Thomas W. Dinsmore is an independent consultant, offering product advisory services to analytic software vendors. To this role, he brings 30 years of experience, delivering analytics solutions to enterprises around the world. He uniquely combines hands-on analytics experience with the ability to lead analytic projects and interpret results.

Thomas' previous services include roles with SAS, IBM, The Boston Consulting Group, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Oliver Wyman.

Thomas coauthored Modern Analytics Methodologies and Advanced Analytics Methodologies, published in 2014 by Pearson FT Press, and is under contract for a forthcoming book on business analytics from Apress. He publishes The Big Analytics Blog at www.thomaswdinsmore.com.

Cheng Lian is a Chinese software engineer and Apache Spark committer from Databricks. His major technical interests include big data analytics, distributed systems, and functional programming languages.

Cheng is also the translator of the Chinese edition of Erlang and OTP in Action and Concurrent Programming in Erlang (Part I).

Amir Sedighi is an experienced software engineer, a keen learner, and a creative problem solver. His experience spans a wide range of software development areas, including cross-platform development, big data processing and data streaming, information retrieval, and machine learning. He is a big data lecturer and expert, working in Iran. He holds a bachelor's and master's degree in software engineering. Amir is currently the CEO of Rayanesh Dadegan Ekbatan, the company he cofounded in 2013 after several years of designing and implementing distributed big data and data streaming solutions for private sector companies.