Sreekanth Jella is a senior Hadoop and Spark developer with more than 11 years of IT industry development experience. He is a postgraduate from the University College of Engineering, Osmania University, with computer applications as major. He has worked in the USA, Turkey, and India and with clients such as AT&T, Cricket Communications, and Turk Telecom. Sreekanth has vast development experience with Java/J2EE technologies and web technologies as well. He is tech savvy and passionate about programming. In his words, "Coding is an art and code is fun".

De Witte Dieter received his master's degree in civil engineering (applied physics) from Ghent University in 2008. During his master's, he became really interested in designing algorithms to tackle complex problems.

In April 2010, he was recruited as the first bioinformatics PhD student at IBCN-iMinds. Together with his colleagues, he designed high-performance algorithms in the area of DNA sequence analysis using Hadoop and MPI. Apart from developing and designing algorithms, an important part of the job was data mining, for which he mainly used Matlab. Dieter was also involved in teaching activities around Java/Matlab to first-year bachelor of engineering students.

From May 2014 onwards, he has been working as a big data scientist for Archimiddle (Cronos group). He worked on a big data project with Telenet, part of Liberty Global. Working in a Hadoop production environment together with a talented big data team, he considered it really rewarding and it made him confident in using the Cloudera Hadoop stack. Apart from consulting, he also conducted workshops and presentations on Hadoop and machine learning.

In December 2014, Dieter joined iMinds Data Science Lab, where he was responsible for research activities and consultancy with respect to big data analytics. He is currently teaching a course on big data science to master's students in computer science and statistics and doing consultancy on scalable semantic query systems.