Alan Gelfand
Alan is J.B. Duke Professor of Statistics at the Department of Statistical Science
at Duke University. Prof. Gelfand is one of the most accomplished and influential
contemporary statisticians. He has authored more than 280 scholarly articles and
is considered a leading expert in Bayesian computation and spatial statistics.
https://www2.stat.duke.edu/~alan/
Jennifer Bryan
Jenny has been a keen user of R/S for over 20 years and, more recently,
is focusing on development and teaching. She takes special delight in
eliminating the small agonies of data analysis. Jenny works for RStudio
and is on leave from the University of British Columbia, where she is an
Associate Professor of Statistics and stewards the course STAT 545.
Jenny is a member of the R Foundation, serves in the leadership of rOpenSci,
and is part of Forwards, a taskforce working to diversify the community
of R users and developers.
https://www.stat.ubc.ca/~jenny/
https://github.com/jennybc
Ross Ihaka
Ross is a co-founder of 
and Associate-Professor at the Department of
Statistics The University of Auckland. His work has been recognized
by many, both formally and informally, for example, he was awarded the
Pickering Medal by the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2008. His
current work with PhD student Brendan McArdle on an R-like language
has the potential to speed up calculations significantly based on
simple modifications of existing R code. He will be retiring from
academic life in late 2017, and this conference will probably be the last opportunity to hear
him speak publicly on statistical computing.
https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka
Luke Tierney
Luke is Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
at the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at The
University of Iowa, USA. A member of the R core team, he has made
significant contributions to the R engine over many years. These
have included memory management, name spaces, large vector support
and byte code compilation.
https://www.stat.uiowa.edu/~luke
Simon Urbanek
Simon Urbanek is Lead Inventive Scientist at AT&T Research Labs
in New Jersey, USA. Originally from Germany and a PhD student
at the University of Augsburg under the supervision of Antony
Unwin, he is the author of many R packages and other software
in the field of statistical computing. His work has a focus of graphical
techniques and he is the author/contributor of 4 books. He was awarded
the John Chambers Award in 2002 and is a member of the R foundation.
https://urbanek.info/