Ozalp is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bologna. He received a Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California at Berkeley. Ozalp’s virtual memory extensions to AT&T Unix as a graduate student at UC Berkeley became the basis for a long line of “BSD Unix” distributions. He is the recipient of the 1982 Sakrison Memorial Award (together with Bill Joy), 1989 UNIX International Recognition Award and 1993 USENIX Association Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the Unix system community and to Open Industry Standards. In 2002 Ozalp was made a Fellow of the ACM for his “contributions to fault-tolerant distributed computing, BSD Unix, and for leadership in the European distributed systems community”. In 2007, he co-founded the IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO) conference series and was a member of its Steering Committee from 2007 to 2019. He has served for two decades on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems and Springer Distributed Computing.

Ozalp is the President of ELICSIR Foundation which he founded with colleagues Gianfranco Bilardi, Alessandro Panconesi and Lorenzo Alvisi in 2024.

Flavio is a Full Professor of Computer Science at Sapienza University of Rome, where he earned his PhD in 2010. He has been a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell and a Visiting Scientist at Google. His research spans algorithms, machine learning, and mathematical modeling, with a focus on social networks and the Web. He has received several prestigious awards, including an ERC Starting Grant and the KDD 2015 Best Paper Award. He was awarded the “Best Young Italian Researcher in Theoretical Computer Science” by EATCS in 2014 and has received multiple Google Awards, including two Focused Awards. He has held leadership roles in premier international conferences such as KDD and WWW, and has been part of the program committees of STOC, SODA, PODC, ICALP, NeurIPS, and ICML; he serves as an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Algorithms.

At ELICSIR, he is a mentor for the Orthogonal School.

Matteo earned his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999. His research interests include the theory and practice of parallel algorithms, multi-threaded systems, cache-oblivious algorithms, signal processing, and, more recently, zero-knowledge proofs. He has worked for over a decade in the cloud industry, designing storage and networking systems for some of the leading cloud platforms. His research has earned significant recognition, including the Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software in 1999, the ACM Most Influential PLDI Paper Award in 2008 and 2009, the SPAA Best Paper Award in 2009, and the IEEE FOCS Test of Time Award in 2019.

At ELICSIR, he is a mentor for the Orthogonal School.

Bill Joy is an American computer scientist, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and a key contributor to UNIX development. Born in 1954, he earned degrees from the University of Michigan and UC Berkeley. Joy created the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) version of UNIX, which influenced modern operating systems.

At Sun Microsystems, he design the Network File System (NFS) and helped design the Java programming language. After leaving Sun, Joy joined venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) as a partner, where he focused on investing in green technology and innovative startups.

In 2000 he wrote a cover story for Wired magazine entitled  “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” addressing the ethical implications of advanced technologies.

Bill is a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a named inventor on more than 60 US Patents.

Andrea Lodi is an Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion. He is a member of both the Operations Research and Information Engineering and the Computer Science fields at Cornell University. Before joining Cornell, he was a Herman Goldstine Fellow at the IBM Mathematical Sciences Department, NY in 2005–2006, full professor of Operations Research at DEI, University of Bologna 2007-2015 and Canada Excellence Research Chair in “Data Science for Real-time Decision Making” at Polytechnique Montréal 2015-2022. His main research interests are in Mixed-Integer Linear and Nonlinear Programming and Data Science and his work has received several recognitions including the IBM and Google faculty awards. Andrea is the recipient of the INFORMS Optimization Society 2021 Farkas Prize and has been elected an INFORMS Fellow in 2023. Andrea has been the principal investigator of scientific projects (often involving industrial partners) for Italy, European Union, Canada and USA. In the period 2006-2021, he was a consultant of the IBM CPLEX research and development team, developing CPLEX, one of the leading software for Mixed-Integer Optimization. 

Nicola is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees (both summa cum laude) from the University of Udine and his PhD from the same university in 2017. He has been a postdoc at the Technical University of Denmark and the University of Pisa, and has worked as an assistant professor at LUISS in Rome. His research, which earned him a prestigious ERC starting grant, focuses on algorithms and data structures for the management and analysis of compressed big data, with applications in bioinformatics. Nicola co-authored more than 60 scientific articles and has been an invited speaker at six international conferences in the field. He was awarded as “Best Young Italian Researcher in Theoretical Computer Science” (EATCS) in 2018 and for the “Best PhD Thesis” by the University of Udine in 2017.

At ELICSIR he is a mentor for the Scuola Ortogonale.

Michel Raynal is an Emeritus Professor of Informatics, IRISA, University of Rennes, France. He is an established authority in the domain of concurrent and distributed algorithms and systems. Author of numerous papers on this topic, Michel Raynal is a senior member of Institut Universitaire de France, and a member of Academia Europaea. He was the recipient of the 2015 Innovation in Distributed Computing Award (also known as SIROCCO Prize), recipient of the 2018 IEEE Outstanding Technical Achievement in Distributed Computing Award, and recipient of an Outstanding Career Award from the French chapter of ACM Sigops. He is also Distinguished Chair Professor on Distributed Algorithms at the Polytechnic University (PolyU) of Hong Kong.

Michel Raynal chaired the program committees of the major conferences on distributed computing. He was the recipient of several ”Best Paper” awards of major conferences (including ICDCS 1999, 2000 and 2001, SSS 2009 and 2011, Europar 2010, DISC 2010, PODC 2014). He has also written 13 books on fault-tolerant concurrent (shared memory and message-passing) distributed systems, among which the following trilogy published by Springer: Concurrent Programming: Algorithms: Principles and Foundations (2013), Distributed Algorithms for Message-passing Systems (2013), and Fault-Tolerant Message-Passing Distributed Systems: An Algorithmic Approach Springer (2018). His last book titled Concurrent Crash-prone Shared Memory Systems: a Few Theoretical Notions has been published in 2022. Michel Raynal is also the Series Editor of the Synthesis Lectures on Distributed Computing Theory published by Morgan & Claypool.

Fred B. Schneider is the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He joined Cornell's faculty in Fall 1978 and served as department chair from 2014-2018.

Schneider's research has focused on various aspects of trustworthy systems — systems that will perform as expected, despite failures and attacks. His early work concerned formal methods to aid in the design and implementation of concurrent and distributed systems that satisfy their specifications. He is author of two texts on that subject: On Concurrent Programming (co-authored with D. Gries) and A Logical Approach to Discrete Mathematics. He also is co-author (with R. van Renesse) of chain replication, which is widely used to implement replicated storage in today's cloud systems.  More recently, his interests have turned to system security.

Schneider was named Professor-at-Large at the University of Tromso (Norway) in 1996 and was awarded a Doctor of Science honoris causa by the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2003 for his work in computer dependability and security. The U.S. National Academy of Engineering elected Schneider to membership in 2011, the Norges Tekniske Vitenskapsakademi (Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences) named him a foreign member in 2010, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences elected him to membership in 2017.

In addition, Schneider has testified about cybersecurity research at hearings of the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee (subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats, and Capabilities), as well as the Committee on Science and Technology (subcommittee on Technology and Innovation and subcommittee on Research and Science Education).