Keynote Speakers

<h2 style="text-align: center">Kelsey Hightower (Google)</h2> <p style="text-align: center"> <img src="/2017/site_media/static/2017/keynote-hightower.jpg" style="max-width: 256px"> </p> Kelsey Hightower is an open source advocate and recovering sysadmin who is currently serving the application container and distributed systems community as an educator and toolsmith. He is currently employed by Google. <h2 style="text-align: center">Katy Huff (University of Illinois)</h2> <p style="text-align: center"> <img src="/2017/site_media/static/2017/keynote-huff.jpg" style="max-width: 256px"> </p> [Dr. Kathryn D. Huff](http://twitter.com/katyhuff) is an unapologetic advocate for open reproducible scientific computing and for emissions-free base-load nuclear energy. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she leads the [Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles Research Group](http://arfc.npre.illinois.edu/). She holds an affiliate faculty position with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and is one of the University of Illinois' most recent Blue Waters Professors. She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow with both the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science at the University of California - Berkeley. She received her PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August 2013 and her undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Chicago. Her current research focuses on modeling and simulation of advanced nuclear reactors and fuel cycles. She is currently the elected chair of the Fuel Cycle and Waste Management Division of the American Nuclear Society. Through leadership with the Hacker Within, Software Carpentry, SciPy, the Journal of Open Source Software, and other initiatives, she strives to advocate for best practices in open, reproducible scientific computing. With colleagues, collaborators, and friends, she has co-authored two books to help scientists with these practices: Effective Computation in Physics, O’Reilly, 2015 and The Practice of Reproducible Research, UC Press, 2017. <h2 style="text-align: center">Jake Vanderplas (University of Washington)</h2> <p style="text-align: center"> <img src="/2017/site_media/static/2017/keynote-vanderplas.jpg" style="max-width: 256px"> </p> Jake VanderPlas is an astronomer by training, and a long-time user and developer of the scientific Python stack. He currently works as an interdisciplinary research director at the University of Washington, where he writes, teaches, collaborates on research, and spends time consulting with local scientists from a wide range of fields. <h2 style="text-align: center">Lisa Guo (Instagram)</h2> <p style="text-align: center"> <img src="/2017/site_media/static/2017/keynote-guo.jpg" style="max-width: 256px"> </p> Lisa Guo is a networking, platform, and scalability software engineer with over 20 years experience. She has been working with the Instagram Infrastructure team since 2014, where she led efforts to expand from a single to multiple data centers and improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Prior to joining Instagram, Lisa worked on Facebook’s Software Defined Networks strategy and deployment. She was also Director, Engineering at Juniper Networks in charge of software development for EX switching series. She joined Juniper through its acquisition of NetScreen, and held core infrastructure development roles at Shasta Networks, Tahoe Networks. <h2 style="text-align: center">Hui Ding (Instagram)</h2> <p style="text-align: center"> <img src="/2017/site_media/static/2017/keynote-ding.jpg" style="max-width: 256px"> </p> Hui Ding is Head of Infrastructure org at Instagram, where he oversees the scaling of Instagram backend platform that supports hundreds of millions of concurrent users on a daily basis. Hui has been with Instagram since 2012, and has led the development of many Instagram product launches as well as all infrastructure efforts. Before joining Instagram, Hui was a core member of the Facebook infrastructure team, building its distributed data store for the social graph. Hui holds a PhD in computer engineering from Northwestern University.