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Program Committee/

All submissions to our call for papers get reviewed by our program committee in a blind review process. See which experts are on the committee here:

Anshum Gupta

Anshum is an Apache Lucene and Solr committer and Project Management Committee member, and an Apache Software Foundation member. He began working with Lucene approximately 20 years ago and has since been building search platforms on top of Lucene and Solr at various organizations. Currently, he leads the Open Source Search team at Apple.

William Benton

William Benton is passionate about making it easier for machine learning practitioners to benefit from advanced infrastructure and making it possible for organizations to manage machine learning systems. His recent roles have included defining product strategy and professional services offerings related to data science and machine learning, leading teams of data scientists and engineers, and contributing to many open source communities related to data, ML, and distributed systems. Will lives in the midwestern United States with his wife and three children and spends some of his spare time chasing light on bicycles or capturing it with cameras.

Mike McCandless

 
Michael has been building search engines for 25 years now, initially as co-founder of iPhrase Technologies in the Boston, MA, USA area, and then (since 2007) focusing on the open source Apache Lucene Java search engine, which distributed search engines like Apache Solr, OpenSearch, and Elasticsearch build upon. Lucene now powers 100% of Amazon’s e-commerce high-scale search engine after Michael joined in 2017 to help migrate from an in-house C++ engine to Lucene. Michael wrote the 2nd edition of the Lucene in Action book, also writes occasional blog posts at blog.mikemccandless.com, and stays active on the Lucene mailing lists responding to new users, fixing bugs, adding new Lucene features, and gently engaging in the occasional flame war. Beyond search, Michael loves tinkering with smart home gadgets scripted with Python, as well as fun maker space tools like 3D printers, laser cutters and CNC machines. His latest 3D printer is a 5-head Prusa XL which prints gorgeous multi-color prints with little waste. Michael has a Ph.D. (1998) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Computer Science, and lives in Lexington, MA, USA.

Olena Kutsenko

Olena is a Staff Developer Advocate at Confluent and a recognized expert in data streaming and analytics. With two decades of experience in software engineering, she has built mission-critical applications, led high-performing teams, and driven large-scale technology adoption at industry leaders like Nokia, HERE Technologies, AWS, and Aiven. A passionate advocate for real-time data processing and AI-driven applications, Olena empowers developers and organizations to use the power of streaming data. She is an AWS Community Builder, a dedicated mentor, and a volunteer instructor at a nonprofit tech school, helping to shape the next generation of engineers. As an international speaker and thought leader, Olena regularly presents at top global conferences, sharing deep technical insights and hands-on expertise. Whether through her talks, workshops, or content, she is committed to making complex technologies accessible and inspiring innovation in the developer community.

Fabian Hueske

Fabian Hueske is working as a software engineer on streaming things at Snowflake. He is a PMC member of Apache Flink and one of the three original authors of the Stratosphere research system, from which Apache Flink was forked in 2014. Fabian is a co-founder of data Artisans (now Ververica), a Berlin-based startup devoted to fostering Flink. He holds a PhD in computer science from TU Berlin and is the author of “Stream Processing with Apache Flink”.

Kristin Hofstee

Kristin is a Director of Engineering at PVcase, which creates advanced software solutions for utility-scale solar projects. In previous roles, she’s championed strategic initiatives in platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, FinOps, and site reliability engineering. Kristin is passionate about improving the developer experience and fostering a collaborative working environment. Kristin brings a blend of technical expertise and leadership experience, having led a large-scale cloud migration program and taken on various roles throughout her career, from embedded software engineer to project, product, and program manager. She loves a good framework and is a strong believer in empathy and teamwork as keys to success.

Josh Devins

Josh is a Senior Principal Engineer working at Elastic on the intersection of machine learning and search technologies. He brings 20 years of diverse background from engineering and data science to help commercialize and apply modern research to real world problems and use cases. Through data-driven research and development, the team at Elastic is exploring modern search from a practical perspective with a goal to bring speed, scale and relevance into the next generation of search. Josh believes that Open Source plays a crucial role in today’s economy and technology landscape and is eager to participate in the conversation of how Open Source evolves.

Stanimira Vlaeva

Stanimira Vlaeva is a Developer Advocate at MongoDB and a Google Developer Expert for Angular. She is passionate about explaining complex technical topics in an understandable way, live-coding, and contributing to open-source software. Her Twitter DMs are always open!

Marta Paes

Marta is a Product Manager at ClickHouse, focusing on real-time data ingestion. She’s been working with data, big and small, for the last 10 years: first as a Data Engineer, and later in Product roles helping build streaming infrastructure (Apache Flink, Materialize).

Christine Poerschke

Christine is an Apache Lucene and Solr committer and Project Management Committee member, and an Apache Software Foundation member. She’s worked as a software engineer at Bloomberg for more than 19 years, having joined the firm directly after her BSc and PhD. Today, she is part of the company’s News Search Infrastructure team. Christine led the effort to integrate Bloomberg’s multi-author Learning-to-Rank plug-in into Apache Solr. She lives in London and is a spare-time beekeeper, albeit temporarily without her own bees.

Atita Arora

Atita Arora is an open-source contributor and PMC at Apache OpenNLP, with a long-standing career dedicated to advancing search, information retrieval systems, and AI. She focuses on advancing search technologies that connect research to meaningful, real-world applications. A regular speaker at international conferences, she also co-leads Women in Search, advocating for diversity and inclusion across the tech community. Atita is an independent AI and Search consultant, advancing practical innovation in modern search systems, driven by the belief that innovation delivers its greatest value when shared and applied.

Isabel Zimmermann

Isabel is a Senior Software Engineer at Posit, PBC, where she works on the Python experience inside the Positron IDE. She has served as an editor, reviewer, and Editor-in-Chief emeritus for the pyOpenSci community where she has helped perform and facilitate peer reviews of scientific Python packages. Her passion is building, supporting, and sharing Python tools to make data science more delightful. Outside of coding, she spends a lot of time reading and rebinding books.

Pablo Francisco
Pérez Hidalgo

Pablo is a software engineer interested in the role of information technology in all aspects of our universe. His professional focus over more than ten years has been on moving and persisting data sets that stubbornly refuse to fit on a single computer. This has led him to contribute to various open source projects in the data acquisition and storage ecosystem, including ZooKeeper, Beats, Cats, and Logstash. He currently serves as Tech Lead of the Foundation team for Hosted Cloud at Elastic. Beyond technology and books, he shares his passion for nature and outdoor sports with his wife and two daughters.

Danica Fine

Danica began her career as a software engineer in financial services and pivoted to developer relations, where she focussed primarily on open source streaming and lakehouse technologies. She now leads the open source advocacy efforts at Snowflake. She can be found on X (Bluesky and Mastodon), talking about tech, plants, and baking @TheDanicaFine.
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