alphabetical by first name, links provided by speakers.

2017 Open Hardware Summit Speakers include:

Josh Datko is the owner of Cryptotronix, an embedded security consultancy. As a submarine officer, he was sent to Afghanistan to ensure that the Tailiban did not develop a submarine force–mission accomplished! He wrote a book on BeagleBones and crypto hardware which not many people have read and presented a better way to make a hardware implant at DEFCON which hopefully helped the NSA improve their spying.

Kashif Ali is the creator of the OpenCellular project – aiming to solve the rural connectivity problem using open-source hardware and software. Kashif Ali received his PhD from School of Computing, Queen’s University and post-doctoral from University of California, Berkeley. At UCB, he co-founded Endaga, a company focused on Community cellular infrastructure, which aim to allowing local community to build, deploy and operate their own cellular networks, in developing countries. His interest lies in ICTD, open-source hardware, and rural infrastructure.

Dr Laura James is an engineer with varied experience in innovative organizations and sectors, focused on enabling new technologies to help people and society. She is Technology Principal at Doteveryone, a think tank fighting for a fairer internet. Laura is also a co-founder of Field Ready, an NGO meeting humanitarian aid through local manufacturing. She is a founding director of the Digital Life Collective, a global co-operative to build and support technology people can trust. She co-founded Makespace, a community workshop and inventing shed in Cambridge, and was previously CEO of Open Knowledge International, a non-profit network unlocking knowledge to empower people. Laura was the first employee and VP Engineering at AlertMe.com, designing and shipping one of the first connected home systems. At another startup, Evi.com, she lead the team training the conversational search AI (which now forms the basis of Amazon’s Alexa). Laura has also worked in R&D at AT&T Labs in the US and UK, and as Chief Operating Officer at CARET, a dynamic innovation department of the University of Cambridge, developing open source systems to support teaching and research. Laura holds Masters and PhD degrees in Engineering from the University of Cambridge, received the Royal Academy of Engineering Leadership Award and a NESTA Crucible Fellowship, and is a Chartered Engineer. She is an advisor to Weir PLC, Good Night Lamp, Polysolar, and ContentMine.

Maria Frangos is an interaction designer engaged in both practice-based work and design research activities. She as20 years professional experience and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Design and a Master of Design in Industrial Design. Over the last several years, she been working as a design consultant in a product design environment for the home energy sector. She is also a core member of Breathing Games, a collaborative project promoting respiratory health through collectively managed and freely available resources, such as open science instruments, free/libre games and knowledge. Areas of interest / specialisation include UX design (User Experience), mobile applications, connected devices / IoT (Internet of Things), collaborative design / participatory processes, agile methodologies, user testing, design for empathy, peer-to-peer / open design, open source technologies (especially for open science), collective intelligence. Much of her work centers around facilitating design processes, translating stakeholder needs and transferring / sharing knowledge with participants.

Michael Ossman founded Great Scott Gadgets so that he could manufacture Ubertooth One, the world’s first affordable Bluetooth test tool. Michael does most of the hardware design for GSG products, and he frequently speaks about wireless communication security and other research at information security conferences around the world.

Mikael Arguedas Hardware/Software Engineer, Open Robotics Foundation.
Mikael received his joint MSc from GeorgiaTech and ENSEA (France) in 2015 with a major in Electronics and Computer Engineering and a minor in Computer Science. He worked as a research assistant at GTRI and developed Computer Vision algorithms for detection of rigid and deformable objects. Before that, Mikael received a BS in Embedded Systems, Robotics and RTOS from IUT Cachan in 2011. He has been working on various ROS projects during the last few years. He joined OSRF as an intern in 2015 when he worked on developing a new generation of open hardware/firmware/software sensors for mobile robots. He joined the team full-time in January 2016.

Morgan Quigley Co-founder, Chief Architect, Open Robotics Foundation and is one of the founders of OSRF. He received a PhD in Computer Science in the AI Lab at Stanford University in 2012. His previous work includes contributions to the initial design and implementation of ROS and its ancestors back in ye olden days, and electronics and firmware for sensor-rich, high-performance robot legs and hands. His research interests include creating systems tools to simplify collaboration and enable greater use of open-source software and firmware in modern robotic systems.

Pamela Liou is a designer, technologist, and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Her work examines tensions between craftsmanship, technology and commerce, examining the hidden sociopolitical forces undergirding human labor. Through examination of supply chain, market design, and digital fabrication, Pamela’s work offers alternative modalities for production and distribution. After graduating ITP, She developed Doti, an open source Jacquard Loom, over the course of her residencies at Eyebeam and Museum of Arts and Design. She was a Researcher-in-Residence at DBRS Innovation labs, developing an Ethereum-based protocol for supply-chain matching markets. She currently works as an adjunct profession at Parsons Design and Technology department.

Rianne Trujillo is the lead developer at the Cultural Technology Development Lab (CTDL), part of the Center for Cultural Technology in the Department of Media Arts & Technology at New Mexico Highlands University. Her role at the lab is to develop (mostly) open source exhibits for museums, historic sites, national parks and libraries that contract with the lab. Rianne holds a masters in software design, but loves hardware more! As part of the Dept. of Media Arts & Technology, Rianne teaches classes in experimental interfaces, physical computing, and web languages, mentors interns for CCT’s AmeriCorps Cultural Technology Program, and leads workshops on open source hardware for museums and installation artists. Rianne is currently working with the Las Cruces Museum of Natural History to complete installation of her dinosaur tracking game using OpenCV/Pi/ and a bunch of projectors.

Rob Ryan-Silva is the Director of the DAI Maker Lab. He has more than 20 years of experience working with foreign aid projects to build the capacities of people and institutions in developing countries.

Shah Selbe, an Explorer at the National Geographic Society, is an engineer and conservation technologist who works with communities, NGOs, and developing countries to identify and deploy technologies that can help with their greatest conservation challenges. His projects have integrated crowdsourcing, smartphone apps, drones, satellite data, and sensors to address conservation issues, including illegal poaching and the monitoring of protected areas. He founded Conservify, which uses open source technology to empower local communities to bring innovative tools into how we change our planet’s’ future. He is Principal Investigator for SoarOcean, a grant project funded by National Geographic Society and Lindblad Expeditions to use low-cost conservation drones for coastal monitoring. He is also Principal Engineer/Technologist for the National Geographic’s Okavango Wilderness Project, an ambitious effort to create an open-source environmental monitoring mesh network to monitor Botswana’s pristine Okavango Delta. He is also a National Geographic Society Fellow, New England Aquarium Ocean Conservation Fellow, and PopTech Social Innovation Fellow. Over the next year, he will be deploying live-data sensor systems in Angolan wildernesses, glaciers in Alberta, reefs in Belize, and along a boiling river in Peru. He is currently developing an open source hardware and web open science platform called FieldKit (fieldkit.org) that will help field researchers share live environmental and field data on an interactive site similar to IntoTheOkavango.org. He is building an extensive library of open source sensor systems that can be used in science and conservation research.

Stefanie Wuschitz works at the intersection of research, art and technology, with a particular focus on feminist hackerspaces, open source technology and peer production. She graduated with an MFA in 2006. 2008 she completed her Masters at ITP, TISCH School of the arts at NYU and became Digital Art Fellow at Umeå University in Sweden. 2009 she founded the feminist hackerspace Miss Baltazar’s Laboratory in Vienna, encouraging technology that is developed from a female perspective. In 2014 she finished her PhD with the title ‘Feminist Hackerspaces. A Research on Feminist Space Collectives in Open Culture’ at the Vienna University of Technology. 2015 to 2016 she held Post-Doc positions at the University of Applied Arts and University of Technology, Vienna, and co-edited the publication ‘Openism. Conversations on Open Hardware’. Since March 2015 Stefanie is part of a research group at the University of Michigan (School of Information) and RIAT (Research Institute for Art and Technology) in Vienna.

Toni Klopfenstein is the Engineering Quality Assurance Manager at SparkFun Electronics, a leading manufacturer and retailer of open-source embedded electronics. She also served on the Open Source Hardware Association board, and has been the Open Hardware Summit Sponsorship Chair for the last two years. Toni received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Colorado.