Committed Speakers

Director of Data Science and Founder at Myrrix Ltd. Sean Owen is a US-born software engineer by training who, having once worked for Google, came to London to work for a venture capital firm. As a hobby, Sean would work on a number of open source software development projects. One of these was Apache Mahout, whose aim was to use Hadoop as a platform for machine learning – the use of algorithms to automatically infer patterns from data.

Co-founder of Hortonworks. Alan is an original member of the engineering team that took Pig from Yahoo! Labs to a successful Apache open source project. Alan also designed HCatalog and guided its adoption as an Apache Incubator project. Lead for Pig, Hive, and Hcatalog. Author of Programming Pig, a book from O’Reilly Press.

Felipe Hoffa joined Google in 2011 as a Software Engineer. As a member of the Google Cloud Platform team, he works with external developers to build applications on Google's big data platforms.

Julie Steele is a Content Editor for Strata at O’Reilly Media. She is co-author of Beautiful Visualization and Designing Data Visualizations. As a book editor and a generalist with a literature and design background, she finds beauty in exploring and comparing various complex systems, and thinks in metaphors. She is always thrilled to find patterns across traditional silos, and to connect people who are working on similar problems in seemingly unrelated areas. She is particularly drawn to the visual medium as a way to understand and transmit information.

Carlos J. Gil Bellosta is a freelance data scientist and R enthusiast based in Madrid. He studied mathematics and statistics at U. of Zaragoza and Washington University in St. Louis. He founded DatAnalytics in 2005 and has been providing statistical insights in data, big and small, ever since. An active member of the R community, he has developed a number of packages, including the increasingly popular rPython or pxR and has served as president of the association of R users in Spain (Comunidad R Hispano) since its foundation in 2011.

Adam Hattrell has provided support for Database and Java related products for more than 14 years. He was the first Datastax EMEA support engineer, moving from Splunk where he was responsible for supporting their Enterprise level customers. At Datastax he provides support for customers, large and small, running Cassandra, Solr and Hadoop.

Luca is the Director of Business Development at MongoDB, where he's responsible for building the ecosystem in Europe, The Middle East and Africa. Prior to MongoDB, Luca worked at Oracle, where he led the MySQL Sales Consulting team in EMEA. Before MySQL, he ran the Database and Business Intelligence practice and then coordinated the Business Development and Strategy team for a Systems Integrator. Luca has a BA in Business and Marketing.

Engineering Manager for OpenStack at Red Hat. GNU developer. Former Solaris Technical Lead at Sun Microsystems, and founder of the Cherokee project.

Experienced marketing professional with 7 years of experience from different markets, mostly in Marketing, CRM, Product and Segment Management. Strong and results driven leader with proven ability to deliver, as well as build and engage highly motivated teams. Maximizing the value of the customer base through development of world class CLM program and driving the change in the organization from volume to value focus using customer insight and taking different anti churn, cross and up sell actions across all segments and products (mobile and fixed). Responsible for business transformation through establishment of new processes and flexible and goal oriented organization that is able to execute.

Iván de Prado is CEO of Datasalt, a company offering Big Data consulting and which is building innovative open-source products around the Hadoop eco-system such as Pangool or Splout SQL. Iván has worked on several start-ups such as Strands and Enormo in a wide variety of roles, posing several challenges and therefore gaining broad experience in the Big Data space. He has co-authored a paper on extending MapReduce which was published at the ICDM2012. He also is Director of the Executive Program of Big Data in U-tad. Splout SQL. Iván has worked on several start-ups such as Strands and Enormo in a wide variety of roles, posing several challenges and therefore gaining broad experience in the Big Data space. He has co-authored a paper on extending MapReduce which was published at the ICDM2012.

Alvaro Agea joined Stratio as a Big Data Architect. As a member of the Big Data team, he works with other teams to define deployment and architure in big data systems.

I came from a far away land to pursuit happiness and bring knowledge, friendship and love.

César de Pablo is a software developer specialized in Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval. He works at Daedalus on Social TV and Second Screen applications as well as Textalytics API. He holds a MSc (eq) in Telecommunication Engineering from UPM and a PhD in Computer Science from UC3M. He has more than 10 years experience building intelligent software systems and data-centric products that made use of semantic technologies.

Rubén Casado received the B.Sc. degree in Computer Science in 2005, the M.Sc. in Computing in 2008 and the PhD in Software Systems in 2013 from University of Oviedo, Spain. He has worked as Assistant Professor at University of Oviedo, where he is currently member of the Software Engineering Research Group. He has also collaborated as visiting researcher with Oxford Brook University (Oxford, UK) in the design of distributed data management solutions, and in the LORIA/INRIA team (Nancy, France) for the design of innovative verification and validation approaches in software quality.He has been involved in many research projects, including both national and international scope. Currently he is the responsible of Big Data research program at Treelogic company. His research interests include Big Data, Distributed Data Management, Software Testing and Cloud and Services based systems.

Studied Computer Science in Valencia (Spain), then a masters degree in Software Engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. Certified as Hadoop Developer and HBase Specialist. He has been working in IT for over 14 years now. For the last 8 years, he has been working as a Technical Architect in projects for international financial institutions at GFT, a consultancy company. Esteban has been involved in GFT's internal innovation research into Big Data technologies since 2011.

Ignacio obtained a Bachelor's degree in Physics from Yale University in 1995. After some time spent working in the Science Policy field, he moved to IT consulting at IBM Global Services in 1999. Since joining GFT he has focused on designing and building IT solutions for financial institutions on the JEE and .NET platforms . Ignacio has been leading GFT's internal innovation research into Big Data technologies since 2011.

Javier is CEO and co-founder of Vizzuality. Over the past 10 years has been working on the field of biodiversity Informatics. First on the academia side, working at different research institutions, and later from the private side. During this time he gained strong experience in the social and technical aspects of data sharing while mobilizing vast amounts of Biodiversity on Internet. He is a recognized expert on biodiversity standards, and is well-known on the geospatial community, specially on Open Source. He is frequently invited speaker on topics including biodiversity, data visualization, conservation, citizen science, open data and web GIS. Javier has a strong interest in the distribution and conservartion of species on Earth and how we can help to conserve them through the use of technology and collaboration over Internet. Javier studied Agriculture Enginner in the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and the Freie Universität Berlin. He is professor at the Master on Global Environmental Change at the IE University on Data Analysis and Data Visualization.

Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez is the co-head of the global Big Data initiative in BBVA. He is responsible for the data platform and several verticals within the space, coordinating business requirements and business models with the technical aspects. He is a Telecommunications Engineer and M.Sc. in Signal Processing, and has worked as a researcher at Nokia, software developer and project manager at two spanish startups and has been with BBVA in its innovation department for over 5 years now.

Marisol is the project Manager of Stockbuzz.es and BBVABetatesters.com. For the last 7 years she has been in charge for several innovation projects for Human Resources, Supply Chain, ATMs, Social Media and Open Innovation. She's Industrial Engineer from Universidad Panamericana (Mexico) and Executive MBA from IESE Business School.

He is Associate Professor at the University Carlos III and technical director at the Institute of Knowledge Engineering, where he developed eViral Project, interactive marketing system for measurement, analysis, prediction and comprehensive monitoring and real-time message propagation viral marketing through Webmail, Facebook or Twitter. Degree and PhD in Physics.

Oscar Méndez is co-founder and CEO of Paradigma Tecnólogico and Stratio. Paradigma is an Internet solutions company with clients, mostly IBEX 35 companies, in Spain and in 14 other countries. Stratio is a spin-off of Paradigma using the best of breed of Big Data technologies to cater for clients world-wide. Stratio is based in Palo Alto, CA.

Santiago Lorente has a Degree in Economics and PECOM from ESIC, he has developed the last 15 years of his career in ICT sector companies, including BMC Software, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, holding various positions in the areas of sales, marketing, business development and operations. Currently he works as Principal Platform Specialist in Microsoft working with Big Data and Business Analytic technologies.

Abraham is Coordinator of the Biomedical Engineering Degree and Associate Professor at Universidad CEU San Pablo. He supports the largest community of Java developers in Spanish-speaking countries since 2002 and his contribution was critical to the success of the 1st edition of Big Data Spain

When not busy with Big Data Spain, Ruben deals with online marketing at Paradigma Tecnológico, Stratio and their many clients.