Damian holds a B.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science.
A widely sought-after speaker and trainer, he is also the author of numerous well-known software modules including: Parse::RecDescent (a sophisticated parsing tool), Class::Contract (design-by-contract programming in Perl), Lingua::EN::Inflect (rule-based English transformations for text generation), Class::Multimethods (multiple dispatch polymorphism), Text::Autoformat (intelligent automatic reformatting of plaintext), Switch (Perl's missing case statement), NEXT (resumptive method dispatch), Filter::Simple (Perl-based source code manipulation), Quantum::Superpositions (auto-parallelization of serial code using a quantum mechanical metaphor), and Lingua::Romana::Perligata (programming in Latin). All of this software is available free from your local CPAN mirror.
A well-known member of the international Perl community, Damian was the winner of the 1998, 1999, and 2000 Larry Wall Awards for Practical Utility. The best technical paper at the annual Perl Conference was subsequently named in his honour. He is a member of the technical committee for The Perl Conference, a keynote speaker at many Open Source conferences, a former columnist for "The Perl Journal", and author of the books "Object Oriented Perl" and "Perl Best Practices". In 2001 Damian received the first "Perl Foundation Development Grant" and spent 20 months working on projects for the betterment of Perl.
Currently he runs an international IT training company Ð Thoughtstream Ð which provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia.
Most of his time is currently spent working with Larry Wall on the design of the new Perl 6 programming language and producing explanatory documents exploring Larry's design decisions.
Other technical and academic areas in which he has published internationally include programming language design, programmer education, object orientation, software engineering, natural language generation, synthetic language generation, emergent systems, declarative programming, image morphing, human-computer interaction, geometric modelling, the psychophysics of perception, nanoscale simulation, and parsing.
maddog is the Executive Director of Linux International (www.li.org), a non-profit association of computer vendors who wish to support and promote the Linux Operating System. During his career in commercial computing which started in 1969, Mr. Hall has been a programmer, systems designer, systems administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager and educator. He has worked for such companies as Western Electric Corporation, Aetna Life and Casualty, Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, VA Linux Systems, and SGI.
Mr Hall has worked on many systems, both proprietary and open, having concentrated on Unix systems since 1980 and Linux systems since 1994, when he first met Linus Torvalds and correctly recognized the commercial importance of Linux and Free and Open Source Software.
He has taught at Hartford State Technical College, Merrimack College and Daniel Webster College. He still likes talking to students over pizza and beer (the pizza can be optional).
Mr. Hall is the author of numerous magazine and newspaper articles, many presentations and one book, Linux for Dummies.
Mr. Hall has consulted with the governments of China, Malaysia and Brasil as well as the United Nations and many local and state governments on the use of Free and Open Source Software.
Mr. Hall serves on the boards of several companies, and several non-profit organizations, including the USENIX Association.
Mr. Hall has traveled the world speaking on the benefits of Open Source Software, and received his BS in Commerce and Engineering from Drexel University, and his MSCS from RPI in Troy, New York.
In his spare time maddog is working on his retirement project: maddog's mansion for math, music, microcomputing and microbrewing.
Randal L. Schwartz is a two-decade veteran of the software industry — skilled in software design, system administration, security, technical writing, and training. He has coauthored the "must-have" standards: Intermediate Perl, Learning Perl, Learning Perl for Win32 Systems, and Effective Perl Programming, as well as writing regular columns for PerformanceComputing, SysAdmin, and Linux magazines. He's also a frequent contributor to the Perl newsgroups and the "Perl Monastery" community (perlmonks.org), and has moderated comp.lang.perl.announce since its inception. His offbeat humor and technical mastery have reached legendary proportions worldwide (but he probably started some of those legends himself). Randal's desire to give back to the Perl community inspired him to help create and provide initial funding for The Perl Institute. He is also a founding board member of the Perl Mongers (perl.org), the worldwide Perl grassroots advocacy organization. Since 1985, Randal has owned and operated Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc.
Since 1992, Randal has been developing Perl courseware and providing training to Fortune 500 companies across the United States, and training other trainers to do likewise.
Andrew Morton is the lead maintainer for the Linux public production kernel. Morton works with Linux creator Linus Torvalds, the kernel subsystem maintainers, Linux distribution companies, hardware vendors and other interested parties to ensure that the public production kernel meets their needs. He is the final arbitrator on determining what code is accepted into the Linux production kernel. Morton has worked in software development for more than 20 years. As principal engineer at Digeo, he was responsible for the base operating system in the companyÕs broadband digital home entertainment products. Prior to Digeo, he was product development manager for Nortel Networks Australian R&D labs. Andrew previously served as managing director of an Australia-based personal computer firm and also worked as a hardware engineer for an Australian maker of digital gaming equipment.
Theodore Ts'o has been working on the Linux kernel since December 1991. In his carreer, he has worked on the tty subsystem, the /dev/random driver, POSIX job control, the ext2/ext3 filesystem, and is currently the primary author and upstream maintainer of the e2fsprogs package. Theodore has also served as the Kerberos v5 development lead at MIT, and chaired the IP Security working group at the IETF. He is currently serving as Treasurer for Usenix, and Chair of the Free Standard Group, which promulgates the Linux Standard Base.
Bebo White has been described as "a historical Web artifact" given his long involvement with World Wide Web technology. In reality, he is a Departmental Associate (retired) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) where he was a member of the team that installed the website at SLAC in 1991 -- the first Web site in the U.S.
He is the author of five books and numerous technical articles and is a popular conference speaker. In addition, he holds academic appointments at various universities around the world including the University of San Francisco, Hong Kong University, and Contra Costa College. He is a member of the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) and the Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. His current research and passion focuses on Web Engineering (he is a Managing Editor of the Journal of Web Engineering), Web 2.0, and Semantic Web applications. Additional information can be found at http://www.stanford.edu/~bebo.
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