Program Committee

I have been contributing to the Linux kernel for over 20 years in various capacities — from maintaining kernels at various organizations to mentoring new contributors. I was part of the organizing team behind FOSS.IN, one of India’s largest Free and Open Source Software conferences, and later founded the Kernel Meetup Bangalore, a community-driven initiative to bring together kernel developers and enthusiasts. I’ve had the opportunity to speak at open source conferences including Open Source Summit North America, sharing insights on kernel development and community building. Passionate about scaling engineering culture and growing FOSS communities, I continue to stay deeply involved in the Linux ecosystem, both technically and socially.

Amit is a Director of Engineering at Qualcomm and has worked with the upstream Linux kernel community in the areas of power, performance and thermal management for two decades. He is, on occasion, found lost in the ZephyrRTOS community too.

In the last decade, he has built a company that offers turnkey electronics design and manufacturing services (mbedrock.com), led the Power Management working group at Linaro that brought Energy-aware scheduling to Linux, helped lead the 96boards.org effort to bring powerful developer boards at low-cost to the software community and helped several SoC vendors work with the upstream community and help themselves build more maintainable software along the way.

Outside of work, he spends time helping guide students into the world of system programming. His main hobby though is to learn to grow his own food.

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/

Arpit Joshipura is an executive leader and open source software evangelist across carriers, cloud and enterprise IT – spanning networking, orchestrations, operating systems, security, AI, edge, hardware and silicon. He was recently voted among the Top 5 Movers and Shakers in the Telecom Industry. At the Linux Foundation, Arpit leads open source networking, orchestration & edge/IOT, including LF Networking projects (ONAP, OPNFV, ODL, FDIO, OvS, DPDK, OpenSwitch, Akraino/Edge/IOT, etc.) as well as major industry disruptions including VNFs to CNFs (Cloud Native Network functions), 5G, AI, etc.

Arpit brings 30 years of networking expertise and vision to The Linux Foundation, with both technical depth and business breadth. He has orchestrated and led major industry disruptions across enterprises, carriers, and cloud architectures, including IP, broadband, optical, mobile, routing, switching, L4-7, cloud, disaggregation, SDN/NFV, and open networking, and has been an early evangelist for open source. Arpit has served in CMO, VP, and Engineering roles within both startups and larger enterprises.

Atish Patra is a Linux kernel developer at Rivos 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.

I am the AI Team lead for the OSPO creating the upstream strategy for Red Hat to align with open source communities aligned to our mission and technical vision.

My role as Sr.Principal Community Architect within Red Hat’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO) has allowed me to work in a variety of Linux Foundation communities such as the CNCF, FINOS, Green Software Foundation, LF AI & Data, vLLM and more. I have previously held leadership roles in FINOS and the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

Dr. Malini Bhandaru is a Senior Distinguished Engineer and Cloud Native Architect focused on AI, confidential compute, security, and performance at Intel. She has over a decade of open source cloud experience working on projects such as the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA), Confidential Containers, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, EdgeX Foundry, and OpenStack. At Intel, she leads the Cloud Native Open Source team to enable the discovery, monitoring, and management of hardware resources and capabilities in a generic manner to Kubernetes workloads, be they processor cache, memory bandwidth, accelerators, or confidential computing. Currently, she chairs the OPEA Technical Steering Committee. She started at Intel as a Xeon Server power and performance architect. She has also worked on autonomous driving, health care, online billing, and telecommunication applications. Malini is a frequent conference speaker, served on KubeCon, Open Source Summit, and OpenStack program committees, co-authored the OpenStack security guide, and is a co-author of the AI and Cloud Native whitepaper to name a few. She has a Ph.D. in Machine Learning, 25+ patents, a mentor for women in technology, a STEM coach, and avid gardener.

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

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

Saurabh has over 17 years of experience in Linux kernel. Currently he leads the Linux kernel team at Microsoft India, which contributes to various modules across the Linux kernel, with a primary focus on Hyper-V drivers. He is an active reviewer and contributor to the Linux kernel, having submitted over 100 patches upstream as author.

His contributions span multiple areas, including DeviceTree, x86, VTL, Hyper-V/VMBus, display, and storage drivers.

Previosuly Saurabh has contribute to Outreach mentorship program as a mentor too: https://www.outreachy.org/alums/2022-12/

Additionally, Saurabh has presented several papers at various Linux kernel forums, most notably at the Linux Plumbers Conference Vienna 2024. More details about this talk can be found here: https://lpc.events/event/18/contributions/1817/

Shirley Bailes has been involved in developer communities and building open source programs for over 15 years. She is the Director of Software Ecosystem Strategy in Intel’s Office of the CTO, where she leads thought leadership and strategic initiatives to accelerate startup innovation and developer ecosystem growth. She previously led open source programs at AWS and served as Co-President of the Women at Amazon Global Board.

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.

Srivatsa Bhat is a Principal Software Engineer in the Linux Systems Group at Microsoft. He has been an upstream kernel maintainer of subsystems such as Generic Paravirt-Ops and VMware Hypervisor Interface. He has contributed towards CPU hotplug locking scalability and Memory Power Management in the Linux kernel and has presented talks at Linux conferences such as Linux Kernel Summit, Linux Conf Australia and Linux Plumbers Conference, as well as academic/research conferences such as SOSP. Srivatsa has also been a distro kernel maintainer, architect of a Linux Real-Time distro and has published research papers on scaling filesystems to many cores.

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.

In the Linux Kernel community, I’ve been a maintainer of the dma-buf framework subsystem.
In the Android world, I lead the team at Linaro that works on all things Android that are relevant to our members – we have helped with Android kernel upstreaming and maintenance. We also maintain specific devboards, enabling and running AOSP on them, adding new features, testing in CI, triaging and fixing issues.

In addition, we also work with various community members around AOSP. We have a devboardsforandroid.linaro.org community space for the same. I am also a founding steering committee member for an upcoming aosp developers community, aosp-devs.org.

I have been an active organising committee member of the Android microconference at Linux Plumbers Conference for many years now. I was also one of the devroom runners for the first ever AOSP devroom at FOSDEM this year.

With a background in Electronics and Communication Engineering, Susan brings a unique blend of technical insight and marketing expertise to the open source world. She began her career in the embedded systems industry, taking on roles in marketing, digital strategy, and product management. Currently, she works as a project marketer at the Linux Foundation, supporting a range of initiatives including the Zephyr Project, OpenSSF, and the Open Mainframe Project.

At the Zephyr Project, she manages the global meetup program, which has successfully connected developer communities around the world. She works closely with users, contributors, and maintainers to enhance project visibility and engagement. In addition to her core projects, she has contributed to other Linux Foundation initiatives, including Linux Foundation Europe and the ELISA Project.

Susan is dedicated to helping open source communities grow through collaboration. Outside of work, she enjoys baking and listening to music in her free time.

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. 

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

Vinod is subsystem maintainer of Linux Kernel’s soundwire subsystem, Generic Phy subsystem, and dmaengine subsystem, He also maintains the ALSA compressed audio framework & Library. Vinod has two decades of embedded development experience in Intel and Linaro in the area of BSP development, display, audio etc. Vinod runs Linux Kernel Bangalore meetup chapter and has spoken at ELC, LPC and other events.