Avkash Chauhan is currently leading a team of engineers at a start-up based in San Francisco, where his team is building a big data monitoring platform using machine learning and new age methods to improve business continuity and gain maximum advantage from the platform itself. He is the founder and principal of Big Data Perspective, with a vision to make the Hadoop platform accessible to mainstream enterprises by simplifying its adoption, customization, management, and support. Before Big Data Perspective, he worked at Platfora Inc., building big data analytics software running natively on Hadoop. Previously, he worked for 8 years at Microsoft, building cloud and big data products and providing assistance to enterprise partners worldwide. Avkash has over 15 years of software development experience in cloud and big data disciplines. He is a programmer at heart in full-stack discipline and has the business acumen to work with enterprises, meeting their needs. He is passionate about technology and enjoys sharing his knowledge with others through various social media. He has also written a few books on big data discipline and is very active in the tech social space. He is an accomplished author, blogger, technical speaker, and he loves the outdoors.

Vladimir Iakovlev is a software developer. Most of the time, he develops web applications using Python, Clojure, and JavaScript. He's the owner of a few semi-popular open source projects. He was a speaker at a few Python-related conferences.

In his free time, Vladimir likes to play with electronic devices, such as Arduino and PyBoard, and image-processing devices, such as Leap Motion. He has tried to build some robots. He has already built a robotic arm.

Currently, Vladimir works at Upwork, where he develops web applications, mostly with Python.

Blagoj Petrushev is a software engineer and consultant based in Skopje, Macedonia. His work revolves mainly around backends, datastores, and network applications. Among his interests are machine learning, NLP, data analysis, modeling and databases, and distributed programming.

Marek Suppa has been playing with (kind of) smart machines for the past few years, which are pretentiously called robots in some parts of the world. Right now, he leads a robotic football team, building tools to help others start with robots and setting off on a new venture to see how far the current technology will let us move toward the goal of creating a robot as it was first defined.