Kumar Abhishek is pursuing his integrated bachelor's and master's degree in electronics and electrical communication engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. He has worked with BeagleBoard.org under Google Summer of Code 2014 to develop BeagleLogic—a logic analyzer using the BeagleBone Black (for more information, visit https://github.com/abhishek-kakkar/BeagleLogic/wiki).
Abhishek wrote his first 8051 program when he was 11 years old, and since then, he has gained experience in a variety of embedded platforms, including 8051, AVR, STM32, and the BeagleBoard. His favorite toys as a child were his soldering iron and his computer, as he figured out that he could use them to build more awesome toys. When he isn't studying or working on his projects, he likes to read books and play the piano. Abhishek's personal abode on the Internet is "The Embedded Kitchen" at www.theembeddedkitchen.net.
Luca Belluomini is currently a member of AgustaWestland Technical Direction. He is in charge of fly control system design, certification, and testing for the AW609 TiltRotor integrated team, working between Italy (headquarters in Cascina Costa) and USA (Arlington, Texas) to certify the first civil TiltRotor aircraft with the Federal Aviation Administration.
Earlier in his career at Alenia Aermacchi, he worked for the M346 Master "Lead in Fighter" project and as a flight control law engineer in the Control Laws R&D team; he worked to ensure the safety of the flight test activities of the new generation dedicated to advanced and lead-in fighter trainer / light combat aircraft.
After passing the government exam and being licensed as a professional engineer, he served as an aeromechanical advisor for the "C27-J Spartan" Alenia Aeronautica program. He developed one of the few models of wind shear (an aerodynamic structure that characterizes the terrestrial boundary layer) integrated in a real-time level A full motion flight simulator to provide tools that are able to design and improve both take-off and landing procedures.
Luca received a bachelor's degree in aerospace science and a master's degree in aeronautical science from Università degli Studi di Pisa.
Richard Bottoms is a former US Army Signal Corps NCO and is now a San Francisco Bay Area-based developer of innovative software and hardware technologies.
His website design and development work began in the Internet's earliest days, when he developed one of the country's first media publication websites with database-backed classified systems for Nuvo Newsweekly, Indianapolis, Indiana (http://www.nuvo.net/).
He came to California to take up a management role with one of the first firms built to service Fortune 500 clients at Santa Clara, based US Web, honing some of the first enterprise-level best practices for the Internet while upgrading the art of technical sales.
Later, he led the technical sales team for Agniroth, a leading Indian firm offering offshore support to Silicon Valley firms with their value proposition of a 24-hour development cycle, allowing nonstop innovations with command and control in the US.
Following the dot-com crash, the freedom of open source with low cost, high benefit technologies such as LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) allowed him to survive it by building lightweight, agile support mechanisms for surviving firms evolving from the breakdown.
In 2007, he took a chance with an untested technology, choosing the unproven iPhone over the dominant Palm, Inc., and their growing line of Treo mobile phones. Obviously, this was the right choice as iPhone became the first true smartphone and its operating system iOS has changed the world.
Later in 2012, recognizing new technologies that were gaining importance, he began working on the integration of Arduino-compatible microcontrollers projects using Bluetooth Smart, which was introduced with iPhone 4S.
Now a mature technology, BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) has led to the well-known meme the Internet of Things (IoT), which has spawned exciting interconnected smart technologies that link social networking tools with location-aware smart TCP/IP addressable devices.
He hopes to make a significant contribution in this field before retiring with his wonderful wife back in Germany, where he once served as a soldier, before he found his calling in the field of computing.
Antonio Tringali is an electronic engineer working as a freelancer, who specializes in automation and remote system control. Most of his work in recent years is concentrated on automated parking systems and train passenger information systems. He develops everything a client may throw at him—from the silicon up to the database—alternating a number of computer languages with the oscilloscope.
He likes to read as much as he can about, well, everything. He likes to write and teach, so it should not be surprising that he started to know and appreciate Rodolfo when both were writing for the same leading Italian Linux magazine.