Speakers

AbdelKarim Mardini Product Manager, Middle East/North Africa, Google . Mardini joined Google as Product Manager for the Middle East & North Africa in December 2009. He is working closely with the engineering and business teams to define the regional strategy, develop new products, and enhance existing ones. Mardini comes to Google from OpenCraft, a company he co-founded in 2004 in Cairo, Egypt. OpenCraft is an open source software firm specializing in web development based on open source technologies and frameworks in particular Drupal, Django, and MySQL. His responsibilities included technical leadership, project management, client relationships, and managing the company's software development processes and IT infrastructure. Mardini holds a BSc in Computer Science from The American University in Cairo. Prior to founding OpenCraft, he held various development and research positions at SportsMEDIA Technology Corporation in North Carolina, the Distributed and Real-Time Systems group at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and Step 9 Software Corporation in Washington DC.

Ahmed Hashim is software consultant and Java developer with about 6 years of experience developing Java/JEE application with passion. Ahmed has been rewards as Sun Java Champion based on his contributions for Java community and universities. Ahmed is frequent speaker in local events and universities evangelizing Java technologies and Open Source Software. Ahmed has experience in many Java technologies like JSP, Servlets, JSF, Struts, AJAX, DWR, RichFaces, Hibernate, Spring, EJB, JMS, XML, Webservices, ESB, BPM, BPEL. He is working as OSS/BSS principal consultant for Oracle Communications Global Business Unit,EMEA.

Ahmad Hamzawi , Head of Engineering, Middle East/North Africa, Google Inc. Ahmad Hamzawi is the head of engineering at Google for the Middle East and North Africa region. He is currently leading engineering teams focused on building and adapting products for the Arab world. Ahmad joined Google in 2006 from KNOVA Software in Silicon Valley where he was Senior Director of Engineering. At KNOVA, he led the onshore and offshore engineering development and operations of an award-winning enterprise search and knowledge management product. Previously, he managed engineering teams of early stage startup companies as well as large enterprise companies such as Autodesk and Gateway. He has also taught courses in the Department of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. He holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science. ?

Alaa Mohssen Nassef has six years of experience in software development. He regularly gives technical sessions and technical training to his colleagues and subordinates at his company (EDC), and he usually did that while at Harf Information Technology (where he was also the technical sessions moderator responsible for choosing weekly session topics and speakers). He has contributed the the JSR 303 reference implementation (Hibernate Validator 4) by implementing several of the standard constraint validators, writing their unit tests, and sending some patches to solve some bugs in the core of the validation framework. He also created several custom constraints and validators, a client side validation solution using JSR 303 annotations and an integration layer with Spring.

Amr ElAdawy is a Software Engineer at Etisalat Egypt. Over 5 years experience in Software Engineering, Amr has been working with many technologies like J2EE, ASP.NET, J2ME, PHP and more. Based on deep understanding of web development concepts, wide background in social networking application and Mobile Applications, Amr is currently working in Telecommunications field specially in Sales applications for Etisalat. Amr is the founder of the Jspx Java web framework, that is an open source free web RAD in java.

Ed Burns is currently a Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc. At Sun, Ed leads a team of web experts from across the industry in developing JavaServer™ Faces Technology through the Java Community Process and in open source. His areas of professional interests include web application frameworks, AJAX, reducing complexity, test driven development, requirements gathering, and computer supported collaborative work. Before working on JavaServer Faces, Ed worked on a wide variety of client and server side web technologies since 1994, including NCSA Mosaic, Mozilla, the Sun Java Plugin, Jakarta Tomcat, the Cosmo Create HTML authoring tool, and the web transport layer in the Irix operating system from Silicon Graphics. Ed has a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. While at UIUC, Ed took a minor in Germanic Studies and worked for IBM in the co-op program, where he first aquired a fondness for computer history by working on System 370 Office Software. Ed has presented many times at Sun's JavaOne conference, given a keynote address at the W-JAX conference in Munich, Germany, and also has spoken at numerous Java User Group meetings.

Fred Sauer Fred Sauer is a Developer Advocate at Google where most of his time is devoted to Google App Engine and Google-Web-Toolkit. He is the author of various GWT related open source projects including gwt-dnd (providing in browser Drag and Drop capabilities), gwt-log (an advanced logging framework) and gwt-voices (for cross browser sound support). Fred has dedicated much of his career to Java related development, with an increasing focus on Web 2.0 technologies. As a consultant he has worked on a wide variety of projects in North America, Asia and Europe, primarily in the financial and billing industry.

Haitham Gamal is an assistant lecturer in the Faculty of Computers and Informatics Zagazig University, Freelancer instructor and developer. He gained his master degree in computer science in the field of bioinformatics (protein folding prediction). During his five years of experience, Haitham Gamal worked as a Java SE and Java EE instructor on a continuous basis, a part-time java developer in a wide range of projects (currently: Electronic Health Care System of 6th October Governorate) and occasionally a speaker in local events and local TV programs. Recently, the ORION team released their first release of their open-source project; MVC-Generator. Haitham Gamal is the administrator of this project. Haitham is married and waiting for his first child

Hazem Saleh has six years of experience in JEE and open source technologies. He is an Apache MyFaces committer. He is the initiator of many components in the MyFaces projects such as Tomahawk CAPTCHA, Commons ExportActionListener, Media, PasswordStrength and others. He is the founder of GMaps4JSF (an integration project that integrates both Google Maps with Java ServerFaces) and Mashups4JSF (an integration project that integrates famous mashup services with Java ServerFaces). He is the author of the "The Definitive Guide to Apache MyFaces and Facelets (Apress)" book. He is an author of many JSF articles and a JSF public speaker. He is now working for IBM Egypt as a staff engineer. He is recognized as a SME (Subject Matter Expert) in web 2.0 technologies.

Cagatay Civici is the founder and project lead of popular PrimeFaces Component Suite, PMC member of open source JSF implementation Apache MyFaces and committer of Atmosphere Ajax Push/Comet Framework. He's a recognized speaker in international conferences including JSFSummit, JSFDays and many local events. Cagatay is also an author and technical reviewer of several books regarding web application development with Java and JSF. As an experienced trainer, he has trained over 75 java developers on Java EE technologies mainly JSF, Spring, Seam and JPA. Cagatay is currently working as a consultant, mentor and instructor in the UK.