Grigor Aslanyan is a theoretical cosmologist with a strong focus on computational methods for data analysis. He has a PhD in physics from the University of California, San Diego, and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Grigor was born and raised in Armenia. He obtained both bachelor's and master's degrees in physics and computer science at Yerevan State University, before moving to California for his PhD studies. He has also worked as a software engineer for three years at Ponté Solutions (a company later acquired by Mentor Graphics).
Grigor's research focuses on studying the theory of the very early universe by using experimental data from cosmic microwave background radiation and galaxy surveys. His research requires the development and implementation of complex numerical tools used to analyze the data on large computational clusters, with the ultimate goal of learning about the theory of the early universe. Grigor's current research is focused on applying advanced data science and machine learning techniques to improve data analysis methods in cosmology, making it possible to analyze the large amounts of data expected from the current and future generation experiments.
Grigor has implemented the publicly available numerical library Cosmo++ that includes general mathematical and statistical tools for data analysis as well as cosmology-specific packages. The library is written in C++ and is publicly available at http://cosmopp.com.
Mohamed Fawzy is an open source geek who adores working with servers. He has been working with Linux since 2013—working and delivering training in Linux system engineering. He has many contributions in open source communities, especially in Egypt where he is a Fedora project contributor and ambassador. He currently lives in Egypt and studies in Mansoura University.
John Kennedy has worked with UNIX and Linux since 1998. He has been shell scripting since 2001. His preferred language is BASH, although he has dabbled in Python.
He has been reviewing and tech-editing books in his spare time since 2001 and has about 20 books under his belt. He believes the best part of reviewing is that he learns something from every book he works on.
John was born in the US and grew up in Northern Virginia. He spent some time in the US Air Force and has lived in Germany and the United Kingdom. He is married to Michele and has two children, Denise and Kieran. He currently lives in Northern Virginia.