Thorsten Meinl is currently a Senior Software Developer at KNIME.com in Zurich. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Konstanz. He has been working on KNIME for over seven years. His main responsibilities are quality assurance, testing, and the continuous integration infrastructure, as well as managing the KNIME Community Contributions. Besides this, he is also interested in parallel computing and cheminformatics.

Takeshi Nakano is a Senior Research Engineer working for Recruit Technologies Co., Ltd. and leads the Advanced Technology Lab in Japan. He holds a Master's degree from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Computer Science. He is the lead author of Hadoop Hacks, a book from O'Reilly Japan, and also the author of Getting Started with Apache Solr, a book from Gijutsu­Hyohron in Japan. He loves to find inspiration for his hobbies (reading, scuba diving, and others).