The conference is proudly to have the following keynote presenters:
- Dr. Swee Lim, Distinguished Engineer at LinkedIn, San Francisco Bay Area, USA
- Dr. Jim Webber, Chief Scientist with Neo Technology, London, UK
- Prof. Kees Dorst, Director, Designing Out Crime Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Dr. Swee Lim, Architect at LinkedIn
Dr. Swee Lim is a Distinguished Engineer at LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network on the internet with more than 200 million members in over 200 countries. He drives architecture and infrastructure projects to improve agility, efficiency, availability and scalability of the Linkedin site.
Previously, he was a Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect of Yahoo! Search where he re-architected the online serving systems to make it more dynamic and flexible to enable new generation of features and more experimentation with production data. Before Yahoo!, he was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems focusing on high available and scaleable distributed systems.
Swee received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
A practitioner’s view on the role of an architect and architecture – Mr. Swee Lim, Linkedin
In this presentation, I will share my experience as an architect at Linkedin and previously at Yahoo! Search. In the first part, I will share what I have learned regarding an architect’s role, desired skills, and how they can influence chances of success of projects, especially large complex projects involving large teams. In the second part, I will talk about our approach to designing and evolving the architecture of a large-scale website like Linkedin. Since this is a practitioner’s view, the talk will highlight what I find to be important but often overlooked. Some will be obvious. Others may be controversial. Finally, I will also present some alternate viewpoints and the associated trade-offs.
Dr. Jim Webber, Chief Scientist with Neo Technology
Dr. Jim Webber is Chief Scientist with Neo Technology the company behind the popular open source graph database Neo4j, where he where he works on R&D for highly scalable graph databases and writes open source software. Jim has written two books on integration (Developing Enterprise Web Services – An Architect’s Guide) and distributed systems (REST in Practice) and his latest book is Graph Databases which focusses on the Neo4j database. His blog is located at http://jimwebber.org and he tweets often @jimwebber.
Surfing the Infinite Monkey Theorem for Fun and Profit – Dr. Jim Webber, Neo Technology
Neo4j is the world’s leading graph database. It’s core strengths are its extensively production-hardened code and an large and enthusiastic community of users and contributors. Still, Neo4j is a commercial open source database and its users must, rightly, be able to depend on it to run their own sophisticated business systems, processes and data analyses. Because of this, there exists a tension between the expectations open-source user community users and contributors, and the technology media who, generally, require exciting new features to solve their emergent problems pitted against enterprise users who expect their deployments to be long-lived and unexciting. In the middle of all this is a commercial entity, Neo Technology, whose job is to plot a sane course for the software through the commercial quagmire, maze of open source, the court of public opinion and ultimately towards a sustainable software architecture for the future.
Professor Kees Dorst, Director Designing Out Crime Research Centre, UTS
Kees Dorst was trained as an Industrial Design Engineer at Delft University of Technology. He has worked as a product designer for various design firms and as a researcher, he has studied the ways in which designers work.
Currently, he is Professor of Design Innovation at the University of Technology, Sydney. He also holds a professorship in ‘Entrepreneurial Design of Intelligent Systems’ at Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands. He is founder and director of the UTS Design Innovation Research Centre and the NSW Designing Out Crime center. He lectures at universities and design schools throughout the world.
He has published numerous articles and books – most recently the books ‘Understanding Design – 175 reflections on being a designer’ (2006) and ‘Design Expertise’ (2009) with Bryan Lawson. Currently he is working on an invited book for MIT Press, ‘Frame Creation – a design-based methodology for driving innovation’.
The principles and practices of Design – Prof. Dr.Ir. Kees Dorst
In this wide-ranging presentation, Kees Dorst will investigate the fundamental principles of design as a specific type of problem solving process with its own underlying a logic, and show that this type of thinking leads to a different, ‘fluid’ form of rationality.
The in-depth understanding of these principles empowers us to develop new and interesting forms of design practice, which can be applied in problem areas way beyond those of the traditional designing disciplines. These new design-based practices have been applied in various contexts. Their ability to spark new approaches to the toughest and most complex problems will be illustrated in a wide variety of case studies. These ‘war stories’ convincingly show that by adopting these ways of thinking we can radically extend our problem solving repertoire, in ways that are very relevant – and indeed, sorely needed in this day and age.