2016 Speakers

Yuriko Horvath is the Director of Technology at 1776 where she oversees integration with software products and converts product vision into 1’s and 0’s. Before joining, Yuriko was a Principal Engineer at Graham Holdings Companies where she developed an authentication and registration platform that integrated with major social media players. At peak usage, the platform registered 300k+ and authenticated 1 million+ users daily while gathering fun social network information.

Raj Echambadi, the Alan J. and Joyce D. Baltz Professor in the College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the Senior Associate Dean of Strategic Innovation. Utilizing key principles from his research on innovative organizations, he spearheaded the efforts to launch the online MBA program for Illinois. This program, known as the iMBA, has been hailed by outsiders as revolutionary and as a breakthrough innovation in graduate education. It was launched in January 2016 in partnership with Coursera.

Echambadi’s major research interests in strategic innovation focus on how firms balance the importance of exploring opportunities found in nascent markets with exploiting opportunities in existing markets. It is a tough but necessary balance that enables innovative firms to renew themselves successfully over time. His research articles have been published in some of the top business and statistics journals.

Echambadi is an accomplished teacher. He has taught a wide range of courses at the undergraduate, MBA, Executive MBA, and Ph.D. levels, and he has won numerous accolades at the University of Illinois for his teaching accomplishments, including the Campus Excellence Award in Professional and Graduate Teaching and the College of Business Alumni Award for Teaching Excellence.

Michael Brown is Chief Technology Officer at comScore, Inc. and leads the company’s technology efforts to measure consumer behavior across multiple types of media and platforms. Mr. Brown has also been responsible for more than 20 patent applications at comScore. Nine of these patents have already been issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Prior to joining comScore in 1999, he worked at GSMI on several different projects for companies around the globe, including a large helpdesk deployment and modernization effort for Deutsche Bahn in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1993, Mike cofounded Pragmatic Image Technologies; prior to this role, he worked as an associate at IBM.

Mr. Brown holds an M.S. in Computer and Information Science from Hood College and a B.S. in Computer Science from University of Maryland University College.

Katy Kasmai is the Founder of Team Exponent, building high-impact teams for 10x solutions, and a senior level Engineering PM at Google, Inc. She is passionate about 10x thinking, sustainability and the pursuit of change and innovation. Katy develops and executes strategies to solve complex problems using technology, with a focus on achieving product excellence. Currently, she is also developing Exponential Education, bringing 10x thinking and projects to K-12. @KatyKasmai | linkedin.com/in/katykasmai

Martin Omander, the man, the myth, the legend, all the way from the Google HQ in Silicon Valley Developer Relations Team.

Nitya Narasimhan is a software architect, researcher and innovator with ~20 years of experience building distributed and ubiquitous computing solutions for mobile & embedded platforms. She consults on Android, AngularJS and Meteor projects, and currently leads Engineering for a Social Good startup. She also organizes Meteor Hudson Valley, GDG New York and GDG Hudson Valley where she can frequently be found speaking, hacking or mentoring at local tech events.

Marc founded Tremolo Security with over a decade of identity and access management experience as a software engineer, product developer and consultant. He has experience building, deploying and managing identity systems from all major vendors across numerous industries in both the public and private sectors. Marc is the lead developer on Tremolo Security’s OpenUnison project and has been spending recent months looking at identity management in OpenStack, OpenShift and Kubernetes.

Ray is a Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform. Ray had extensive hands on cross-industry enterprise systems integration delivery and management experiences during his time at Accenture, managed full stack application development, DevOps, and ITOps. Ray specialized in middleware, big data, and PaaS products during his time at RedHat while contributing to open source projects, such as Infinispan. Aside from technology, Ray enjoys traveling and adventures.

Jay Gordon is a Technical Account Manager at MongoDB focused on providing users with a great experience with our Cloud products. Jay joined MongoDB in 2016 after many years as working as a System Administrator and DevOps Professional. Prior to MongoDB, Jay was able to be part of teams that leveraged large MongoDB deployments such as BuzzFeed.

Josh Gordon is a Developer Advocate at Google working on TensorFlow. He’s interested in teaching and computer science education. He can often be found exploring central park on his bike. You can find him on Twitter at @random_forests.

Dave Erickson is the Director of Solutions Architecture for Elastic, the makers of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, Beats and other open source projects making up the Elastic stack.

Android Lead at LivingSocial. Prior to LivingSocial, Michael worked at The Washington Post, and FINRA. He’s been writing apps since Cupcake, co-organizer of DC Droids (the DC Android Meetup), and embarrassingly was one of those people walking around with Google Glass at one point.

His mom also says he’s very smart.

Jessica works as a Front-End Developer for Deloitte Digital. She serves on the leadership of DCFemTech and DC Tech Meetup and is the unofficial social chair of Women Who Code DC. She loves JavaScript, maps, gifs, campy 80’s movies, sci fi, and web development. Jessica transitioned careers from International Relations to tech and has fallen in love with the #dcTech scene.

Front-End Engineer. Beyonce Addict. Dance Theatre Artist. Pokemon Go Player. Crossfit Enthusiast. Brown University alum (Go Bruno!)

Antonio is an Android engineer on the mobile team at Mapbox. He is very passionate about the future of the Android platform, from phones to smartwatches to TVs.

Prior to joining Mapbox, Antonio co-founded Silica Labs, a startup focused on wearable software development and worked for the World Health Organization supporting disaster response and preparedness as part of its Emergency Operations Center. Antonio has a degree in Theoretical Physics from the University of Granada in Spain, and he is an active member of the DC developer community. He co-organizes the local Google Developer Group (GDG DC) and co-founded DC Android (DCA).

Lougenia fell in love with development as a child via a Commodore 64, typing meaningless strings of characters into the blue screen of the command prompt. She is now a full-stack developer with nine years of experience (and the gray hairs to prove it). She has a passion for advocating for new developers and diversifying the tech community.

Jared has been playing with technology all of his life and building mobile applications since Google was making tasty treats like Donut, Eclair and Gingerbread. He enjoys bridging the gap between technology, product and business development teams and bringing them together to ship epic software. Jared is an Android Ninja who has shipped over ten android applications and is a co-founder of the DCAndroid Meetup group in Washington, DC.

Huyen is an Android developer and Google Developer Expert, a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland, a member of the Android team at Trello, and co-producer of the “Android Dialogs” YouTube channel. The only other thing that keeps her up as late as development (and often longer) is gaming: PC, console, board, card, anything.

Chris Nguyen is a software engineer for The Washington Post’s Arc Publishing platform. He started his career as a C++ backend developer, but somehow ended up writing a lot of Javascript along the way.

Noble gives connected fitness and wearable startups superpowers. For 8 years he has worked on business strategies for bringing wearable software to the consumer and enterprise market. He invented LynxFit, an award winning virtual coach for Google Glass, Samsung Gear and Android Wear. Today he empowers personal trainers looking to access data from wearables with tools to create workouts for wearables and insights to coach users with data from wearables. When not being awesome at work, he is Running with bulls in Pamplona, or running a marathon armed with wearable tech.

Sam is a Lead Android Engineer for Capital One Wallet. He has been working with Android since 2011 and has over 12 years of professional experience with full-stack development with Java and JavaScript. Check out http://handstandsam.com where he shares tips and tricks about Android and software development.

Elizabeth is an experienced computing professional. She regularly attends Google I/O and got to be both a Google Glass Pioneer and Explorer. Since 2008 her work is on Android apps as a mobile app architect and developer. This continues a long history on the Java platform starting at Sun (JDK 1.1.4).
Elizabeth is able to communicate complex technical ideas to other engineers as well as lay people, having been both an Individual Contributor as well as a Director of Technical Support. She is making connections in Boston after many years in Silicon Valley working with a diverse group of technologists in small, private start-ups and at large corporations like Adobe Systems.
Miss Mezias hails from Bridgeport, CT. Her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from San Francisco State University included valuable early work as a campus consultant where she met Steve Jobs. For her, technology is a passion and she is continually building her skill set. Today she is a Senior Software Engineer for Modo Labs in Cambridge, MA. On Monday nights she runs the Informal Android Developer Meetup for the Boston GDG twice each month.

Eric began his career in the embedded world, writing cryptographic toolkits. Since 2010, he has been working in mobile, and is currently employed as an Android developer at Shopify. He has built a backend to deliver notifications to multiple mobile platforms, and has tinkered with Android cloud messaging technologies from C2DM onwards. This year, Eric has begun to share his expertise through public speaking, and rebooted the Toronto Android Developers Meetup. In addition to coding, he enjoys baking. A lot. Eric holds a BMath degree from the University of Waterloo, Canada in Computer Science and Combinatorics & Optimization.

Bret is on the Google Cloud Platform team at Google, focusing on developer-oriented products like App Engine, the Cloud Vision API, Firebase and more. He’s also an aspiring Node.js developer. Prior to Google, Bret came from Texas, having worked in the cloud industry at Rackspace as a software engineer building the RackConnect hybrid hosting product. Before that, he led engineering teams at e-commerce, non-profit and startup companies. He’s often on the running trail, volleyball court or kickball field. Bret earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Texas A&M University.

Implementing HTTP/2 Server with Node and Express

Naveen oversees the development, operations and infrastructure for MobilePosse. His role includes technology planning, development of architecture and roadmaps, continued evolution of digital platforms and oversight and direction for MobilePosse. Naveen joined Mobile Posse with over 20 years of experience leading technology teams for Digital/Mobile functions for emerging technology companies

An early online publishing pioneer, Eric brings over a dozen years of AOL publishing, content development, product development, and system architecture experience, and another 20 years as a software engineering professional. With recent patent submissions for dynamic mobile content experiences, Eric continues his history of developing creative, innovative products, tools, and solutions. Eric was a principal creator of many of the earliest AOL Shopping experiences, including the EnPassant, and 2Market CD’s. As an early AOL architect, Eric defined, built or managed dozens of AOL Greenhouse content products, including Love@AOL, the Entertainment Asylum, Electra, Big Brother, and others.

Annyce is an Android Google Developer Expert. She has spent the past 5 years developingapplications for the Android ecosystem across multiple form factors. She is also a international conference speaker and author, sharing her knowledge of Android development with others. In addition, Annyce is active in the Washington, DC tech scene and assists with running a local meetup focused on Android development and design.

John is the lead UI developer of the complete Threat family of products at ThreatTrack. He’s been coding since high school when he taught himself HTML and coded his TI-83 and 89 calculators. Now he codes things a little more complex: creating UIs across large datasets, visualizing data, and finding fun ways to do new things. He also spearheads development in TSLabs, an application area to try new features and experimental ideas.
When not coding, he adjuncts at Northern Virginia Community College, runs for fun (that fact surprises him too), sports a kilt on occasion, and enjoys time with his wife and two kids.

Elissa Shevinsky is Managing Director of Tech Search at Kearney Boyle & Associates. A serial entrepreneur, she has been in tech startups since 1999. Notably companies include Geekcorps (acquired), Everyday Health (IPO), Glimpse and Brave. Shevinsky is the editor of “Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-Up Culture.”

Kashif is an Engineer at AOL focused on Android development with experience developing applications for millions of users including the flagship AOL Android app and the new smart email product Alto. He also enjoys applying his design intuition to applications he works on.

Yufeng has been building computers since elementary school and lives at the intersection of hardware and software. As a Google Developer Advocate, Yufeng bridges the gap between the developer community and engineering teams.
He is interested in combining IoT devices, big data, and machine learning, and loves learning new technologies. When he’s not tinkering, you can find him running on the road or the track training for his next race. You can find him on Twitter at @YufengG.

Mark Murphy is the founder of CommonsWare and the author of The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development. He is active in supporting the Android developer community, fromanswering questions on Stack Overflow to publishing sample code and reusable components as open source.

A three-time entrepreneur, his experience ranges from consulting on open source and collaborative development for the Fortune 500 to application development on a myriad of platforms. A polished speaker, Mr. Murphy has delivered conference presentations and training sessions on a wide array of topics internationally.

Frank is an engineer for Firebase at Google. He helps developers build extraordinary apps that use Firebase as their back-end. If you’ve ever asked a Firebase question on StackOverflow, you’ve probably met Frank already.

Anastasia Lopez is a very passionate Software Engineer, working @ Songkick as an Android developer. She like cupcakes, chocolate, and all types of sweets, which is probably what led her to the Android world.

Romain is a passionate Android developer who has been building apps since Android Froyo. He is currently working for Songkick as a happy Android developer. In the past he worked for Microsoft as well as building useless/fun apps with GIFs and animations.

Jonathan Bodner has been developing software professionally for nearly 20 years as a programmer, chief engineer, and architect. He has worked in a wide variety of industries: government, education, internet, legal, financial, and e-commerce. His work has taken him from the internals of the JVM to the DNS resolvers that shape internet traffic. A veteran of several startups, Jonathan was also the architect for Blackboard’s Beyond division, which was the company’s first foray into cloud services. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Elissa Shevinsky is Managing Director of Tech Search at Kearney Boyle & Associates. A serial entrepreneur, she has been in tech startups since 1999. Notably companies include Geekcorps (acquired), Everyday Health (IPO), Glimpse and Brave. Shevinsky is the editor of “Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-Up Culture.”

Dennis has been working as a software engineer for 20 years in a number of different industries including utilities, health care, retail, insurance, banking, loyalty and marketing. He is currently a software architect for Ippon USA providing architectural consulting for a number of clients. He has been primarily working with Java and web technologies but he has an interest in DevOps, Cloud and Big Data technology as well. He has three daughters which keep him very busy outside of work and he likes Euro-style board games, music, craft beer and American football.

Cameron is an Android engineer at Mapbox working alongside the mobile and support teams to help users get the most out of Mapbox Mobile.

Before joining Mapbox, Cameron created a university app allowing users to locate and route to classrooms, find bus lines and their real time locations, and display places of interest. He is actively involved in the OpenStreetMap community and holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from The University of Houston.

Oleg is an Android Developer at Washington Post and (in a meantime) jack-of-all-trades at Sympli. He had seen Android before if was Cupcake, and he isn’t tired of it yet. Loves to do cool stuff and and wants to force all the people around him to do cool stuff too.

James Cha is a developer advocate at Clover and a developer community ninja. He enjoys introducing technology to anyone who will give him a moment to do so. He takes his experience as a developer and an adjunct teacher to teach coding and clever ways to use the technology we have available to make life easier and more accessible for people.

Bobby is a member of the Technology Fellows team at Capital One, where he designs and develops solutions to difficult problems, influences the technical direction of Capital One while helping development teams implement that technical direction, and engages the broader technical community via speaking and open-source contribution. Prior to joining Capital One, Bobby was Director of Product Engineering at B23 LLC, a startup working on enabling big data solutions in cloud environments. Before B23, Bobby worked on the Product Team at Cognitect building, testing, and helping customers win with Datomic. Bobby’s been writing web applications and distributed systems with Clojure and ClojureScript since 2010. Before that, Bobby worked in Java, Scheme, and Ruby on Rails plus the full web stack starting in 2005. Bobby first got interested in computers and open source when he converted his desktop computer into a Linux server running Bugzilla in support of the software development team for which he was interning; once he finally got `rpm install` to work, he never looked back.

Jinn Kim is a Android developer since v2.3 operating in the New England area. He also has taught multiple Android developer courses based on the Google’s Study Jam. He’s also the lead organizer of the Boston Android Meetup group. Before he started programming Android apps, he worked primarily in .NET web application. He is left handed.

Vishal is a Sr. Director of Software and Solutions Engineering at Armedia. In his current role he oversees the Solution Engineering team at Armedia focusing on emerging technologies in the field of Enterprise Content Management and Content Analytics.

Gaurav Agrawal is a Software Engineer at AOL Inc working for Data Warehouse group since 8 years. He utilizes his professional expertise to build highly-scalable and extensible data platforms that provide the foundation for collecting,storing,modeling and analyzing massive data sets from multiple sources using leading edge technologies like Amazon Web Services, Hadoop, Vertica

Michael Epley is a Middleware and PaaS Solutions Architect with Red Hat helping the Intelligence Community realize the benefits of open source innovation and security using the JBoss Enterprise Middleware suite and Openshift Platform­ as­ a ­Service. Prior to this, he was a software engineer and technical lead at Lockheed Martin and then Industrial Medium Software where he developed advanced, automated intelligence analysis and dissemination systems for various Army, Navy, DARPA, IC, and JCS customers using opensource, SOA, and JBoss technologies. In his off time, Mike enjoys cycling with his wife Catherine and building legos with his son Konrad.

Sunitha is a Software Engineer at AOL, focused mainly on developing mobile apps on Android ecosystem. Currently working on Alto, a smart email organizer. When she is not coding, she likes to build metallic puzzles.

Krishnan is a Google Developer Expert in Google Cloud Platform. He has co-authored the book “Building Your Next Big Thing with Google Cloud Platform” which is the first book that comprehensively covers Google Cloud Platform. The book was launched at Google IO 2015 in May 2015 and more information is available at https://bit.ly/cloudplatformbook. He also created a new undergraduate course “Cloud Computing: business case and technical models” for a private university. Krishnan is also a co-founder of Google Developer Group in Singapore.

Krishnan is a seasoned professional with 16+ years of industry experience in multiple IT domains. Earlier, Krishnan has completed his PhD (Computer Engineering) & MS (Computer Science) from National University of Singapore, Singapore and Bachelor of Engineering (Electronics & Communication) from University of Madras, India.