Supun Kamburugamuve has a PhD in computer science from Indiana University – Bloomington. For his thesis, he researched improving the performance of data-intensive applications with Professor Geoffrey C. Fox. Supun created Twister2 and co-created Cylon projects that are aimed at high-performance data-intensive applications. His research work is published in recognized conferences and journals. Supun is an elected member of the Apache Software Foundation and has contributed to many open source projects including Apache Web Services projects and Apache Heron. Before joining Indiana University, Supun worked on middleware systems and was a key member of the WSO2 ESB project, which is a widely used open source enterprise integration solution. Supun has presented his ideas and findings at research conferences and technical conferences including Strata NY, Big Data Conference, and ApacheCon.

Saliya Ekanayake is a senior software engineer at Microsoft. He is part of the Cloud Accelerated Systems & Technologies (CAST) group that is developing high-performance machine learning systems. Before joining Microsoft, Saliya was a postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley Lab, specializing in improving the performance of large-scale machine learning systems. He holds a PhD in computer science from Indiana University – Bloomington, where his research contributed to the development of SPIDAL, a scalable, parallel, and interoperable data analytics library that outperformed existing big data systems on several machine learning applications. After his PhD, Saliya also worked on designing large-scale graph analytics systems and algorithms at Virginia Tech. His work has been published in recognized conferences and journals, with more than 20 publications to his name. Saliya is also an Apache committer for the Apache Synapse project.