Andrew Berls is a Ruby and JavaScript developer and lives in Santa Barbara, CA. He's been building websites ever since he learned what an HTML tag was, and has since fallen in love with full-stack application development. He was recently an intern at Causes.com, where he developed data dashboards using D3.js for visualizing social networks. Andrew is completing his degree in Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and when he's not programming you can find him learning to cook (badly) or hiking up a mountain somewhere.
Kevin Coughlin holds both Computer Science and Economics degrees from The College of New Jersey. He is a JavaScript developer with over two years of industry experience. At work and at home, Kevin combines HTML5 standards with cutting-edge client- and server-side technologies such as Angular.js, Backbone.js, and Node.js to produce effective modern solutions for the open web.
Kevin regularly posts tutorials on emerging web technologies on his website http://kevintcoughlin.com.
Ismini Lourentzou has a Business Administration B.Sc. and a long-standing career in the banking sector, at National Bank of Greece. Learning programming in Java in her spare time and her continuous urge for novelty, drove her to pursue a second degree in Computer Science from Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). During her undergraduate studies, she has participated in the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Cup 2012, as a member of the Data and Web Mining Group of AUEB, headed by Professor Michalis Vazirgiannis, and worked on "Automated Snippet Generation of Online Advertising", which led to a publication at CIKM 2013. Meanwhile, she also participated at ImageClef 2013 as a member of the Information Retrieval Group of AUEB, headed by Professor Theodore Kalamboukis. Their participation was placed second in the Textual Ad-hoc image-based retrieval and fifth in Visual Ad-hoc image-based retrieval. Due to her love for research and programming, there was no doubt about changing her career orientation; she is currently a PhD student at University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign, combining Machine Learning and Information Retrieval in developing intelligent information systems that will improve a user's productivity by decreasing the amount of manual involvement in searching, organizing, and understanding information from mainly textual sources. After completing her PhD, she hopes to continue working in research, and to be able to learn more and more each day.
Pablo Navarro is a data visualization consultant from Chile. He earned his Master's degree in Applied Mathematics from École des Mines de Saint-Etienne, France. After working for some years in operations research and data analysis, he decided to specialize in data visualization for web platforms, in which he currently works. In his free time, he enjoys doing watercolor illustrations, running and reading about human evolution. His most recent works can be seen at http://pnavarrc.github.io.
