Benjamin Bengfort is a Data Scientist who lives inside the beltway but ignores politics (the normal business of DC) favoring technology instead. He is currently working to finish his PhD at the University of Maryland where he studies machine learning and distributed computing. His lab does have robots (though this field of study is not one he favors) and, much to his chagrin, they seem to constantly arm said robots with knives and tools; presumably to pursue culinary accolades. Having seen a robot attempt to slice a tomato, Benjamin prefers his own adventures in the kitchen where he specializes in fusion French and Guyanese cuisine as well as BBQ of all types. A professional programmer by trade, a Data Scientist by vocation, Benjamin's writing pursues a diverse range of subjects from Natural Language Processing, to Data Science with Python to analytics with Hadoop and Spark.

Jenny Kim is an experienced big data engineer who works in both commercial software efforts as well as in academia. She has significant experience in working with large scale data, machine learning, and Hadoop implementations in production and research environments. Jenny (with Benjamin Bengfort) previously built a large scale recommender system that used a web crawler to gather ontological information about apparel products and produce recommendations from transactions. Currently, she is working with the Hue team at Cloudera, to help build intuitive interfaces for analyzing big data with Hadoop.