Dr. Will Roper is the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. As the Air Force’s Service Acquisition Executive, Dr. Roper is responsible for and oversees Air Force research, development and acquisition activities totaling an annual budget in excess of $60 billion for more than 550 acquisition programs. In this position, Dr. Roper serves as the principal adviser to the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force for research and development, test, production and modernization efforts within the Air Force.

Dr. Scott Parazynski is an American physician and a former NASA astronaut. A veteran of five Space Shuttle flights and seven spacewalks, Parazynski’s latest mission was STS-120 in October, 2007 – highlighted by a dramatic, unplanned EVA to repair a live solar array. In May 2016 he was inducted into the United States Astronaut Hall of Fame. He retired from NASA in March 2009 to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities in the private sector, and he is currently the CEO of a technology start-up. He is the first person to have both flown in space and summited Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth.

Peiter Zatko, better known as Mudge, is a network security expert, open source programmer, writer, and a hacker. He was the most prominent member of the high-profile hacker think tank the L0pht as well as the long-lived computer and culture hacking cooperative the Cult of the Dead Cow. While involved with the L0pht, Mudge contributed significantly to disclosure and education on information and security vulnerabilities. In addition to pioneering buffer overflow work, the security advisories he released contained early examples of flaws in the following areas: code injection, race condition, side-channel attack, exploitation of embedded systems, and cryptanalysis of commercial systems. He was the original author of the password crackingsoftware L0phtCrack. In 2010 Mudge accepted a position as a program manager at DARPA where he oversaw cyber security research. In 2013 Mudge went to work for Google in their Advanced Technology & Projects division.

Dave Aitel is a computer security professional. He joined the NSA as a research scientist aged 18 where he worked for six years before being employed as a consultant at @stake for three years. In 2002 he founded a security software company, Immunity, where he is now the CTO. Aitel co-authored several books, including The Hacker’s Handbook, The Shellcoder’s Handbook, and Beginning Python. He is also well known for writing several security tools, including SPIKE (a block-based fuzzer), SPIKE Proxy (a man-in-the-middle web application assessment tool), and Unmask (a tool to do statistical analysis on text to determine authorship).