Keynotes Bios & Abstracts

Prior to his role with Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks, Sebastian was Director of Technology Strategy at Nokia. He was responsible for strategy topics on technology with business impact across devices and services. Recently he has lead business and technology strategy projects in the areas of wireless broadband access, software platforms and digital rights management. Sebastian has also responsible for leading new and innovative early stage technology projects within Nokia. In this role he was responsible for a wide range of activities ranging early stage technology selection and market making to standardization and commercialization.

Sebastian joined Nokia in 2003 from McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy, where he was leading strategy projects. Sebastian holds a M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and Management from the Helsinki University of Technology.

Walter Bender is the founder of Sugar Labs, a non-profit foundation that serves as a support base for the community of educators and software developers who are extending the Sugar user interface. Sugar is designed to enhance the primary educational experience by emphasizing collaboration and expression. Prior to that, Bender was president for software and content of the One Laptop per Child association, where he developed and deployed technologies that are revolutionizing how the world's children engage in learning. Before taking a leave of absence from MIT, Walter was executive director of the MIT Media Laboratory.

Making Sugar Sweet: Experiences in Creating a Great User Experience with UI Design

Over a 20+ year career at MIT Media Labs, One Laptop Per Child, and now Sugar Labs, Walter Bender has researched the interactive styles associated with online and traditional media and extending them onto computers. He has participated in much of the pioneering research in the field of electronic publishing, and personalized, interactive multimedia, particularly including news. Walter will share his experiences from MIT, OLPC, and Sugar Labs relating to user interaction with computers and its importance on UI design.

Lars Knoll is responsible for Qt’s R&D organization with teams in Oslo, Berlin and Brisbane. Lars has had different roles in former Trolltech’s engineering organization, working his way up from software engineer to leading the engineering team in Oslo as Director before taking over the role as Director of Global R&D.
Lars has been an active member of the KDE community and the architect behind KDE's html rendering engine KHTML. KHTML has later been taken by Apple and used as foundation for their browser Safari and the WebKit open source project. Lars holds a PhD in physics from the University of Heidelberg. A German national, he lives with his family in Oslo.

Matthias is a well-known member of the Free Software Community. He created the LyX document-processor and is a founder of the K Desktop Environment (KDE), which aims at providing Linux and Unix systems with a familiar and friendly graphical user interface. KDE is built with the Qt toolkit created by Trolltech, now Nokia Qt Development Frameworks. As VP Engineering, Matthias lead the Qt development team during the creation of Qt 4. Today he is the head of Nokia Qt Development Framework's R&D office in Berlin, working among others on Qt Creator.

Juha joined Nokia in 2002 and has been working in with application & service creation, technology management and product management for communicators and E-series smartphones.

Juha holds an M.Sc degree in software development and digital technologies from Tampere University of Technology as well as an MBA in General Management from Helsinki School of Economics.

Tapani has been working as a software developer and architect for more than 20 years. In Nokia he has been the chief architect of the network management systems before joining Nokia Mobile Phones on 2001. There he has had several architect positions in different S60 and Symbian platform related organizations. Today he is heading the Qt Technology Management.