MICHAEL MCCANDLESS has been building search engines for over a decade. In 1999,with three other people, he founded iPhrase Technologies, a startup providing usercentric enterprise search engine software, written in Python and C++. After IBM acquired iPhrase in 2005, Michael became involved in Lucene and started contributing patches, becoming a committer in 2006 and PMC member in 2008. Michael received his B.S., M.S and Ph.D. from MIT, and now lives in Lexington, MA along with his wonderful wife, Jane, and four delightful kids, Mia, Kyra, Joel and Kyle. Michael’s blog is at http://chbits.blogspot.com.

ERIK HATCHER codes, writes, and speaks on technical topics that he finds fun and challenging. He has written software for a number of diverse industries using many different technologies and languages. Erik coauthored Java Development with Ant (Manning,2002) with Steve Loughran, a book that has received industry acclaim. Since the release of Erik’s first book, he has spoken at numerous venues including the No Fluff, Just Stuff symposium circuit, JavaOne, O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention, JavaZone, devoxx, user groups, and even sometimes webinars. As an Apache Software Foundation member, he is an active contributor and committer on several Apache projects including Lucene and Solr. Erik proudly presents his favorite technologies passionately, recently notables are Solr, Solritas, Flare, Blacklight, and solr-ruby—preferring to dabble at the intersection of user experiences and Solr. Erik cofounded Lucid Imagination, where he helps carry the torch for open-source search goodness. Erik keeps fit and serene in central Virginia.

OTIS GOSPODNETIC ′ has been a Lucene developer since before Lucene became Apache Lucene. He is the co-founder of Sematext, a company that focuses on providing services and products around search (focusing on Lucene, Solr, and Nutch) and analytics (think BigData, Hadoop, etc.). Otis has given talks about Lucene and Solr over the years and some of his previous technical publications include articles about Lucene, published by O’Reilly Network and IBM developerWorks. Years ago, Otis also wrote To Choose and Be Chosen: Pursuing Education in America, a guidebook for foreigners wishing to study in the United States; it’s based on his own experience. Otis currently lives in New York City where he runs the NY Search & Discovery Meetup.