Keynote Speakers
We would like to proudly announce the following Keynote Speakers in our conference (in alphaberical order):
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Benjamin Peterson has been a CPython core developer for 11 years. He is also the author of six, a Python 2/3 compatibility library. His talk will be on Python governance; it will cover the history of the Python project, how the new CPython governance model was selected, and what the future might hold for CPython and the Python language.

Pantelis is working for Nokia Bell Labs as the Head of Applied Machine Learning Research based in Murray Hill NJ and Budapest, has received two Bell Labs Presidential awards and works closely with open source communities. His speech will be about AI evolution and where it is heading.

The OpenStack project was started in 2010 to create an ubiquitous, open source cloud computing solution. Nine years later, where are we? What did we create? Is OpenStack still relevant? In this keynote talk, Thierry Carrez, the VP of Engineering at the OpenStack Foundation, will look back at the history of the OpenStack project and present its future challenges.

Steve has spent almost half his programming career using and promoting the Python language. He is a former chairman and director of the Python Software Foundation, and is currently the CTO of a startup building systems to help people lead less stressful and more productive lives. His talk will discuss the vast range of applications that this language now encompasses.

Monty currently leads the team that works on the Zuul project for CI/CD in Red Hat’s CTO Office. He’s the founder, core member and past PTL of the OpenStack Infra team which runs CI and developer tooling for OpenStack. He’s a member of the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors, a Python Fellow and past member the OpenStack Technical Committee. Monty is the PTL of the openstacksdk project and is the maintainer of the Ansible modules for consuming OpenStack.

Neal has started several open source projects including pychecker and cppclean. He also worked on the Python core language for 5+ years. Since 2005, Neal has been a software engineer at Google. He’s worked on frontend infrastructure for google.com,youtube.com, and things yet to come.
Plenary Speakers
We would like to proudly announce the following Plenary Speakers in our conference (in alphabetical order):
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Diomidis is a Professor and Head of the Department of Management Science and Technology of the Athens University of Economics and Business, and director of the Business Analytics Laboratory (BALab)
Speech title: Software Engineering in the Cloud

Alissa Bonas is an engineering manager in Kiali open source project at Red Hat. She has development experience in several programming languages, and is a contributor and a maintainer in many open source projects. Alissa has been working with Kubernetes from its early days, and has a great interest in user experience (UX) topics.
Talk title: Introduction to service mesh with Istio and Kiali

Dimitris works as a Technical Evangelist in Microsoft supporting software houses in their journey to the cloud. He loves working with OSS software and he is a Certified Kubernetes Application Developer. Nowadays, he enjoys working with Kubernetes and Go.
Speech title: “Scaling Dedicated Game Servers on Kubernetes”

Thanassis is the CEO of StackMasters and organiser of
Athens OpenStack User Group. He is a cloud expert with multiple years experience in large systems architecture and operations, OpenStack instructor, Cloud architect and Open-source enthusiast.
Speech title: “A practitioner’s tale on clouds”

Sugandha Agrawal is a Software Engineer working at IBM R&D, Boeblingen, Germany, currently developing IBM Cloud Functions and participating in open source contributions for Apache OpenWhisk. She pursued her masters in University Stuttgart, Germany and is enthusiastic about Serverless technology and all about Cloud. She hosts IBM Cloud Developers Meetup in Stuttgart area and likes to paint and indulge in modern Calligraphy.
At Oπe\n, Sugandha will touch base with basics of Serverless and what it is. Understanding in depth what Serverless offers and where it fits best.
How can one implement Python applications on Serverless platform and dive into a special Python application running on Serverless today.

Working in the telecoms industry for 19 years, in various positions covering R&D, Technical Support, Operations, Hosting, Data Centers and Connectivity, allowed him to have a holistic view across multiple domains and their future impact across a wide range of industries. Currently working as Chief Architect Cloud in Nokia’s Mobile Networks, focused on Telco Cloud Reference Architecture.

Panos Louridas is an Associate Professor at the Department of Management Science and Technology, Athens University of Economics and Business. He holds an MSc by Research and a PhD in Computation from the University of Manchester. He is the author of Real World Algorithms: A Beginner’s Guide. His research spans many different areas, including Software Engineering, Software Design, Security, Practical Cryptograpy, Data Analytics.
Speech title: Data Visualisation with Python (Mostly) for Fun and Research

Nikos is a lead software engineer at Yodeck.com, focused on system level programming, using Python, currently exploring IoT. In his presentation, he will talk about the building blocks required for a Python-based MVP, focusing on an IoT framework we love, Crossbar.io.

Kostas is a lead developer – ARGO monitoring platform @ GRNET. Speech title: GRNET presenting the design, development and evolution of ARGO: a modern distributed platform providing monitoring, analytics, reporting and alerting for large federated e-infrastructures.

Alex is a co-founder and CTO at Plum, where he oversees the technical direction of the product. He is the former payments lead at Tictail. He joined Tictail as engineer #5, built the platform and team that handled payment processing for 150,000 shops and watched the company grow to 60 people with offices in Stockholm and NYC. Prior to Tictail, he built software for retail data analytics, social networks, sports and Bloomberg. He is also the co-founder of Hack Cyprus, a tech movement in Cyprus which runs hackathons and coding schools for youngsters who want to learn how to code. He has an MEng in Computing from Imperial College London.

Paris is co-founder at SourceLair, an online IDE for Python and JavaScript, performs trainings on all-things Docker and also co-organizes the Docker Athens meetups. He loves Python, Docker and automating stuff. Topic: Get back to sleep with Infrastructure as Code.
Description: Messing with infrastructure bears huge responsibility. That is why it is one of the most stressful duties in software, keeping you from sleeping all night. Rejoice wit Infrastructure as Code! Let’s explore the patterns letting us create reproducible infrastructure and never lose our sleep again!

Laurent is a developer passionate about software, hardware, science, and anything shaping the future. He works for Google where he ecstatically explores cloud technologies. In a previous life, he pioneered the ebook industry, co-created the 1st European ebook reader, and co-founded Bookeen. He now enjoys sharing his passion in international conferences. You can find him on Twitter at @PicardParis. Speech title: Building smarter solutions with Machine Learning, from magic to reality

Dimitris is holding a PhD degree in biometrics, computer vision and machine learning. Currently he works as a product owner and a senior R&D DevOps software engineer at the MN Cloud department of Nokia (Athens) and is also head of the R&D department of Authenteq.
He has worked as an associated lecturer at the Universities of Surrey, Derby, UEL, and Teesside. His professional interests involve research and development in the areas of software quality, biometrics, data science and DevOps. Speech title: Software quality evaluation platform.
Lightning Speakers
We would like to proudly announce the following Lightning Speakers in our conference (in alphabetical order):
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Matina works as a Security System Architect in NOKIA TAS. She holds a Computer Engineering and Telecommunications Diploma / University of Thessaly, an MBA in Telecoms / Athens University of Economics and Business, a MSc in Digital Systems Security / University of Piraeus and has acquired many security certifications. Her research interests are in the fields of information security. Speech title: The road to software architecture evolution is paved with DevSecOps
Zois Kokkonis

Polizois (Zois) Kokkonis is a product manager with Nokia for data management solutions. He has extensive experience with a diverse range of telecommunication solutions and is particularly interested in develping the “ecosystems” around network data and services. Zois studied physics, worked in materials research (PhD in physical chemistry) and also holds an MBA degree. Speech title: Telcos digital transformation and the cloud: a new architecture imperative

Anna works as a Services Support Sales Lead for Central & Eastern Europe (CEE) at Microsoft, focusing on developing the strategy to support the lifecycle of our clients. Prior to this position she held the CEE Services Cloud Adoption Lead. She loves driving for execution through teamwork. Speech title: “The Cloud Era Needs More Women”. Having an interest in computing was it cool or not? Learn how motivation and energy has enabled her growth in leadership allowing her to be part of the cloud era.

Konstantinos is currently working on Kubernetes and Big Data for Canonical Ltd, the company behind Ubuntu. Prior to that he worked for Microsoft – Skype in the Big Data Group. In 2012 he received his Ph.D. on “Resource management in IaaS-Clouds” from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications at the University of Athens. In this presentation we will go through the “artistic aspects” of assembling and shipping a micro-Kubernetes distribution. We will offer our experiences from the single node Kubernetes distribution called MicroK8s. How we handle releases, technical issues but also unfavorable reviews surely interest both distribution maintainers and users alike.

Vladimir is a Mathematician, Data Scientist and Teacher. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and a Master’s Degree in Data Science. He has working experience in data mining, natural language processing, predictive modelling and a passion for deep learning to solve problems that matter. He enjoys travelling, teaching and coding.
Abstract: During this session we will discuss the need for interpretable ML and DL models. We will present some modern techniques used to “open” the black-box and make their interpretations comprehensible to humans. We will shed some light into why the models make certain decisions, what might go wrong in certain scenarios and how we can eventually gain trust in these machine learning and deep learning models.