Otis Gospodnetić

Founder, Sematext

Otis Gospodnetić is a coauthor of Lucene in Action (1st and 2nd edition). He has been involved with Lucene since 2000 and Solr since 2006. He is also a member of Nutch, and Mahout development teams, as well as Lucene Project Management Committee. Otis is an Apache Software Foundation member and the founder of Sematext, a software development and consulting company focused on Search & Analytics using Lucene, Solr, Nutch, Hadoop, HBase, Flume, Mahout, and other open-source technologies to serve customers world-wide.

Speaking Topic: Search Analytics: What? Why? How? and Panel Discussion: Open Source Search in Government

Tutorial instructor: Solr Cluster Performance Tuning & Monitoring (June 14, 2011)

David Grossman

Associate Professor of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology

Dr. Grossman received his B.Sc. in Computer Science (1985) from Clemson University, his M.Sc. in Computer Science from American University (1988), and his Ph.D. from George Mason University (1995). Dr. Grossman is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Prior to joining IIT, Dr. Grossman was the project manager of a large federal data warehouse project. Since coming to IIT in 1999, Dr. Grossman has developed and taught new courses on Information Retrieval, Data Mining, and Information Security. He is the Director of the IIT Information Retrieval Lab. Dr. Grossman has published over 75 research papers and he is the co-author of Infomation Retrieval: Algorithms and Hueristics. Must of his work has focused on integrating structured and unstructured data.

Speaking Topic: Panel Discussion: Open Source Search in Government

Erik Hatcher

Lucid Imagination

Erik Hatcher is co-author of Lucene in Action. He presented on Apache Solr at the Basis Technology Government Conference in 2009, and has taught Solr classes to several large organizations and conference training audiences, and has spoken to industry events around the world. He is a Lucene and Solr committer.

Speaking Topic: What’s New in Solr? and Panel Discussion: Open Source Search in Government

Tutorial instructor: Solr Application Development Workshop (June 13-14, 2011)

Steve Kearns

Product Manager, Basis Technology Corp.

Steve Kearns was brought on board Basis Technology in August 2008 to be the product manager of Rosette Name Translator and Rosette Name Indexer and is now the product manager for the entire Rosette platform. Steve is also the subject matter expert for the international compliance market within Basis. Prior to Basis, Steve worked at BBN Technologies where he was a project and team lead for the Broadcast and Web Monitoring Systems, which capture and extract Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) from live television and Internet news websites. He has experience in information visualization, distributed systems architecture and received his MS in information technology and BS in computer information systems from Bentley College.

Speaking Topic: Keynote: Building an OSINT Analysis Platform with Open Source Tools

Christian Moen

Founder & CEO, Atilika Inc.

Christian founded Atilika in October 2009 to help Japanese companies apply advanced technologies to their business as an innovation partner. Atilika is proficient in the fields of search and recommendations, computational linguistics and data mining, and has experience applying these technologies to business problems within news media, publishing, advertisement, e-commerce and government..

Prior to starting Atilika, Christian spent 10 years at FAST (now Microsoft). In FAST R&D headquarters in Oslo, Christian led product development teams responsible for developing the FAST ESP (Enterprise Search Platform) product infrastructure. In 2005, he relocated to the Tokyo branch office and served in management and architecture roles, helping to establish FAST’s solid position in the Japanese search market.

Christian holds an M.S. in computer science from the University of Oslo, Norway.

Speaking Topic: Big Data Open Source Data Analytics and Panel Discussion: Open Source Search in Government

Paul Nelson

Chief Architect, Search Technologies

Paul Nelson has been working with Solr for several years now and has been involved in dozens of Solr architectures and implementations for a wide range of customers, including Comcast, Aspermont, BNA, Worldcheck, ProQuest, the US GPO, Jobsite, Standard and Poors, OLRC, Travidia, and Automated Intelligence. He has developed plug-ins and support systems for Solr and Lucene at every level, including query operators, parsers, request handlers, search components, hit collectors, and data processing frameworks.

Speaking Topic: Migrating Search to Solr for the Office of the Law Revision Council and Panel Discussion: Open Source Search in Government

David Smiley

Senior Software Developer, MITRE

Born to code, David Smiley is a senior software developer, book author, and instructor. He has 12 years of experience in the defense industry at MITRE, using Java and various web technologies. David is the principal author of “Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server”, the first book on Solr, published by PACKT in 2009. He also developed and taught a two-day course on Solr for MITRE. David is currently the search architect for a large-scale Solr project in which he has implemented spatial search, wildcard ngram query parsing, searching multiple multi-valued fields at coordinated positions, part-of-speech search using Lucene payloads, and other things. David consults as a Solr expert on numerous projects for MITRE and its sponsors as a Solr expert. David He has contributed various patches and bug fixes to Solr. Prior to his Solr work, David has used Lucene as far back as 2000, and has used Endeca recently, too.

Speaking Topic: Geospatial Search Using Geohash Prefixes

Scott Stults

Co-Founder, Open Source Connections

Scott Stults has led implementation teams on a variety of Department of Defense, UK Ministry of Defence, and commercial projects where Search search and Security security were equally crucial aspects of success. He has implemented MLS Multi-Level Security in a Lucene-based environment and is working with the Solr community to develop best practices for securing Solr. As a co-founder of OpenSource Connections, which has been working with Solr since 2007, Scott leads the Solr Security Practice for the company.

Speaking Topic: Multi-Level Security with Solr: Searching Documents at Various Classifications

Ching-hsien Wang

Ching-hsien Wang, Manager, Library and Archives System Support Branch Office of Chief Information Officer Smithsonian Institution

Ms. Wang is also the manager for the Smithsonian Enterprise Digital Asset Network project responsible for system design, software development, data analysis, and unit coordination from across the Smithsonian.  Ms. Wang is a leading expert in information management and information integration for Library, archives and museum collections. Ms. Wang received her Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science and Library Science from University of Maryland.  She worked as a software engineer for a major library software company before joining the Smithsonian Institution.

Speaking Topic: Steps toward Open Government: A Discovery Center for Library, Archives and Museum Object Collections Made with Solr