Yuri Shkuro is a software engineer at Uber Technologies, working on distributed tracing, observability, reliability, and performance. He is the technical lead for Uber's tracing team. Before Uber, Yuri spent 15 years on Wall Street, building trading and risk management systems for derivatives at top investment banks, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley.

Yuri's open source credentials include being a co-founder of the OpenTracing project, and the creator and the tech lead of Jaeger, a distributed tracing platform developed at Uber. Both projects are incubating at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Yuri serves as an invited expert on the W3C Distributed Tracing working group.

Dr. Yuri Shkuro holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Maryland, College Park, and a Master's degree in Computer Engineering from MEPhI (Moscow Engineering & Physics Institute), one of Russia's top three universities. He is the author of many academic papers in the area of machine learning and neural networks; his papers have been cited in over 130 other publications.

Outside of his academic and professional career, Yuri helped edit and produce several animated shorts directed by Lev Polyakov, including Only Love (2008), which screened at over 30 film festivals and won several awards, Piper the Goat and the Peace Pipe (2005), a winner at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, and others.

Pavol Loffay is a software engineer at Red Hat working on Observability tools for microservice architectures. He is an active maintainer of the Jaeger and OpenTracing projects. He is also a member of the OpenTracing Specification Council (OTSC) and a lead for the MicroProfile OpenTracing specification. In his free time, Pavol likes to travel and he is a passionate skier and rock climber.

Lev Polyakov is an award winning independent animation director and conceptual artist, whose films were featured on WNET 13, Channel Frederator, and ShortsHD.

Lev Polyakov has been active in the animation world since 2004, starting as an intern for Signe Baumane, one of New York's most prominent independent animators, and proceeding to write and direct his own animated films. His first short, Piper the Goat and the Peace Pipe, won the first place at the 2005 Ottawa Animation Festival. For his next film, Morning, Day, Evening, Night… and Morning Again, Lev was awarded a grant and an honorary membership from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. During his junior year at School of Visual Arts, Lev directed and produced Only Love, a 15-minute animated short that premiered at the prestigious Woodstock Film Festival, and has been shown at more than 30 film festivals around the world, winning several first place awards.

Lev has done visually appealing, character-driven commercial work such as storyboarding, character design, and animation for an iPad movie-book Peter and the Wolf in Hollywood, produced by Giants Are Small in partnership with Universal Music; and for the virtual reality studio, The Glimpse Group.

Lev is currently the Chair of the Art and Technology Committee at the National Arts Club in New York City.

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