Ahmad Alkilani is a data architect specializing in the implementation of high-performance distributed systems, data warehouses, and BI systems. His career has been split between building enterprise applications and products using a variety of web and database technologies, including .NET, SQL Server, Hadoop, Hive, Scala, and Scalding. His recent interests include building real-time web and predictive analytics and streaming and sketching algorithms.

Currently, Ahmad works at Move.com (http://www.realtor.com) and enjoys speaking at various user groups and national conferences, and he is an author on Pluralsight with courses focused on Hadoop and Big Data, SQL Server 2014, and more, targeting the Big Data and streaming spaces.

You can find more information on Ahmad on his LinkedIn profile (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmadalkilani) or his Pluralsight author page (http://pluralsight.com/training/Authors/Details/ahmad-alkilani).

Włodzimierz Bzyl works at the University of Gdańsk. His current interests include web-related technologies and NoSQL databases.

He has a passion for new technologies and introducing his students to them.

He enjoys contributing to open source software and spending time trekking in the Tatra mountains.

Tanin Na Nakorn is a software engineer who is enthusiastic about building consumer products and open source projects that make people's lives easier. He cofounded Thaiware, a software portal in Thailand and GiveAsia, a donation platform in Singapore; he currently builds products at Twitter. You may find him expressing himself on his Twitter handle @tanin and helping on various open source projects at http://www.github.com/tanin47.

Sen Xu is a software engineer in Twitter; he was previously a data scientist in Inome Inc.

He worked on designing and building data pipelines on top of traditional RDBMS (MySQL, PostgreSQL, and so on) and key-value store solutions (Hadoop). His interests include Big Data analytics, text mining, record linkage, machine learning, and spatial data handling.