Guy Steele has spent most of his career as a slacker, only managing to accomplish:

• * Contributions and illustrations to The Hacker's Dictionary
• * Design of the original Emacs command set
• * Implementation of the first port of TeX
• * C: A Reference Manual and the first standards for C
• * Common Lisp the Language which became the ANSI standard for Common Lisp
• * Definition of the Scheme dialect of Lisp with Gerald Sussman
• * The "Lambda Papers" with Gerald Sussman
• * The High Performance Fortran specification and the Fortran standard committee
• * Three editions of the Java Language Specification
• * Editor of the first ECMAScript standard
• * Currently working on Fortress, a language for the scientific community

Talk: "How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not!"

Douglas Crockford is Yahoo!'s JavaScript architect and a member of the committee designing future versions of the world's most popular programming language. Douglas is known for writing "JavaScript: The Good Parts" and introducing the JSON data format.

Talk: "Heresy and Heretical Open Source: A Heretic's Perspective"

Hilary Mason (@hmason) is the lead scientist at bit.ly, where she is finding sense in vast data sets. She is a former computer science professor with a background in machine learning and data mining, has published numerous academic papers, and regularly releases code on her personal site, www.hilarymason.com. She has discovered two new species, loves to bake cookies, and asks way too many questions.

Talk: "Machine Learning: A Love Story"

Billy Newport (@billynewport) is a Distinguished Engineer at IBM. He's been at IBM since 2001. Billy was the lead on the WorkManager/ Scheduler APIs which were later standardized by IBM and BEA and are now the subject of JSR 236 and JSR 237. Billy lead the design of the WebSphere 6.0 non blocking IO framework (channel framework) and the WebSphere 6.0 high availability/clustering (HAManager). Billy currently works on WebSphere XD and ObjectGrid. He's also the lead persistence architect and runtime availability/scaling architect for the base application server. Billy's current interests are lightweight non invasive middleware, complex event processing systems and grid based OLTP frameworks.