Of the Community, By the Community, For the Community

One of the unique features of The Fifth Elephant (and HasGeek events in general) is the community’s defining role. The speakers, the curators and the attendees are all from the same community.

Anyone is welcome to propose a session. Participants who have purchased conference tickets will vote on session proposals. The Programme Committee steering The Fifth Elephant 2013 will also vote on submissions and balance the community voting. The Programme Committee consists of data analysts and big data practitioners.

Proposal submissions are reviewed on the basis of use cases, how a problem was solved, or why a particular technology and/or approach was adopted for solving the problem. Proposers can refer to open source technologies and tools available for storage, analytics and visualisation in their submissions.

Vote on Sessions

The Programme Committee

This year’s programme committee boasts of experience and expertise from different spectrums of Big Data — practitioners working on storage and cloud computing as well as architects and technologists working on analytics and business intelligence.

  • Gopal Vijayraghavan

    Hortonworks

    Gopal has spent many years making PHP faster at Yahoo! and Zynga. He thinks about performance problems as opportunities to contribute. He has turned towards Hadoop for newer challenges and is chasing performance at both ends of the scale spectrum at Hortonworks.

    Beyond work, he’s a photographer by day, biker by sunset, and by night he posts random thoughts.

  • Govind Kanshi

    Microsoft

    Govind works at Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Bangalore helping customers adopt technology platform, ranging from applied software solutions and processes. He can be usually found ‘learning’ more about ‘how things work’ and demystifying them in pragmatic way. His expertise lies in developing applications and finding/fixing bottlenecks. Data excites him, and terms like startburst and byzantine evoke his curiosity.

    Outside work, food, books and movies, travel keeps him busy. He blogs occasionally.

  • Joydeep Sen Sharma

    Qubole

    Joydeep is a co-founder at Qubole and heads their India development team. Prior to starting Qubole, he worked at Facebook where he boot-strapped the data processing ecosystem based on Hadoop, started the Apache Hive project and led the Data Infrastructure team. Joydeep studied Computer Science at IIT-Delhi and University of Pittsburgh. He has previously worked at Oracle, Netapp and Yahoo!

    Joydeep holds numerous patents, has many published papers and has been both speaker and panelist at Hadoop summits and at other Silicon Valley conferences.

  • Srinivasan Seshadri (Sesh)

    Boltell

    Sesh has significant expertise in internet technologies and is a well-known database and information retrieval researcher. He spent the initial part of his career in academia and research, first at IIT Bombay and then at Bell Labs, Murray Hill. Subsequently, Sesh returned to India as the founding CEO of Strand Genomics (now Strand Life Sciences). He was also the founding CTO of Yahoo! India.

    Sesh currently runs Boltell Infomedia, a tech-savvy company with a focus on emerging technologies and building out next-generation software.

Community Partners