Andrea Mostosi is a technology enthusiast. Innovation lover since when he was a child, he started his professional job in the early 2000s, and has worked on several projects playing almost every role in the computer science environment. He is currently the CTO at The Fool, a company that tries to make sense of data. During his free time, he likes travelling, running, cooking, biking, reading, observing the sky, and coding.

Toni Verbeiren received his PhD in theoretical physics in 2003. He has worked on models of artificial neural networks, entailing mathematics, statistics, simulations, (lots of) data, and numerical computations. Since then, he has been active in this industry in a range of domains and roles: infrastructure management and deployment, service and IT management, and ICT/business alignment and enterprise architecture. Around 2010, he started picking up his earlier passion, which is now called Data Science. The combination of data and common sense can be a very powerful basis for making decisions and analyzing risk.

Toni is active as owner and consultant at Data Intuitive (http://www.data-intuitive.com/) in all the things related to (big) data science, and its applications to decision and risk management. He is currently involved in ExaScience Life (http://www.exascience.com/), and the Visual Data Analysis Lab (http://vda-lab.be/), concerning scaling up visual analysis of biological and chemical data.

Lijie Xu is now a PhD student at Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research interests focus on distributed systems and large-scale data analysis. He has both academic and industrial experience in Microsoft Research Asia, Alibaba Taobao, and Tencent. As an open source software enthusiast; he has contributed to Apache Spark, and has written a popular technical report named Spark Internals at https://github.com/JerryLead/SparkInternals. He believes that all things are difficult before they are easy.