Keynote: Fireside Chat with Rick Riobol, Nithya Ruff, & Mike Crisafulli, Comcast

Keynote: Fireside Chat with Rick Rioboli, SVP & CIO; Comcast, Nithya Ruff, Sr. Director, Open Source Practice, Comcast & Mike Crisafulli, SVP, Platform & Product Services, Comcast About Abby Kearns With nearly twenty years in the tech world, Abby Kearns is a true veteran of the industry. Her lengthy career has spanned product marketing, product management and consulting across Fortune 500 companies and startups alike. As Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation, Abby helms the ecosystem of developers, users and applications running on Cloud Foundry, and works closely with the Board to drive the Foundation’s vision and grow the open source project. Prior to Cloud Foundry Foundation, Abby focused on Pivotal Cloud Foundry as part of the Product Management team at Pivotal. She spent eight years at Verizon where she led Product Management and Product Marketing teams dedicated to the early days of cloud services. In her free time, Abby enjoys indulging in food and wine, and spending time with her husband and son. About Mike Crisafulli Mike Crisafulli serves as the Senior Vice President of Product & Platform Services. In this role, Mike works closely with business owners to develop strategic plans, systems architecture and to ensure on-time roadmap delivery of systems that have major impact on Comcast entire customer lifecycle. His responsibilities include Activation and Provisioning across all products, Employee and Customer User Interfaces, Repair & Support, Core Services, Workforce Management, DevOps Tools and Infrastructure, and Employee Engagement, inclusive of systems that use artificial intelligence to help us better interact with customers Prior to joining Comcast in 2008, Mike spent 13 years at AOL where he most served as SVP of Application and Web Services. Mike has a bachelor’s degree in Information Systems from George Mason University and an MBA from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. About Nithya Ruff Nithya A. Ruff is the Senior Director for Comcast’s Open Source Practice. She is responsible for growing Open Source culture inside of Comcast and engagement with external communities. Prior to this, she started and grew the Western Digital’s Open Source Strategy Office. She first glimpsed the power of open source while at SGI in the 90s and has been building bridges between hardware developers and the open source community ever since. She’s also held leadership positions at Wind River (an Intel Company), Synopsys, Avaya, Tripwire and Eastman Kodak. At Wind River, she led a team of product managers in managing a world class embedded Linux distribution and was a key member of the Yocto Project advocacy team on the board. Nithya has been a passionate advocate and a speaker for opening doors to new people in Open Source for many years. She has also been a promoter of valuing diverse ways of contributing to open source such as in marketing, legal and community. You can often find her on social media promoting dialogue on diversity and open source. She has spoken at multiple conferences such as OSCON, All things Open, SCALE, Grace Hopper, OpenStack, VMWorld, OS Strategy Summit and Red Hat Summit on the business and community of open source. In recognition of her work in open source both on the business and community side, she was named to CIO magazine’s most influential women in open source list. She was recently one of 4 people to win the 2017 OReilly Open Source Award for exceptional contribution to open source. Nithya graduated with an MS in Computer Science from NDSU and an MBA from the University of Rochester, Simon Business School. She lives in the bay area and is a proud mother of two daughters. You can follow her on twitter @nithyaruff. About Rick Rioboli As SVP & CIO of Comcast Cable, Rick Rioboli leads the information technology organization responsible for the technology, systems and tools that support the customer lifecycle (sales, activation, billing, support, etc.), as well as employee-facing functions such as human resources, finance, and workplace information technology. Rick and his team are responsible for leading the technology strategy and execution of Comcast’s customer experience transformation, which strives to make the customer experience simple, consistent and digital. Rick has over 20 years of experience leading product and engineering teams focused on bringing innovative, customer-facing products and technologies to market. His teams have been awarded two Technology and Engineering Emmys as recognition for the impact of their work on television engineering: Video Personal Recommendations on the X1 platform (2015) and the Voice Remote on the X1 platform (2017). Rick received his Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University and his Masters in Computer Engineering from Villanova University. https://www.cloudfoundry.org/