Program Committee

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

👋 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. I received my 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. 

Fuli Qi is a multi-year experienced Linux engineer at Fujitsu.
He specialized in developing persistent memory and ARM64 servers, and he contributed to improving RAS of Non-Volatile DIMMs. He also has experience in enterprise customer support through collaboration with distributors.
Currently, he is working on developing Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure.

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.

Harunobu Kurokawa is a manager of OSS development team and responsible for Renesas BPS for community as well asAGL. His has worked in Renesas from 2007 as Embedded software engineer. His first experience is mobile phone platform software(symbian, Android) development for Japan domestic. From 2014, he works embedded linux on R-Car series for IVI/cockpit solution, especially kernel, wayland/weston, video and Chromium for AGL.

Hiro Fukuchi is OSPO and Senior Alliance Manager in Sony Group Corporation. He is working on Open Source strategy and relationship with OSS communities. He is a core contributor of OpenChain Japan workgroup from the beginning, ToDo Group and SPDX. He is a speaker at OSSEU(2019,2021,2022) OSSJP(2021,2022), regarding a regional community and OSPO. He is an English-Japanese translation volunteer regarding OSS community related document, such as OpenChain and SPDX specification. He was recognized for his leadership in the OpenChain Japan workgroup and received the OSS Award from Northeast Asia OSS Promotion Forum in 2022.

Hiroshi is a lead engineer of Kubernetes-based application platforms in LY Corporation’s Private Cloud Division. The company runs many large-scale applications on its Kubernetes-based platform, and Hiroshi is skilled in running applications stably at such a scale. He has also been instrumental in promoting Kubernetes in Japan. For example, he has authored several books, including “Kubernetes Practical Guide,” and has spoken at CloudNative Days Tokyo, Japan’s largest CloudNative tech conference.

TOKITA Hiroshi has been working at Fujitsu as an embedded systems developer for 20 years.
He mainly has knowledge of in-vehicle Linux, especially in the infotainment area.
He is also involved in the Japanese translation of KiCad, and is involved in development and writing activities spanning open source, software, and hardware.
In recent years, he has been active as a member of the Zephyr project and as a maintainer of Raspberry Pi Pico and Renesas RA.

Over 20 years experience in embedded-Linux field and manage OSS developer team in Renesas to boost upstream (mostly kernel space) contributions.

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.

Kenta Tada has worked as a Linux engineer and a team lead for various organizations.

He has specialized in the Linux kernel tracing technologies and eBPF. In the past, he contributed to Linux kernel and BPF Compiler Collection (BCC) to improve the kernel tracing infrastructure. He also has contributed to some CNCF related projects including serving as a reviewer for the system validator used in kubeadm preflight checks.

In 2023, he reviewed the Japanese translation of the book “Learning eBPF” published by O’Reilly Japan. In 2024, he participated as an organizer of Cloud Native Community Japan (CNCJ), fostering the open source cultures in Japan.

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.

Masato Endo is the Group Manager of Driver Monitoring Group, Value Chain Service and Technology Development, Technical Project Field of Advanced R&D and Engineering Company in TOYOTA.

He focuses also on building the OSS governance structure within Toyota and developing relationships with the OSS community, through projects such as Automotive Grade Linux and the Open Invention Network.

From 2017, he began to work with the OpenChain Project a board member and set up OpenChain Japan Work Group with Hitachi and Sony. In 2019, he launched OpenChain Automotive Work Group to promote OSS Supply Chain Management (OSS SCM) and standardization in Automotive industry.

Originally, he was a patent engineer working with various technologies such as MaaS, Autonomous Vehicle, Navigation Systems, Intelligent Transport Systems, Smart Grid, and so on. His experience includes work in New Delhi to study Indian IP and External Affairs. In 2017, he worked for an IP project of the Japan Automotive Manufacturers Association and gave a technical lectures for examiners of each government of India, Thai, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.

Masaya Aoyama is a Senior Software Engineer and Product Owner of a managed Kubernetes platform at CyberAgent, Inc. He also serves as a Technical Advisor to 3-shake, Inc. and CREATIONLINE, Inc., both of which are CNCF member companies. Since 2017, he has been an active leader and contributor in Japan’s Cloud Native communities, organizing numerous conferences and meetups throughout the country. Notably, he has served as a Co-Chair of “CloudNative Days”, Japan’s largest conference series in this field, for more than seven years. As a Co-Founder and Co-Organizer of the CNCF Japan Chapter (CNCJ), he continues to foster and grow the local community. He is also the author of the highly acclaimed “Kubernetes Perfect Guide”, widely regarded as the most popular Kubernetes book in Japan.

I work on leading open source strategies with different business units.

I started my career in OSPO in 2022 April. Before that, I worked on the development of embedded software for camcorders and cameras.

I am organizing the Japan OSPO Local Meetup in Japanese, supported by TODO Group and OpenChain Japan WG.

Muuhh IKEDA has been an OSS lover and believer since his first compiling by gcc in the 90s. He got involved in the Linux kernel development mainly for embedded and IoT usecases. He is working at Cybertrust Japan as a Lead Architect for IoT products and services, and a member of OSPO, which leads the activities for the OSS community. Muuhh is also a bass guitar player and a photographer.

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.

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.

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.

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 Sikang Bian is Head of Open Source of Ant Group. As an engineer by training, Richard was an ex-Square, ex-Microsoft software engineer who had been living in the States for 10+ years. He built Ant Group’s first OSPO and has been leading and growing the team from a strategy initiative to a full functional team. He is in charge of Ant OSS governance, operations, strategy, new products and international growth initiatives and is actively working with all open source projects and external partners.

Ronald Petty is a consultant at RX-M, a global Cloud Native an AI advisory and training firm. Ronald works as a consultant/advisor/board-member for both for-profit and non-profit organizations focusing on technology and related policy issues. Additionally, he authors and edits technical material around software development. He participated in the creation of the Kubernetes certifications and is co-lead of the Cloud Native AI Working Group. Ronald is a member of the Internet Society and Association for Computing Machinery, and is the 2024-2025 chair for both San Francisco Bay chapters.

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.

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.

Industry relationship and alliance experience for Linux and Open Source. Open Source development experience. Japanese Software/IT industry experience and relationship with outside of Japan such as US, EU, China, Vietnam and India.

For OpenSource experience, He is maintaining some documents in Linux mainline since 2.6.23. He is leading OpenStack community development team.

Shingo Oidate has led OSS utilization and community promotion at Mitsubishi Electric. In April 2025, he became General Manager of the newly established Open Source Program Office (OSPO). This organization also functions as an InnerSource Program Office (ISPO), promoting open collaboration and engaging with the global InnerSource Commons community.

Shinsuke Kato was a developer for Panasonic Holdings Corporation, where he helped Panasonic R&D improvements to Linux for use in Panasonic’s products in the past.
And, He has been working with Linux and the OSS promotions in his company for over 20 years.
Recently, he has promoted the OSS compliance in his company. He has some seminar of the OSS compliance and provides advice on the OSS compliance.

Shivay Lamba is a software developer specializing in DevOps, Machine Learning and Full Stack Development.

He is an Open Source Enthusiast and has been part of various programs like Google Code In and Google Summer of Code as a Mentor and has also been a MLH Fellow. He is actively involved in community work as well. He is a TensorflowJS SIG member, Mentor in OpenMined and CNCF Service Mesh Community, SODA Foundation and has given talks at various conferences like Github Satellite, Voice Global, Fossasia Tech Summit, TensorflowJS Show & Tell.

Shu is one of maintainer for Kubernetes Dashboard since Autumn 2019 and one of chair for SIG UI. Before that, Shu has contributed to OpenStack Dashboard and its several plugins as core developer since 2015. Besides them, developping WebRTC application.

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.

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.

Sunyanan Choochotkaew is a staff research scientist at IBM Research, specializing in distributed computing and performance acceleration on cloud platforms. She contributes to various open-source projects, where she holds the role of maintainer and top contributor, including Kepler (Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter) and Multi-NIC CNI. She is an organizer of the CNCF Community Group in Japan (CNCJ), and played a leader role in organizing the CNCF Cloud Native Sustainability Week in Tokyo 2024. Sunyanan has served as a program committee member and an organizing committee member for several conferences in the fields of HPC, AI, and networking, and has also served as an associate editor for IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems.

Swastik Baranwal is an Open Source Developer who works on developing open source projects ranging from Compilers, Devtools, webdrivers, TUIs and CLI. 

He is a website and OSPOlogy maintainer of TODO Group and serves as a Co-Chair of OSS in Business WG.

He works at LambdaTest, where he develops Appium, WebDriverIO and Selenium as a part of his daily work. 

He is also a part of the current Governance Board of FOSS United, a non-profit foundation to promote and strengthen the FOSS ecosystem in 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.

Toru is a Software Engineer at Preferred Networks, Inc. He is the creator and lead developer of youki, an OCI Runtime in Rust, and a maintainer of the OCI Runtime Specification. Additionally, he serves as a reviewer for runwasi and is involved in developing a world that utilizes containers and Wasm. Additionally, he is a member of the Kubernetes org and is especially interested in developing the Kubernetes scheduler.
Since 2023 Fall, he has been active as a CNCF Ambassador.

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.

Xiaoya Xia is a member of the Ant Group OSPO, where she focuses on catalyzing open source success through data-driven insights. Before joining Ant Group, Xiaoya was a PhD at East China Normal University (ECNU), where she concentrated on research into open source ecosystem sustainability.

Xie Ziyi is an active contributor in the Kubernetes community, currently focusing on documentation and storage. She also serves as an instructor for new contributors at Kubernetes Upstream Training events in Japan.

Yasushi SHOJI is a Linux kernel and embedded systems developer with over 20 years of experience. Founder of Space Cubics, he develops spacecraft using Zephyr RTOS and contributes to open source projects for high-reliability systems.

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.

Yoshiyuki Tabata is a Senior OSS Consultant at Hitachi, Ltd, responsible for IAM and API-related solutions.
As an authentication and authorization expert, he has provided numerous consultations, for example designing and building API/SSO systems in various fields such as finance and public.
As a CNCF Ambassador, he disseminates solutions and know-how for a better and more secure CNCF ecosystem through conference talks and contributions. And he’s a Cloud Native Community Japan organizer and a Cloud Native Security Japan founder.
He’s also a contributor to OSS such as Keycloak and 3scale.

Yuichi Nakamura,Ph.D has been engaged with OSS over 20 years, contributed SELinux, gave presentations in many OSS events such as Linux Security Summit, Embedded Linux Conference and KubeCon. He also launched ecosystem of business and OSS contribution model based on Keycloak in Hitachi,Ltd. He is one of the 1st evangelists of the Linux Foundation Japan and launched CNCF Japan chapter Cloud Native Community Japan (CNCJ) with community colleagues. He is also a board of the Linux Foundation.

Yuichi Kusakabe is the Chief Architect at Honda Motor Co., Ltd. , AGL(Automotive Grade Linux) member and COVESA(Connected Vehicle Systems Alliance) member since 2011 with over twenty years of Automotive and Open Source Software Experience.
Prior to joining Honda Motor he worked for Tier One Supplier
He is created their first Open Source Compliance Office and delivered Linux based IVI system to OEM customers.
Also he is leading self-certification of OpenChain(ISO/IEC 5230) and OSPO at Honda Motor

Zhiqiang Yu is the Chief Open Source Liaison Officer at China Mobile Research. He has been a member of the LF APAC Open Source Evangelist team since 2022 and currently serves as the co-chair of the LF APAC OSPO SIG. Alongside Nadia Jiang and Jiangsheng Li, he launched the first OSPO Summit in 2023. Starting from 2024, Zhiqiang was awarded the title of OSPO Ambassador by the TODO Group.