Biography: Chris Swan

Chris Swan is CTO at CohesiveFT, a cloud networking company founded in 2006 that he joined in early 2013. He was previously at UBS where he held a number of CTO roles and represented the bank as a Director on the Steering Committee of the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA). Before joining UBS he was CTO at a London based technology investment banking boutique CapitalSCF. Chris previously held various senior R&D, architecture and engineering positions at Credit Suisse, which included networks, security, data centre automation and introduction of new application platforms. Prior to the world of financial services Chris was a Combat Systems Engineering Officer in the Royal Navy. He has an MBA from OUBS and a BEng in Electronics Engineering from the University of York.

Chris is a keen maker and hacker taking an active role in the London and Brighton communities for Open Source Hardware, Raspberry Pi and the Internet of Things. He is also an advisor to a number of London based tech and fintech startups, and track host for Privacy & Security and Making the Internet of Things.

Twitter: @cpswan
Track Host of "Privacy & Security - Rebuilding Trust" and "Making the Internet of Things"

Biography: Dio Synodinos

Dio Synodinos is the coauthor of "Pro HTML5 and CSS3 Design Patterns" by Apress and "The Essential Guide to HTML5 and CSS3 Web Design" by friendsofED. He's also a member of the W3C HTML Working Group, Lead Editor for HTML5/JavaScript at InfoQ, and the Research Platform Lead at C4Media. Going back and forth between server-side programming and UI design for more than a decade, he has been involved in diverse software projects and has contributed to different technical publications.

Twitter: @synodinos
Track Host of "Bleeding Edge HTML5 & JavaScript - Taking the Web Platform to the Next Level"

Biography: Katherine Kirk

Now an independent consultant and researcher, Katherine has solid experience contracting and freelancing in a variety of roles within the IT and Media industries: from blue chip investment banking to media conglomerates. Most recently she spent time as an Agile Coach at Rally after a period consulting as Delivery Improvement Specialist, Project Manager and Agile Coach at the BBC in the Future Media division in London. Katherine often finds herself specifically tasked with working with really "troubled" projects, where simplistic solutions don't quite cut it.

She is an active participant of a community of Lean and Agile practitioners in Europe who explore and challenge the status quo through experimenting and collaborating and is particularly interested in contextually driven edge-cases and the cultural interaction between hierarchical management and Agile teams. She supports this interest by studying an MSc in Software Engineering at University of Oxford, specializing in Process Improvement, Managing Quality and Risk, and Software Systems Security. Katherine also holds a first class BSc (Hons) Multimedia Computing.

Track Host of "It's about the People, Stupid"

Biography: Stefan Tilkov

Stefan Tikov is a decent-frequency blogger, tweets at @stilkov and is a frequent speaker at conferences in Germany and abroad. He is the author of the book “REST und HTTP”. Stefan also used to be lead SOA editor on InfoQ.

Stefan has been involved in the design of large-scale, distributed systems for almost two decades, using a variety of technologies and tools ranging from C++ and CORBA over J2EE/Java EE and Web Services to REST and Ruby on Rails.

Co-founder and principal consultant at innoQ, Stefan spends his time alternating between advising customers on new technologies and taking the blame from his co-workers for doing so.

Track Host of "Lightweight Integration with Web Technologies"

Biography: Trisha Gee

Trisha is a developer at MongoDB. She has expertise in Java high performance systems, is passionate about enabling developer productivity, and has a wide breadth of industry experience from the 12 years she's been a professional developer. Trisha is a leader in the London Java Community, and involved in the Graduate Development Community, she believes we shouldn't all have to make the same mistakes again and again.

Twitter: @trisha_gee
Track Host of "Not Only Java"

Biography: Werner Schuster

Werner Schuster sometimes writes software and sometimes writes about software. He focuses on languages, VMs, compilers, and recently more and more on HTML5/Javascript.

Twitter: @murphee
Track Host of "Reactive Programming - Tackling the Async Challenge"