Masato Hagiwara works as a lead scientist at the Rakuten Institute of Technology, New York. He received his PhD in Information Science from Nagoya University in 2009. Before joining Rakuten, he worked at Google and Microsoft Research as an intern, and at Baidu, Japan as a full-time R&D engineer, focusing on Japanese language processing related to search engines. His research interests include Japanese and Chinese word segmentation, knowledge acquisition, transliteration, and language education. He received several awards from Japanese domestic conferences for his work on knowledge acquisition and transliteration. He extensively uses Clojure for his research projects.

Bart Kastermans is an academician turned software developer. He has worked in set and computability theory, before giving in to his long-standing interest in information technology. Currently, he is working as a data scientist at AdGoji, a mobile marketing start-up in Amsterdam.

Nicholas Quirk has been a lifelong resident of Massachusetts. He currently works as one of the few in-house programmers for a billion-dollar manufacturing company. Working there for only three years, he was the sole designer and programmer responsible for the rewriting of some legacy applications, most notably, the production scheduling and order entry software. He has a continuous drive for self improvement. His interests tend to sit in two realms; arts and technology, which he likes to meld when the opportunity presents itself. His art interests include watercolors, drawing (traditional and digital), digital photography, learning languages, and playing the piano. His technical interests include learning about functional programming (Clojure, Haskell, or just about any LISP), language design, compilers, virtual machines, and game design. He also has an unending curiosity in typography, sequential art, text editor color schemes, and knowing how to trick the brain into learning.

You can find more information about him at www.nicholas-quirk.com.

Andrew Stine is a software developer from Northern Virginia. He loves coding and has used a wider variety of technologies than he would care to recall. His favorite language is Clojure.