Mr. Paul Blinzer works on wide variety of Platform System Software architecture projects and specifically on the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) System Software at Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) as a Fellow in the System Software group. Living in the Seattle/WA area, during his career he has worked in various roles on system level driver development, system SW development, graphics architecture, graphics & compute acceleration since the early '90s. Paul is the chairperson of the "System Architecture Workgroup" of the HSA Foundation. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering (Dipl.-Ing) from TU Braunschweig, Germany. He is also a long-standing ACM & SIGGRAPH member.

Prof. Vijay Janapa Reddi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include system architecture and software design and implementation to address performance, power, energy and reliability issues for mobile and high-performance computing systems. He is the recipient of the Intel Early Career Award and has received Best Paper and Top Picks awards in Computer Architecture. He is also very passionate about STEM education at an early age, particularly involving computer science, and is responsible for a new curriculum that focuses on teaching computer science to 6th graders in the Austin Independent School District, which ties directly into the heart of public education in Austin--Texas, through Arduino-based projects. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University. Please see his webpage at http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~vjreddi/.