OSS 2019 Invited Speakers

Professor Brian Fitzgerald is Director of Lero – the Irish Software Research Centre, where he previously held the role of Chief Scientist. Prior to that he was Vice-President Research at the University of Limerick. He also holds an endowed professorship, the Krehbiel Chair in Innovation in Business & Technology.

His research interests include software development, encompassing open source and inner source, crowdsourcing software development, agile and lean software development, and global software development. His publications include 15 books, and over 150 peer-reviewed articles in the leading international venues in both Information Systems and Software Engineering, including MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methodology.

Prior to taking up an academic position, he worked in the software industry for about 12 years, in a variety of sectors (including finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, bespoke software development) in a number of countries (Ireland, Belgium, Germany).

Peter C. Rigby is a researcher whose goal is to understand how developers produce successful software. He was the first researcher to quantify the Apache and Linux code review process and to understand how many “eyeballs” actually reviewed code. He has also quantified how personality traits of core developers influence projects and how developers deal with “bikeshed” discussions. He is an associate professor at Concordia University in Montreal.

Marc Khouzam is Solutions Architect at City of Montreal. Besides focusing on continuous deployment towards Kubernetes, he is part of the City’s open-source committee and was heavily involved in putting in place the recent open-source policy) of the City of Montreal.

Previously, while working at Ericsson, he spent 10 years as a maintainer of the open-source C/C++ Eclipse project and was co-lead of the project for the last 3 of those years. In the last decade, Marc has contributed to multiple other open-source projects such as GDB, Git, Helm, Kong and others.

Bianca Tomazeli is passionate about how digital innovation leads to citizen’s life net positive impact. For over ten years, she has been engaged in Montreal IT Services. Her role as Senior Advisor under the Technology, Architecture, Innovation, and Security Direction has led her to develop a broader knowledge of IT strategies and digital innovation. Her diligent interest and directional decision thinking accelerate the breakthrough towards the aimed digital evolvement.

Her current leading projects at Montreal IT Services comprise open source development, municipal innovation, IT policy maker, market analysis and partnership development. These projects are contributing to Montreal's digital innovation strategy and will become a reference for other municipalities.

Patrick Masson currently serves as the General Manager with the Open Source Initiative, after working in higher education technology for over twenty years, including roles as Director of the UCLA Media Lab, CIO within The State University of New York, and most recently, CTO at UMassOnline. Patrick is an Adjunct Professor at the State University of New York at Albany, teaching Open Source Principles and Practices within the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Patrick has worked to promote the awareness and adoption of Open Source Software, particularly within education, throughout his career. He served on the Jasig Foundation's Board of Directors, and is currently on the Apereo Foundation's Advisory Council, as well as Brandeis University's Graduate Professional Studies Advisory Board. He is the co-founder of the Educause Constituency Group on Openness. Patrick was also elected to his local Board of Education in 2014.

Keynotes