Juan Cortez is a first-generation college student from El Paso, Texas, majoring in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. During his time in college, Juan dedicated most of his time providing services to various organizations, including the Equal Opportunity in Engineering Program, the University of Texas Longhorn Band, and Engineering Student Life. Outside of school, Juan had the distinct pleasure of interning at five different companies: Intel, Texas Instruments, Cirrus Logic, Toshiba, and IBM. In the summer of 2013, Juan interned at Texas Instruments and worked directly under the BeagleBone Black hardware architect Gerald Coley. During his time at Texas Instruments, he developed tutorials on how to program on the BeagleBone and entered their Intern Design Contest to showcase the skills that he has acquired during his internship. He is currently a software engineering intern at IBM and is working with big data by utilizing Apache Spark, which is a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing. Apart from work, Juan loves to volunteer and he mentors young students by exposing them to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) through fun projects and experiments.
Chris Desjardins is an embedded systems software engineer with 15 years of experience. His main focus throughout his career has been on real-time systems and multiprocessing. He has written code for a wide range of systems from small highly-parallel low power DSPs to huge real-time distributed processing systems, and everything in between. He currently loves living and working in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Look him up on LinkedIn at http://nl.linkedin.com/in/chrisdesjardins/
Michael Hirsch's research includes geospace remote sensing via tomography of the aurora. He has deployed autonomous outdoor climate-controlled one meter cubes with single photon sensitive cameras to rural Alaska in order to capture the faintest and fastest moving aurora that is invisible to the naked eye. He developed automatic OpenCV-based algorithms, reducing the data stream from terabytes/day to megabytes/day.
Michael founded SciVision, Inc. with applications including machine vision, embedded remote sensing systems, and wearable and batteryless sensors.
Pavel Mamontov is a Russian-born designer and web developer residing in New York City. He holds a BS degree in digital media from Drexel University and an MFA degree in design and technology from Parsons School of Design. He is currently employed at Metropolitan College of New York as an in-house web developer. In his free time, he loves to tinker with open source and open hardware technology, draw, and occasionally volunteer for various labor organizations.