Speakers 2017

The following speakers presented talks at the BelFOSS 2017 event:

Lorraine Barry

Lorraine Barry is a Geographical Information Scientist with 18 years experience in the field of GIS and spatial analysis. She has worked for over 11 years at Queen’s University Belfast in teaching, training and developing Geographical Information Science for research. She has a strong research interest in FOSS4G (Free and Open Source for Geospatial).
Social: Linkedin, Twitter, Web

Dr Mihai Bilauca

Dr. Mihai Bilauca is leading the development of Limerick’s Digital Strategy which aims to lay the foundation for a Sustainable Smart Limerick City, Region and Communities. Having worked for Limerick for 15 years Mihai is now heading the Digital Strategy and Customer Services departments in Limerick City & County Council in redefining the citizen and customer experience and the digital customer experience. Mihai worked in various roles in the ICT Department and in 2013 as part of the Senior Change Management Team that oversaw the transformation of the former city and county councils into a new organization based on a new operating model. In his spare time Mihai continues his research in mathematical programming and optimization modelling methods. Mihai received the Master of Science (M.Sc.) and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) from University of Limerick, Ireland and the software engineering degree from “Stefan cel Mare” University of Suceava, Romania.

Favoured Distribution: Ubuntu
Social: Mihai Bilauca

Steven Boyd

Steven is a Geographic Information Consultant working in the Spatial NI team in Land and Property Services developing web services and web mapping applications across Government. Steven has been a volunteer with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) for nearly 4 years and running Missing Maps mapathons since the projects launched in late 2014. Steven is a Chartered Geographer specialising in Geographical Information Systems and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Matt Curry

Matt Curry is a passionate technologist and busy dad from Scottsdale, Arizona. He is currently working at Allstate Insurance, helping to drive a cultural transformation which Allstate has labeled Compozed Labs. Matt is a software and hardware geek with a demonstrated history of using software to solve infrastructure challenges. He is a strong believer in maximizing developer efficiency.

Prior to Allstate, Matt worked at PayPal for 8 years. There he undertook a variety of roles from Business Analyst to Capacity and Performance Specialist to Solutions Architect. While at PayPal he worked on projects related to holiday capacity planning, data center movement, code release efficiency and self-healing infrastructure.

Favoured Distribution: Arch Linux when not using a Mac
Social: LinkedIn, Twitter

Jolene Dunne

Jolene joined Proofpoint in April 2016 as a Software Engineer, where she primarily works in server-side development for an email security platform using a range of open-source technologies. She also organises the Belfast chapter of Papers We Love, a community of programmers who enjoy discussing research papers from academia and how they relate to the industry.

Social: LinkedIn, Papers We Love

Christopher Fearon

As head of Black Duck’s Open Source Security Research Group, Christopher Fearon is leading an initiative to redefine open source vulnerability disclosure and management processes. The goal is enabling customers not only to maximize security, but also to better understand and reduce their security risks.

Christopher has deep expertise and experience in application security as well as in incident response and strategic research planning, including the adoption and effective implementation of open source. He has held a number of security roles in financial services and other private sector industries.

Christopher’s Northern Ireland-based security group is a key component of Black Duck’s global Center for Open Search Research and Innovation (COSRI).

Social: LinkedIn

Conor Graham

Conor Graham is the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Research Officer at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen’s University Belfast. He manages a dedicated GIS Research and Teaching lab with colleagues Lorraine Barry and Dr Jennifer McKinley, and has been an active GI educator and researcher for over 15 years. Conor is a STEM Ambassador and professional member of the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland and Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. He has interests in Geomatics, Geodesy, Digital Survey, Remote Sensing, Web Mapping and spatial data collection utilising UAV/Drone technologies.  When not working with, collecting or playing with Spatial Data, Conor is a keen Mountain biker (with a GPS attached of course)!
Social: Twitter

Steven Hunter

Steven Hunter works at FABlab Belfast as a S.T.E.A.M Officer and FAB guru. A self-taught hacker/coder with qualifications in Mechanical Engineering allow him to take “almost” any idea and turn it into a reality. He has 13 years experience in Blender 3D in addition to other open-source staples such as Inkscape and Gimp. As a keen supporter of open-source software Steven encourages its use in all his endeavours.
FabLab Belfast is a Fabrication Laboratory with the ability to make “almost” anything. Equipped with cutting edge CNC machinery and an array of skills to allow anybody to come in and create and innovate.Favoured Distribution: Ubuntu
Social: Facebook, FabLab Website

Ryan Kilfedder

Ryan Kilfedder has worked as a web and software developer since 2006. In that time he has worked on both proprietary and open source frameworks, and has watched PHP grow and mature.
Ryan currently works in a management position within The Tomorrow Lab and has a BitBucket account full of half-baked ideas.
Social: LinkedIn, Twitter, The Tomorrow Lab

Paul Mayne

Paul Mayne spoke at BelFOSS 2016 and returns in 2017 to speak about Containerization and Docker. Paul joined Liberty IT’s Emerging Business & Technology division in August 2016 as a Senior Software Engineer having previously worked at Allstate for over 13 years. His background is in DevOps tools/infrastructure, programming and web development with a strong focus on Open-Source applications used for Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery pipelines.

Liberty IT creates world class IT solutions exclusively for U.S. parent company, Liberty Mutual Insurance, developing a wide range of enterprise scale, customer focused solutions which leverage cloud technologies, agile engineering and disciplined practices.
Social: LinkedIn, Twitter

Jonny McCullagh

Jonny has worked in Queen’s University Belfast for over 10 years as a systems engineer, programmer and web developer. He has built many systems while at QUB utilising FOSS technologies. Jonny is a certified Linux Professional with LPIC-1 and LPIC-2 accreditations.

Favoured Distribution: Linux Mint with Cinnamon

Social: LinkedIn, Twitter, Blog

Jonathan McDowell

Jonathan is currently working with Titan IC Systems having recently completed a law degree at Queen’s. Prior to this he spent more years than he cares to remember developing software for companies such as Cisco, Aviva and HP. Having become a Debian Developer in 2000 while running an ISP extensively using the distribution, he remains an active member of the project.

Favoured Distribution: Debian (obviously)
Social: LinkedIn, Twitter, Blog

Dr Suzanne McLaughlin

Suzanne is the Open Data Programme Manager at Digital Shared Services in the Department of Finance.  She previously worked in Land & Property Services and was responsible for the development of the Spatial NI portal. She is quite passionate about all things data and has a PhD from UUC relating to GI and coastal vulnerability.

Social: Twitter, LinkedIn

Chris Nixon

Chris is senior software developer on the R&D team at Mintel Ltd. He’s been programming for over a decade and has a long standing interest in, and strong opinions about Free Software, Developer tooling, Programming Languages and the intersection of theory and practice in computer science.
Favoured Distribution: Arch Linux
Social: LinkedIn

Rose-Kane Quinn

Rose is a software developer with an art school background, currently working for Neueda Consulting. She recently led a team that won the Open Data NI Education competition and loves anything to do with data visualisation.
Social: Neueda

Dr Sandra Scott-Hayward

Dr Sandra Scott-Hayward, CEng, is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Queen’s University Belfast. In the Centre for Secure Information Technologies at QUB, Sandra leads research and development of network security architectures and security functions for software-defined networks (SDN). Sandra is Vice-Chair of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) Security Working Group and a project leader of the Open Source SDN Project Delta, a penetration testing framework for SDN.

Phil Weir

Phil Weir is a leading figure in the Belfast Linux User Group. Phil has used a wide range of open source software in academia and industry, researching floating structures in the Antarctic and simulating problems in bio-engineering. He is a web developer and mathematician, and is particularly focused on international open source contracting.
Favoured Distribution: Ubuntu with Gnome
Social: Flax & Teal, LinkedIn