Donald Miner serves as a Solutions Architect at EMC Greenplum, advising and helping customers implement and use Greenplum's big data systems. Prior to working with Greenplum, Dr. Miner architected several large-scale and mission-critical Hadoop deployments with the U.S. Government as a contractor. He is also involved in teaching, having previously instructed industry classes on Hadoop and a variety of artificial intelligence courses at the University of Maryland, BC. Dr. Miner received his PhD from the University of Maryland, BC in Computer Science, where he focused on Machine Learning and Multi-Agent Systems in his dissertation.
Adam Shook is a Software Engineer at ClearEdge IT Solutions, LLC, working with a number of big data technologies such as Hadoop, Accumulo, Pig, and ZooKeeper. Shook graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) and took a job building a new high-performance graphics engine for a game studio. Seeking new challenges, he enrolled in the graduate program at UMBC with a focus on distributed computing technologies. He quickly found development work as a U.S. government contractor on a large-scale Hadoop deployment. Shook is involved in developing and instructing training curriculum for both Hadoop and Pig. He spends what little free time he has… working on side projects and playing video games.