the Linux Plumbers Conference
committee, and part of the OSS/LinuxCon Program committee for several
years. In addition Elena is a member of the Sourceware Project
Leadership Committee.

Evan Anderson is the founder of Custcodian, a software supply chain company that aims to remove the pain and friction of tracking security standards. He’s also a founder of the Knative (CNCF — serverless), and Minder (OpenSSF — supply chain) projects, and a member of CNCF TAG-Security and OpenSSF Baseline. He’s previously worked at Google, VMware, and Stacklok. Father, recovering SRE, ongoing runner.

India’s First Technical Trainer for The Linux Foundation, Course Maintainer, Author, Moderator & Kubestronaut.

Flavio Ceolin is a Principal Engineer at Hubble Network, where he works on embedded SDKs, device firmware, and communication protocols that use Zephyr and Bluetooth chips to connect devices to satellites. He is also a long-time Zephyr RTOS contributor, Zephyr’s Security Architect, and a member of the project’s Security Working Group, where he works hands-on with the PSIRT vulnerability-handling process, including advisory triage, CVE records, and release security accounting. 

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 honors in electronic engineering from the University of Rome.

Goutham Pacha Ravi is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat and Chair of the OpenStack Technical Committee. His open source journey began in 2015, and he has since served as Project Team Lead of OpenStack Manila (Shared File Systems) and become a core contributor to multiple OpenStack projects. He is a member of the OpenStack Vulnerability Management Team and a frequent speaker at open source conferences including OpenStack Summits, OpenInfra Summits, Grace Hopper Celebration and SCALE. Goutham is passionate about free and open source software, mentoring contributors, distributed storage, Ceph, and the intersection of OpenStack and Kubernetes.

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.

Hrittik is a Platform Advocate at Loft Labs and a CNCF Ambassador, with expertise in cloud native technologies and open source communities. He has contributed extensively to developer advocacy, technical writing, and community engagement. Hrittik has been a featured speaker at events such as Kubernetes Community Days, Open Source Summits, and more, and has served as a Program Committee member for several KubeCons and CloudNativeCons.

NXP engineer and the company’s Zephyr Technical Ambassador.
Her background is in Linux, particularly the audio subsystem and Sound Open Firmware, though her main focus is now Zephyr.
She maintains Zephyr’s IPC subsystem, OpenAMP, and libmetal, and works on asymmetric multiprocessing across i.MX and i.MX RT platforms, including driver upstreaming, power management, and SoC enablement.
She also sits on the OpenAMP technical committee and is active in Zephyr governance.

After 20 years of working as a software engineer, Jake stopped writing software and started writing *about* software—and more—at LWN.net. 19 years later, he’s still at it. He lives in Baja California Sur, México with his wife and a loony dog.

Longtime open source developer, technical writer, and community leader & bottle washer. Currently managing Red Hat’s relationships with communities in automotive, edge, and hardware enablement, including RISC-V. 

Johan got started with Open Source and Bluetooth early in his career, and eventually became a BlueZ & Linux kernel Bluetooth subsystem maintainer. The shift to Zephyr happened in 2015, about a year before the project’s public launch, when Johan implemented its Blueooth host stack and became the maintainer for it (a position he still holds). Along the way Johan has taken other roles in the project, such as TSC member, network buffer maintainer, release manager and Silabs platform maintainer.

John is a Principal Consultant at ControlPlane, where he helps some of the world’s most security-conscious organizations build and assure mission-critical platforms. He is a member of the in-toto Steering Committee and a maintainer of its Witness and Archivista sub-projects. He also serves as a co-chair of the CNCF’s TAG Security. Within the OpenSSF, John is a member of the inaugural Ambassador cohort and contributes to several initiatives, including the SBOMit project.

Jonathan Corbet is the kernel documentation maintainer, co-founder of
LWN.net (and the author of its Kernel Page), and the lead author of Linux
Device Drivers, Third Edition. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

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.

Senior engineering leader with more than 30+ years in software development in both open and closed source solutions. Currently focusing on standardization of AI systems. and is an AI expert at IEEE, ISO, She chairs the SPDX AI/Dataset profile working group.

Karen Chu leads Swift community initiatives for Apple’s Open Source Program Office. With 10+ years in OSS, 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.

Karthik Babu Manam is a DevOps and Cloud Engineer with strong experience in cloud infrastructure, automation, Kubernetes, Terraform, security, and CI/CD. He has worked with AWS, Azure, OCI, GitLab, and modern cloud security practices. Karthik recently completed his PhD and is active in research, writing, and open-source contributions. He is a Kyverno contributor and a Golden Kubestronaut, reflecting deep expertise in the Kubernetes ecosystem. He also holds many respected cloud and DevOps certifications. His interests include platform engineering, DevSecOps, open-source communities, and building secure, scalable, and practical systems.

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.

Kerim is a senior developer advocate at IBM, where he coaches operators 

and developers on sustainable infrastructure and orchestration workflows.

Before he joined IBM, Kerim worked on Industrial IoT for the Amsterdam airport 

and helped museums bring more of their collections online.

As a Community Architect at Red Hat, Laura Santamaria bridges engineering disciplines by breaking down complex systems to foster open-source collaboration. She serves as a global core member for DevOpsDays, a steering committee member for Cloud Native Rejekts, and a long-standing program committee member for Open Source Summit. In addition, she organizes DevOpsDays Austin, PyTexas, and Cloud Austin to serve the Austin community. With a background in technical education, she spent years teaching Python for Women Who Code ATX, helping to lower the barrier to entry for engineering disciplines. While she is a veteran podcaster (currently heard on Technically Leadership from Packet Pushers and Cloud Native Compass with David Flanagan (rawkode) and previously on things like Quick Bites of Cloud Engineering), her primary focus remains building sustainable, contributor-driven ecosystems. Outside of tech, Laura runs, reads, and watches clouds—the real kind.

I am currently working as an EU Policy Advisor with a focus on cybersecurity and open-source software. I serve as a bridge between OpenSSF (and its community), other technical communities and policymakers, helping position OpenSSF as a trusted resource within the global and European policy landscape. I am also representing OpenSSF in the European Commission’s CRA Expert Group, and Linux Foundation Europe in the European Standardization Organizations contributing to the CRA implementation guidelines and standards discussions.

Marcel Kurzmann joined Bosch in 1997. After establishing the test-automation service team at Bosch Engineering and Acquisition Project Management in the automotive section he took over the Quality Management of Bosch Software Innovations in 2008. From 2015 he was responsible for the Open Source Management System of Bosch Software Innovations, member of the Center of Competence Open Source at Bosch and is now part of the Center of Excellence Open Source and Inner Source at Bosch Digital. He represents Bosch in the OpenChain Governing Board, is active member of the OpenChain Tooling Workgroup and Co-Maintainer of the Eclipse Apoapsis Project.

Marta Rybczynska has network security background, 20 years of experience in Open Source including 15 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. She’s a member of the security team of the Yocto Project, Technical Steering Committee of OpenEmbedded, and a co-maintainer of meta-security.

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

Maureen Helm is a Distinguished Engineer in the Software & Digital Platforms 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.

Mary Wang is the Executive Director of the OpenChain Project at the Linux Foundation,
leading global efforts to build trust in the software supply chain through transparent,
standardized open source governance. She collaborates with the global open source
community to drive adoption and innovation worldwide.
Mary is a technology leader with over 15 years of experience in software development, PLM,
CI/CD, and open source governance. Before this role, she was Director of Open Source
Ecosystem at Volvo Cars, where she founded and led their Open Source Program Office
(OSPO). Prior to that, she spent nine years at Ericsson, building a strong foundation in
automation and CI/CD tooling.
Persistent, passionate, and driven by continuous improvement, she excels at turning
real-world challenges into practical, scalable solutions.

Nagesh Kumar Vinnakota is a Senior Lead Software Engineer at Capital One with over 21 years of experience building large-scale, cloud-native, and distributed systems. He specializes in designing resilient, high-performance platforms for extreme scale. Currently, he is leading one of the largest fintech data migrations, moving millions of Discover customer loyalty records to Capital one using a custom-built, idempotent, and highly scalable distributed migration engine. He has deep expertise in cloud orchestration, serverless architectures (AWS Lambda + Go), CI/CD pipelines, data reconciliation at scale, and zero-downtime system transitions. Passionate about open source technologies, he actively applies and contributes to open standards and tools that power modern cloud and data infrastructure.

Natali Vlatko (she/her) is a Director of Open Source Software Engineering at Cisco, specializing in open software, policy, and governance. She is a SIG Docs Co-Chair for Kubernetes and a member of the TODO Group Steering Committee. 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 Pappler is a Functional Safety expert at AlektoMetis, specializing in the intersection of safety, cybersecurity, overall dependability, and open source. With 20+ years of experience in automotive software and industrial automation — including a decade at TÜV SÜD — she bridges the gap between rigid standards and modern development. 
Within the Linux Foundation, Nicole serves as the Functional Safety Manager for the Zephyr Project and is a lead contributor to the SPDX Functional Safety Profile, focusing on machine-readable safety documentation. She is also an active member of the ELISA Project. 
Nicole is a frequent speaker and community collaborator who believes that transparency is the only way to solve the industry’s shared challenges.

I am a Software Engineer specializing in managing Kubernetes clusters across AWS, GCP, and Azure public clouds. At Confluent, we run stateful and data-intensive applications such as Kafka and Flink on Kubernetes clusters.

With expertise in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and backend development, I help design scalable, resilient cloud-native solutions. 
Previously, I worked on Oracle’s Kubernetes Engine team, enhancing its managed Kubernetes service. 
I’m passionate about solving complex engineering challenges in cloud environments.

Apart from learning about distributed systems and infrastructure, I enjoy cycling & cooking!

Nishant Lakshmikanth is an Engineering Leader at LinkedIn, with over 12 years of experience designing and leading large-scale distributed systems and infrastructure. He currently drives LinkedIn’s recommendation infrastructure, including the People You May Know (PYMK) system, a critical initiative responsible for generating millions in annual revenue, engaging over one billion members worldwide. His work integrates cutting-edge technologies like graph-based models, entity-based recommender systems, and advanced machine learning frameworks.

In the realm of machine learning infrastructure, Nishant has spearheaded the development of distributed training systems, real-time feature population pipelines, and solutions for remotely hosting complex models, enabling seamless integration of large-scale AI systems into production environments and ensuring their accessibility and reliability. He has also contributed to building highly reliable tracking systems, GPU optimizations, and cost-efficient large language model (LLM) deployments tailored for recommendation systems, advancing the scalability and efficiency of LinkedIn’s ML-powered products.

Before LinkedIn, Nishant held key engineering roles at Amazon Web Services and Cisco. At AWS, he contributed to Elastic Block Storage (EBS), where he designed a distributed volume placement system and optimized replication strategies, earning seven patents. At Cisco, he advanced video streaming and encoding technologies, demonstrating expertise in backend systems.

Nishant’s technical contributions extend beyond systems design to fostering innovation, mentoring engineering talent, and advancing engineering standards. His extensive experience with control plane for managing complex distributed systems, bootstrapping cloud services and building machine learning infrastructures places him at the forefront of innovation.

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).

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.

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 is also a Program Evaluator (PEV) in Software Engineering (BSSE) for the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET.)

Philipp Ahmann is a Senior OSS Community Manager at ETAS (a Bosch subsidiary), specializing in safety-critical automotive open source software. With 15+ years’ experience in Linux automotive platforms, he has held roles from software engineer to project & line manager.
He currently holds the position of the technical steering committee chair for the Linux Foundation ELISA project to Enable Linux in Safety Applications. Additionally, he is member of the Linux Foundation Europe Advisory Board.

Ramón Roche is General Manager of the Dronecode Foundation, an open-source project under the Linux Foundation supporting drone and robotics development. He leads a global ecosystem behind technologies like PX4 and Pixhawk, and has over a decade of experience in open source. Ramón also organizes the PX4 Developer Summit, uniting hundreds of drone developers and innovators each year.

Ricardo currently works at Snowflake as a Cloud Infrastructure Lead helping automate AI/ML infrastructure with cloud native technologies. He’s an open source enthusiast and co-chair of the CNCF TAG-Runtime. He has been working in tech for more than 20 years and comes from a diverse professional background, having been in different roles at large companies such as Rakuten, Cisco and VMware as well as startups such as Branch Metrics, Coupa, Hytrust, Exablox, and SnapLogic.

Richard is the Head of Product and Operations for Ant Ling (the foundational LLM from Ant inclusionAI), with dedicated focus on building innovative products to showcase the capabilities of the LLM base model. 

Prior joining Ant Ling, Richard built Ant Group’s first OSPO and has been leading and growing the team from a strategy initiative to a full functional 10 people team in 4 years. He is in charge of Ant OSS governance, operations, strategy and international growth initiatives and is actively working with all open source projects and external partners.

As an ex-Square, ex-Microsoft engineer by training, Richard enjoyed leading strategic initiatives from scratch to fruition and building products that developers and end-users love to use.

Richard has been studying and working for more than 5 years each in 4 different countries (Singapore, Canada, USA and China) with immensely cross-cultural collaboration experience.

Ritika Dhiman is a Software Development Engineer at Amazon, working on real-time communication systems for Amazon Connect. She holds a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University and is actively involved in hackathon and technical mentorship. Her work sits at the intersection of scalable systems, applied AI, and community impact.

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.

Shirley Bailes has spent more than two decades working at the intersection of open source communities and the technology companies that build on them. She has held ecosystem and developer engagement leadership roles at Intel, AWS, and NGINX, focusing on how organizations participate effectively in open collaboration. Earlier in her career, she worked with Ruby Central and O’Reilly Media on programming and speaker development for major open source conferences. She co-hosts the Community Devroom at FOSDEM and serves as an occasional program committee reviewer for Linux Foundation events.

Shivay Lamba is a software engineer and open source contributor passionate about AI and edge computing. With experience across startups and enterprise tech, he focuses on simplifying complex technologies for developers. Shivay actively speaks at global conferences, organizes community events, and contributes to projects in cloud-native ecosystems, WebAssembly, and machine learning. He has also built and mentored educational programs to bridge gaps in emerging tech adoption.

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.

I am a seasoned engineering leader with over 15 years of experience in distributed systems architecture, databases, security, and AI/ML-powered systems at scale. At LinkedIn, I architected a privacy platform handling 20 million queries per second and built the Trusted Graph system with over 100 million verifications — delivering mission-critical infrastructure that sat at the intersection of distributed systems, data, and security.
My areas of expertise span AI/ML application development, large-scale distributed systems, database architecture, and security and privacy platforms. I am passionate about advancing open technology ecosystems and bringing practitioner perspectives to conversations around scalability, reliability, and responsible AI. I am eager to contribute to the Open Source Summit community by helping shape a program that reflects the real-world challenges engineers face when building intelligent, secure, and highly available systems at scale.

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.

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.

Sumit has been working in the OSS space for the past 20+ years. Currently he leads the Virtualization efforts at Linaro. Previously he has led the Android team at Linaro, helping the AOSP ecosystem to improve.

He has been part of the core team for Android microconference at Linux Plumbers, as well as of the Program Committee of the first OSS India.

Takashi Ninjouji, Chief Engineer at Honda Motor Co., Ltd., focuses on software-defined vehicles (SDV) and the Open Source Program Office (OSPO). He is also interested in security assurance and SBOM. He spent 10 years in R&D in the telecommunications and mobile industries. In the past 15 years, he has established and operated OSPOs at companies in web/IT and infrastructure. He also contributes to the OpenChain, SPDX, and AGL.

Tasha Drew leads Product Engineering for the AI team in the VCF Division of Broadcom. Her team is responsible for building a common platform for customer workloads to be able to build, manage, and scale their AI Agents and Inference workloads. Her team is also responsible for delivering VCF Intelligent Assist, the in-product Agents and AI capabilities for VCF itself. She lives in beautiful San Francisco, California with her husband, boys, and dog.

Terence “Tex” McCutcheon is an open source advocate and governance practitioner dedicated to strengthening the people and projects that power decentralized ecosystems. He serves as Open Source Program Manager at Intersect, where he leads the Open Source Office and supports the Open Source Committee in stewarding sustainable, transparent funding for Cardano’s open source infrastructure.
Tex’s work centers on a simple premise: open source does not sustain itself by accident. His focus is building structures that allow contributors to do their best work without sacrificing transparency, accountability, or community voice. Through the development and operation of the Paid Open Source Model (POSM) and open source strategy design, he helps design and deliver milestone-based funding programs that support maintainers, developers, and ecosystem tools ensuring that treasury resources are used responsibly.
Deeply engaged in community collaboration, Tex works across committees, technical working groups, and contributor networks to reduce friction between governance and builders. He believes sustainable open source requires more than funding. Requirements include clarity of mandates, measurable outcomes, and the humility to adapt programs subject to the needs of the ecosystem. Listening to maintainers, engaging with developers, and incorporating feedback from the broader Cardano community are core elements of his approach.
Whether developing funding frameworks, refining governance policies, supporting developer onboarding, or strengthening security programs, Tex’s mission remains consistent: build durable systems that empower open source contributors and protect the long-term health of open source ecosystems.

Thomas Petazzoni is the CEO of Bootlin, an engineering company specializing in Embedded Linux and Zephyr, with a strong focus on open source. A seasoned open-source contributor, he has authored over 900 patches to the Linux kernel and more than 5,000 patches to Buildroot, where he also serves as a co-maintainer. With more than 18 years of experience in Embedded Linux, Thomas has been a regular speaker at the Embedded Linux Conference and has been service for several years on its program committee.

Thomas Steenbergen specializes in strategic open source management, helping organizations align their open source practices with their objectives. An expert in open source adoption, community building, and compliance – including Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs). Currently he working for various Open Source Program Offices as a consultant including the OSPO at SIVON (ICT co-op of Dutch schools) and CARIAD (Volkswagen group company). He previously led OSPO at EPAM and HERE. He is a OSS Review Toolkit, TODO group maintainer and a regular contributor to FINOS’s Open Source Readiness, OpenChain and SBOM community (CycloneDX/SPDX). 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 use Linux and other open source software in their products. Tim is the organizer of the Linux Boot-Time Special Interest Group and is involved with various Linux Foundation projects (including previous membership on the LF board of Directors and the Linux kernel Technical Advisory Board). Tim created the Embedded Linux Conference, and has been involved with
Linux (and particularly embedded Linux) for over 30 years.

Tim Pepper is an engineer and executive with almost 30 years experience in open source software development. Tim’s work has touched many dimensions of software stack code (Linux/kernels, storage, mobile and embedded systems, power and performance, cloud orchestration, AI/ML frameworks) as well as how that software is developed and maintained (steering and conduct committees, mentorship, open source program offices, public policy, legal compliance, software supply chain security). In what free time remains, Tim dabbles at being a backyard farmer, homebrewer, woodworker, Vespa rider, and amateur triathlete.

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. Currently, he serves as a solution architect for Medical IoT at inovex GmbH. In this role he works with clients on modernizing their embedded architectures or introducing new technology frameworks pre-dominantly from the open-source side of the spectrum.

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.

Vini Jaiswal is a longtime contributor to some of the most widely adopted open source AI and data projects, including Apache Spark, MLflow, and most notably, Delta Lake. Recognized as a Top Voice in AI and Data, Vini is widely known for her impactful work in building scalable AI and data platforms at Databricks, TikTok and Citi, navigating complex global policy landscapes, and shaping AI policies and investments at key institutions such as the U.S. Congress, United Nations, and USPTO.

She served on several influential boards in the open source ecosystem, including as Chair of the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) at the Linux Foundation’s LF AI & Data, Governing Board member of both the Confidential Computing Consortium and LF AI, and Co-chair of the Open Source Programming track at the Grace Hopper Celebration.

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.

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.

Yoshitake Kobayashi is the Senior Manager 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.

CNCF Kyverno maintainer, KubeCon Europe 2026 Program Committee member, KyvernoCon 2025–2026 program comittee and speaker, Golden Kubestronaut