Dave Thomas, Chief Scientist/CSO, Kx Systems, Co-Founder and past Chairman of Bedarra Research Labs (BRL), creators of the Analyst visual analytics workbench and an ACM Distinguished Engineer. Founder and past CEO of Object Technology International (OTI), becoming CEO of IBM OTI Labs after its sale to IBM. With a unique ability to see the future and translate research into competitive products, he is known for his contributions to Object Technology including IBM VisualAge and Eclipse IDEs, and their Smalltalk and Java virtual machines. Dave is a popular, humorous, albeit opinionated keynote speaker with an impressive breadth of business experience and technical depth. He is a thought leader in large-scale software engineering and a founding director of the Agile Alliance. With close links the R&D community Dave is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University in Canada and held past positions at UQ and QUT in Australia. He has been a business and technical advisor to many technology companies. Dave is founder and chairman of the YOW! conferences, and a GOTO Conference Fellow.