Alaa Abed is a die-hard open source philosophy advocate. In 1995, after having his Masters degree in automation, he started his career in software engineering. His early projects involved writing assembly language and C/C++ device drivers, TCP/IP stack implementation, and Unix terminal emulation tools.

His passion with Java started in 1998 when he designed and implemented a content management system for mobile content syndication. Since then, he has been working with a diverse set of clients across various industries such as financial, energy, health, and many ISVs.

For the past several years he enjoyed designing Java frameworks for ORM, MVC-based presentation, analytics and reporting and enabling rapid development for rich web applications.

He currently is a Senior Architect working on enterprise integration, multichannel delivery, and business intelligence solutions.

Mario Fusco is a senior software engineer at Red Hat working at the development of the core of Drools, the JBoss rule engine. He has huge experience as a Java developer, having been involved in (and often leading) many enterprise-level projects in several industries ranging from media companies to the financial sector. Among his interests, there are also functional programming and domain-specific languages. By leveraging these two passions, he also created the open source library lambdaj with the purposes of providing an internal Java DSL for manipulating collections and allowing a bit of functional programming in Java.