GTAC 2015: Speaker Profiles

Adam Carmi Adam is the Co-founder and CTO of Applitools - a company providing a cloud service for visual test automation. Prior to Applitools, Adam was the VP R&D of Safend - an information security company, and worked as a researcher at IBM and as a software architect at Intel. Adam holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from the Technion - Israel’s Institute of technology, and is the organizer of the Israeli Selenium Meetup group.

Alister Scott Alister is an Excellence Wrangler for WordPress.com at Automattic. He has extensive experience in automated software testing and establishing quality engineering cultures in lean cross-functional software development teams. He lives in Brisbane, Australia with his wife and three sons, and writes a popular software testing blog at watirmelon.com.

Andrew Knodt Andrew is a Software Engineer at Lockheed Martin and has been working on software defined radio applications and satellite ground control systems. Prior to joining Lockheed, Andrew worked at the Navy's Manned Flight Simulator laboratory. Andrew is focused on modernizing traditional defense software development by incorporating automated testing to improve system quality. He holds a Master's degree from Villanova and a Bachelor's degree from Penn State, both in Electrical Engineering.

Anurag Routroy I have been with Intel Security for about 5 years. I am an Automation Technical lead for the Test Enablers Team, which predominantly work on functional and non functional test automation of the mobile products. I primarily work on android and web automation. I am the first engineer in Intel Security(formerly McAfee) to set things right on android automation. Overall I have been on test automation for about 11 years with great interest on deriving more ROI using automation.

Apple Chow Apple Chow is the engineering manager for Uber’s Mobile Test Infra Team. Her team focuses on building tools and infrastructure for Uber’s fast-growing mobile organization. Prior to joining Uber, Apple was the engineering productivity lead at Google. She led releases and worked on building out the testing infrastructure for many of Google’s mobile and web products including Google Hangouts, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Now, Google CRM, Google Offers, Google Checkout and OpenSocial. Her book interview for “How Google Tests Software” was published in 2012. She also presented “Building a Flexible & Reusable Framework Around Selenium” at GTAC in 2007.

Benjamin Greenberg Benjamin Greenberg is a graduate student at MIT concentrating in machine learning. He has interned at Google NYC for the past two summers on both the GWS team and as a SETI on ads and commerce. Ben has also accepted a full time offer with Google in Mountain View starting next summer. In his free time Ben enjoys rock climbing and unicycling, and he plans to complete a triathlon on a unicycle once he moves to Mountain View.

Bian Jiang Bian has comprehensive experience in both mobile application development and mobile application testing. He was a key member of the team which built and shipped the new Yahoo! Mail iOS client from scratch in just 12 weeks. He was also the key contributor on the team which built the test scheduling system for mobile application performance testing at Facebook. Currently he helps design and build testing tools and infrastructure for the Mobile Test Infra team at Uber, such as Octopus, a multi-app and multi-device coordinating test runner.

Brian Gogan Brian leads the Cast Test & Release Engineering team at Google, responsible for testing and delivering Chromecast and the Cast protocol. He has been at Google for five years, working as a Software Engineer, Tools & Infrastructure on various TV related projects like Google TV and TV Search. Prior to Google, Brian worked as a Software Engineer at Xilinx. He holds a masters degree in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University and a bachelors degree in Computer Engineering from Trinity College Dublin.

Casey Burkhardt Casey Burkhardt is a Senior Software Engineer with Google’s Accessibility Engineering team based in Mountain View, California. After joining Google in 2012, Casey worked to improve the accessibility of the Android platform, and led development of TalkBack, Android’s open source screen reader. He now works to build automated testing and developer tools focused on mobile accessibility. Prior to joining Google, Casey received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from Villanova University.

Celal Ziftci Born and raised in Turkey, where he attended Bilkent University, Celal moved to the USA to obtain his graduate degree. He holds a Masters degree from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, and a PhD from the University of California San Diego, both in Computer Science. He is currently working at the Google New York office with a focus on developer productivity and automation. He is interested in software testing, software analytics, program analysis, and applications of data mining and machine learning in these fields

Chris Sosa Chris Sosa is a software engineer who has been at Google for the past 6 years. Over the past year, he has been leading the ChromeOS Infrastructure team. Before that, he worked on projects in Chrome OS both in Infrastructure as well as on the product-side including leading the Autoupdate Team. His technical background is in distributed systems - specifically Grid computing. These days, Chris cycles almost daily to work and loves to bring his much adored toy poodle Zelda with him.

Dan Giovannelli Dan Giovannelli is a Software Engineer, Tools and Infrastructure at Google, where he focuses on building test tooling for display ads. He's been a Googler for two years, and prior to that worked in a Philadelphia-area lab studying the cognitive neuroscience of autism. His particular area of expertise is iOS, where he enjoys digging in to the minutiae of the platform and complaining loudly about some of Objective-C's more bizarre edges. When he isn't doing that (though seriously, four slightly different values for NULL? I mean, really?) he likes cooking, playing bass (poorly), brewing beer, and exploring Brooklyn.

Giulia Guidi Giulia is a test automation engineer at Nest Labs. She recently received her Masters in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford. Together with her team, she develops a global portfolio of tools that standardize testing procedures across different individuals at Nest. Her responsibilities span from circuit design to embedded software.

Hans Kuosmanen Hans is a Test Solutions Vice President and Partner at OptoFidelity. He has a great combination of wide-scale technical expertise in engineering, management, sales and operations. Hans has been working at OptoFidelity for over 8 years and is extremely passionate about robotics, testing and programming in Python. Prior to OptoFidelity he has been successfully leading global engineering teams and design projects in several high-tech companies for over a decade.

Jouko Kaasila Jouko has had a front row seat in experiencing all phases of the mobile app revolution and is currently building Testdroid’s mobile test automation business in US. While Jouko is extremely busy with managing his team and engaging customers, he always finds time for spirited discussions on the mobile market, technologies and the world in general. During the past five years he has been working together with top mobile brands to build and scale up the Testdroid Cloud – a real mobile device cloud that spans over a thousand real devices from all geographic markets, OS versions and platforms. As a big believer in the power of open source technologies he is well versed with open source test automation, specifically in the mobile context. He strives to provide thought leadership and sounds strategies with organizations looking to improve their mobile testing process.

Karin Lundberg Karin Lundberg recently joined the Engineering Effectiveness team at Twitter after spending almost 7 years working on build and test infrastructure, frameworks and much more at Google. At Twitter, Karin focuses on building tools, frameworks, and infrastructure that will help developers write higher quality code for all parts of the Twitter stack. When not busy improving the effectiveness of engineers at Twitter, Karin likes to spend time with her family and enjoy the nice Californian weather (very different from Denmark where she grew up).

Laura Inozemtseva Laura is a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her main research interest is improving the testing process, though she also works in mobile security and privacy. She has received a number of awards for her work in these areas, including a Microsoft PhD fellowship. She will be finishing her PhD next year and looks forward to what's next.

Matt Garrett Matt is an Engineer working on Google's Frameworks Team. He owns and maintain's RpcReplay's implementation and works to integrate it into test environments. Matt is always seeking to increase his areas of expertise and has done so throughout his two years at Google.

Maxim Guenis I have over a decade of experience in the trenches as an automation and performance engineer, I worked across a number of industries, from government - military and financial services to small start-ups. During my career I founded and managed Automation groups in companies like Tescom, ITG, eToro and Supersonic. I'm patient about Automation and believe that everything can be automated : "Run automation tests from first line and keep your automation green" I'm also fan of cooking and addicted to culinary TV shows.

Minal Mishra Minal Mishra is an Engineering Manager at Netflix. In the past, he has worked with Xbox Live ecommerce and xbox music/video services teams at Microsoft. At Netflix, he has been involved with teams that focused on development of automation for client software on several key platforms. Currently, he is part of an effort to improve the software delivery efficiency of Netflix's streaming player. Outside work, he enjoys playing tennis and hanging out with his infant.

Murali Krishman Ramanathan Murali Krishna Ramanathan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Automation at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. His research interests broadly span the areas of software engineering, programming languages and scalable system design. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Purdue University. Previously, he was affiliated with Coverity and helped build program analysis tools for detecting concurrency bugs. In his spare time, like most other San Franciscans, he used to participate in endurance sports and has finished an Ironman triathlon.

Natalia Leinonen Natalia is a Software Engineer at OptoFidelity. She has over 5 years of experience developing test automation and UI performance measurement solutions for R&D labs and production lines. Most of her work is related to non-intrusive testing of mobile devices. At OptoFidelity non-intrusive approach means that all interactions are simulated with actual robot fingers and devices are monitored with cameras and sensors. Natalia holds an MSc from Tampere University of Technology and her Master's thesis was about robot assisted model-based testing of graphical user interfaces.

Patrick Lam This year, Patrick is doing research at ETH Zurich while on sabbatical from his regular gig as Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. His research goals include making program analysis tools more usable and accessible to developers. Patrick is also exploring the Swiss Alps this year (skis, ropes) while on sabbatical.

Puneet Khanduri Puneet Khanduri is a Staff Engineer and Tech Lead within the Engineering Effectiveness team at Twitter. His team's work at Twitter focuses on building tools and frameworks that help other engineering teams build more resilient systems. Prior to Twitter, Puneet worked at Oracle Labs where he built a real-time analytics platform for live sensor data. Puneet has also worked as a researcher at Sun Labs and on network and microprocessor architectures.

Roussi Rossev Roussi Roussev is a software engineer in the content group at Splunk, where he shipped some of the most popular core apps. Previously, Roussi was one of the first virtualization solutions engineers at VMware where he worked on interesting applications of virtualization to testing, security and availability problems. During his graduate studies he held numerous internships at Google, Microsoft Research and a security startup.

Sam Gordon Sam has been helping Nest build custom hardware and embedded software solutions for complex cross-product automation problems since mid-2014. His previous experience includes hardware engineering at a consumer electronics startup and electronics systems design for deep space satellites and rovers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In his spare time, Sam enjoys surfing, rock climbing, and working on his house.

Dr.Shauvik Roy Choudhary Dr. Shauvik Roy Choudhary is the Founder of CheckDroid, where he works on building cutting edge testing and support tools for Android apps. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and his work was focused on techniques for cross-platform testing and maintenance for web and mobile applications. Prior to his PhD, Shauvik received his MS in Information Security from Georgia Tech and his BE in Computer Engineering from Mumbai University. Over the years, he has held several development, testing and research positions at companies including, Google, Fujitsu Labs of America, Yahoo! Inc., IBM Research, Goldman Sachs and HSBC Software. For more information about Shauvik, visit his website at http://shauvik.com.

Simran Basi Simran Basi is a silicon valley native who naturally fell in love with coding by growing up in the tech center of the world. Since completing his education, he has been a software engineer who has been at Google for the past 3.5 years working on ChromeOS Infrastructure. He loves working on hardware projects that require low level programming and tinkering with actual devices. His major recent projects include MobLab, a mobile test lab for ChromeOS Hardware partners, and developing the testing framework for Project Brillo, Google’s OS for IOT. On weekends you’ll find Simran at most major concerts or enjoying his days playing video games.

Toni Chang Toni is passionate about test strategy and food. She is currently a Google Test Engineer and previously a Microsoft SDET. Having been in the test discipline for 10 years, she has observed her share of broken test practices; including systems that is tested only in isolation and breaks the moment you try to integrate, or systems that are so intertwined that can only be tested E2E. To address the former, she has published a Think Week paper called “System Integration Test on Paper” to advocate for early integration and drove team adoption. Now seeing the opposite side of the challenge, she is driving awareness for component test, and occasionally letting out the truth that we really need them both.

Usman Abdullah Usman joined Google/Nest as a Software Engineer in February 2015. Prior to this he was a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft on the Bing Images and Multimedia Team working on both the frontend and backend for Bing Multimedia. Currently Usman is engaged in profiling and helping improve NestCam’s Motion Detection algorithms. His wide range of work experiences at Microsoft, Qualcomm, Trustwave and Blue Coat Systems has enabled him to come up with solutions to complex problems and exhibit his technical creativity both inside and outside of work.

Yabin Kang My name is Yabin Kang, I have been working with LinkedIn for 3 years as a Test Engineer in Consumer Group. Worked on a lot of projects such as backend service testing, rest service integration test framework and mobile test framework integration (KIF/Espresso). Before Linkedin, I worked for Microsoft as a SDET for 6 years, also involved mostly in testing products and Test Development/Enhancement area as well.

Yvette Nameth Yvette Nameth is a Test Engineer / Manager in the Google Seattle office working on Google Maps. Since joining Google in 2007, Yvette has also contributed to AdWords, internal testing tools, and Google for Education. Prior to Google, Yvette was a Software Engineer at Amazon and a Computer Science teacher at an all-girls high school. She’s a graduate of Dartmouth College with a BA in Computer Science.