Announcing the Keynote Speakers for PyCon 2016

2016 April 03
by Brandon Rhodes

We are excited to announce our keynote speakers for PyCon 2016!

Each speaker will be featured at one of our plenary sessions, of which there are four — a plenary session that opens each of the three main conference days at PyCon, and a final plenary session at the close of the main conference at the end of the third day.

All of the following details are also available on our main conference web site on the Keynotes page, if you want to reference them there:
https://us.pycon.org/2016/events/keynotes/

Parisa Tabriz

Security Princess

Parisa Tabriz has worked on information security for over a decade and as a (self-appointed) “Security Princess” of Google for the last 8+ years. She started as a “hired hacker” software engineer for Google’s security team. As an engineer, she found and closed security holes in many of Google’s products, and taught other engineers how to do the same.

Today, Parisa manages Google’s Chrome security engineering teams, whose goal is to make Chrome the safest way to browse the web, and generally improve security on the Internet. She also is a reserve for the U.S. Digital Service, whose mission is to improve the state of critical government technology.

K Lars Lohn

Hippie Biker at Mozilla

At first, you’d think K Lars Lohn is some character from a biker bar on the bad side of town. However, speaking with him dispels that image in favor of, perhaps, a professor from Hogwarts. Lars is an eccentric, skeptic and heretic.

Lars has had a diverse career spanning 40 years. His early adoption of C++ in the late 80s gained him a formidable reputation as an emergency services programmer. Lars adopted Python in 2002. Lars currently works for Mozilla Corporation where he has been the primary engineer behind the Firefox crash reporting system, Socorro.

Lars lives in a yurt on organic farm in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Never having understood the word “bored”, Lars hacks hardware, restores old pin ball machines, draws mazes, makes 3D printable designs, plays electronic woodwinds, grows exotic carnivorous plants and rides a noisy Harley.

Lorena Barba

Computational Scientist

Lorena A. Barba is Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. She has MSc and PhD degrees in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology and BSc and PEng degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in Chile. Previous to joining GW, she was Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Boston University (2008–2013) and Lecturer/Senior Lecturer of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bristol, UK (2004–2008).

Barba is an Amelia Earhart Fellow of the Zonta Foundation (1999), an awardee of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) First Grant scheme (UK, 2007), an NVIDIA Academic Partner award recipient (2011), and a recipient of the National Science Foundation Early CAREER award (2012). She was named CUDA Fellow by NVIDIA in 2012, and is a sought-after speaker about high-performance computing, fast and efficient algorithms, and computational science.

Cris Ewing

Plone Foundation Member

Cris Ewing is a husband and father of two, and an independent developer with nearly 20 years of experience building software. He started in the field of computer music, and since 2001 has worked building web-based applications.

He has been involved with Plone since 2006 and has served on the board of directors of the Plone Foundation. He teaches web development in Python for the University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education program and has established the Python program at Code Fellows in Seattle, WA.

Guido van Rossum

Python’s Creator

Guido van Rossum is the author of the Python programming language. He continues to serve as the “Benevolent Dictator For Life” (BDFL), meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary. He is currently employed by Dropbox.

Van Lindberg

Chair of the Python
Software Foundation

Van Lindberg is Vice President of Intellectual Property at Rackspace. He is trained as a computer engineer and lawyer, but what he does best is “translate” to help businesses, techies and attorneys understand each other. Van likes working with both computer code and legal code. For the past several years, he has been using natural language processing and graph theory to help him digest and map the U.S. Patent Database. Van is currently chairman of the board of the Python Software Foundation, as well as the author of Intellectual Property and Open Source.