The first batch of confirmed guest speakers for NEO DevCon 2019 has been officially announced, featuring experts from leading enterprises such as Microsoft and Qihoo 360. The DevCon will be held at the Hyatt Regency in Seattle on February 16th and 17th. More details on the event can be found here.

NEO will be represented by its co-founders Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang. Da Hongfei is a key opinion leader in the blockchain industry and acts as an advisor to numerous financial institutions. Erik Zhang is a NEO core developer and author of the dBFT consensus mechanism, with a strong background in information security.

NEO Global Development’s general manager, Johnson Zhao, will also be speaking at the event, alongside NEO Global Capital founding partner, Wayne Zhu. Both have strong backgrounds in finance, with Johnson dedicated to inter-industry communication and blockchain use case integration, and Wayne as a seasoned equity research analyst and crypto asset investor.

From the Microsoft camp, corporate vice president, Steve Guggenheimer, and Xlang program manager Harry Pierson will be in attendance as speakers. Both have worked at Microsoft for over 20 years, with considerable experience between them in leadership roles across its hardware and software ecosystems.

Self-professed geek Dr. Joseph Williams has also accepted an invitation to speak at the event. Dr. Williams is a tech industry veteran, having worked in executive roles at Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. He currently acts as the ICT industry sector lead for Governor Inslee, and is ICT economic development director for the State of Washington.

Dr. Zhiniang Peng, a security researcher from Qihoo 360 core security, will also be speaking at the event. Dr. Peng has published numerous academic papers in the field of information security and is credited with the discovery of several critical software vulnerabilities. Dr. Peng currently focuses on research into blockchain security and applied cryptography.

Smartsheet director and computational philosopher Ted Neward will speak at the DevCon, with fifteen years of experience in the technology industry under his belt. Ted has consulted for multiple industry giants, including Microsoft and IBM, and regularly speaks at conferences around the world.

IT strategy specialist Miha Kralj, currently managing director of Accenture Strategy, will also attend and speak at NEO DevCon. Miha has over 25 years of experience working with senior IT executives, including 6 years at IBM, 15 years at Microsoft and 2 years with Amazon Web Services. Miha specializes in cloud adoption, helping enterprises align their business and technology strategies with the best industry practices.

The final confirmed guest speakers are Sergei Liubich and Dr. Anatoly Bogatyrev, co-founders of NEO SPCC. Sergei is managing the flagship NEO SPCC project, a distributed and decentralized storage platform, with experience working on practical data science problems at Samsung Electronics.

Dr. Anatoly is the technical guru of NEO SPCC, with approximately 10 years of experience working on distributed data storage problems, including work as a senior software engineer in data storage infrastructure at Dell-EMC.

The announcement also noted key topics that will be covered at the event, including but not limited to Layer 2 solutions, distributed storage, and consensus mechanisms.

Tickets for DevCon 2019 may be purchased here. The code ‘I-LOVE-NEO’ may be used to reduce the ticket price to $99, with 100 discounted tickets available on a first-come-first-served basis.

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