Ramzi Alqrainy is one of the most well-recognized experts in the Middle East in the fields of artificial intelligence and information retrieval. He's an active researcher and technology blogger who specializes in information retrieval.
Ramzi is currently resolving complex search issues in and around the Lucene/Solr ecosystem at Lucidworks. He also manages the search and reporting functions at OpenSooq, where he capitalizes on the solid experience he's gained in open source technologies to scale up the search engine and supportive systems there.
His experience in Solr, ElasticSearch, Mahout, and the Hadoop stack have contributed directly to business growth through their implementation. He also did projects that helped key people at OpenSooq slice and dice information easily through dashboards and data visualization solutions.
Besides the development of more than eight full-stack search engines, Ramzi was also able to solve many complicated challenges that dealt with agglutination and stemming in the Arabic language.
He holds a master's degree in computer science, was among the top 1 percent in his class, and was part of the honor roll.
Ramzi can be reached at http://ramzialqrainy.com. His LinkedIn profile can be found at http://www.linkedin.com/in/ramzialqrainy. You can reach him through his e-mail address, which is <[email protected]>.
Walt Stoneburner is a software architect and engineer with over 30 years of commercial application development and consulting experience. He holds a degree in computer science and statistics and is currently the CTO for Emperitas Services Group (http://emperitas.com/), where he designs predictive analytical and modeling software tools for statisticians, economists, and customers. Emperitas shows you where to spend your marketing dollars most effectively, how to target messages to specific demographics, and how to quantify the hidden decision-making process behind customer psychology and buying habits.
He has also been heavily involved in quality assurance, configuration management, and security. His interests include programming language designs, collaborative and multiuser applications, big data, knowledge management, mobile applications, data visualization, and even ASCII art.
Self-described as a closet geek, Walt also evaluates software products and consumer electronics, draws comics (NapkinComics.com), runs a freelance photography studio that specializes in portraits (CharismaticMoments.com), writes humor pieces, performs sleight of hand, enjoys game mechanic design, and can occasionally be found on ham radio or tinkering with gadgets.
Walt may be reached directly via e-mail at <[email protected]> or <[email protected]>.
He publishes a tech and humor blog called the Walt-O-Matic at http://www.wwco.com/~wls/blog/ and is pretty active on social media sites, especially the experimental ones.
Some more of his book reviews and contributions include:
Anti-Patterns and Patterns in Software Configuration Management by William J. Brown, Hays W. McCormick, and Scott W. Thomas, published by Wiley
Exploiting Software: How to Break Code by Greg Hoglund, published by Addison-Wesley Professional
Ruby on Rails Web Mashup Projects by Chang Sau Sheong, published by Packt Publishing
Building Dynamic Web 2.0 Websites with Ruby on Rails by A P Rajshekhar, published by Packt Publishing
Instant Sinatra Starter by Joe Yates published by Packt Publishing
C++ Multithreading Cookbook by Miloš Ljumović, published by Packt Publishing
Learning Selenium Testing Tools with Python by Unmesh Gundecha, published by Packt Publishing
Trapped in Whittier (A Trent Walker Thriller Book 1) by Michael W. Layne, published by Amazon Digital South Asia Services, Inc
South Mouth: Hillbilly Wisdom, Redneck Observations & Good Ol' Boy Logic by Cooter Brown and Walt Stoneburner, published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Ning Sun is a software engineer currently working for LeanCloud, a Chinese start-up, which provides a one-stop Backend-as-a-Service for mobile apps. Being a start-up engineer, he has to come up with solutions for various kinds of problems and play different roles. In spite of this, he has always been an enthusiast of open source technology. He has contributed to several open source projects and learned a lot from them.
Ning worked on Delicious.com in 2013, which was one of the most important websites in the Web 2.0 era. The search function of Delicious is powered by Solr Cluster and it might be one of the largest-ever deployments of Solr.
He was a reviewer for another Solr book, called Apache Solr Cookbook, published by Packt Publishing.
You can always find Ning at https://github.com/sunng87 and on Twitter at @Sunng.
Ruben Teijeiro is an active contributor to the Drupal community, a speaker at conferences around Europe, and a mentor in code sprints, where he helps initiate people to contribute to an open source project, such as Drupal. He defines himself as a Drupal Hero.
After 2 years of working for Ericsson in Sweden, he has been employed by Tieto, where he combines Drupal with different technologies to create complex software solutions.
He has loved different kinds of technologies since he started to program in QBasic with his first MSX computer when he was about 10. You can find more about him on his drupal.org profile (http://dgo.to/@rteijeiro) and his personal blog (http://drewpull.com).