Syd Bauman
Syd Bauman began working at the Women Writers Project in 1990. Although his title would have you believe that he is a computer programmer, Syd is fond of pointing out that he doesn’t write that much actual code, but usually writes in XSLT, and his programs are always copylefted.

Syd became a hard-core computer user in 1982, and a devotee of descriptive markup two years later. He began using SGML and the TEI when he came to the Women Writers Project. From 2001 to 2007 Syd served as North American editor of the TEI, and is currently on the TEI Technical Council.

David J. Birnbaum
David J. Birnbaum is Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh. Much of his electronic text work intersects with his research in medieval Slavic manuscript studies, but he also often writes about issues in the philosophy of markup.

Steven J. DeRose
Steve DeRose has been working with electronic document and hypertext systems since 1979. He holds degrees in Computer Science and in Linguistics and a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Brown University.

He co-founded Electronic Book Technologies in 1989 to build the first SGML browser and retrieval system, “DynaText”, and has been deeply involved in document standards including XML, TEI, HyTime, HTML 4, XPath, XPointer, EAD, Open eBook, OSIS, NLM and others. He has served as adjunct faculty at Brown and Calvin Universities. He has written many papers, two books, and fifteen patents. Most recently he has been working as a consultant in text analytics.

Peter Flynn
Peter Flynn managed the Academic and Collaborative Technologies Group in IT Services at University College Cork, Ireland until his retirement in 2018. He trained at the London College of Printing and did his MA in computerized planning systems at Central London Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster). He worked in the UK for the Printing and Publishing Industry Training Board as a DP Manager and for United Information Services of Kansas as IT consultant before joining UCC as Project Manager for academic and research computing. In 1990 he installed Ireland's first Web server and concentrated on academic and research publishing support. He has been Secretary of the TeX Users Group, Deputy Director for Ireland of EARN, and a member both of the IETF Working Group on HTML and of the W3C XML SIG; and he has published books on HTML, SGML/XML, and LaTeX. Peter also runs the markup and typesetting consultancy, Silmaril, and is editor of the XML FAQ as well as an irregular contributor to conferences and journals in electronic publishing, markup, and Humanities computing, and has been a regular speaker and session chair at the XML Summer School in Oxford. He completed a late-life PhD in User Interfaces to Structured Documents (https://cora.ucc.ie/handle/10468/1690) with the Human Factors Research Group in Applied Psychology in UCC. He maintains a fairly random semi-technical blog at http://blogs.silmaril.ie/peter.

Amanda Galtman
Amanda Galtman is an independent XML software developer and a maintainer of the XSpec infrastructure. She writes about XSpec at https://medium.com/@xspectacles. Previously, she was an XML software developer at MathWorks.

Mark Gross
Mark Gross is a recognized authority on XML implementation and digital transformations. Mark's experience and leadership focuses on developing and delivering technology-driven solutions. Under his direction, DCL uses the latest innovations in artificial intelligence, including machine learning and natural language processing, to help businesses structure data and content for modern technologies and platforms. He is a frequent speaker on the topics of XML, DITA, AI in scholarly publishing, and content reuse strategies.

Michael Robert Gryk
Dr. Michael R. Gryk is Associate Professor of Molecular Biology and Biophysics at UCONN Health. At UCONN, Michael co-leads a technical research and discovery component of the NMRbox BTRR Center, the mission of which is to foster the computational reproducibility and scientific data re-use of bioNMR data. Michael is also the associate director of the BioMagResBank, the international repository for bioNMR research data. He is also a doctoral student at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where his broad research interests are in provenance, workflows, digital curation and preservation, reproducibility, and scientific data re-use. Michael is also a participant of the W3C Invisible Markup group.

Ronald Haentjens Dekker
Ronald Haentjens Dekker is a software architect and lead engineer of the Computational Modelling for Textual Sources (ComTES) at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. As a software architect, he is responsible for translating research questions into technology or algorithms and explaining to researchers and management how specific technologies will influence their research. He has worked on transcription and annotation software, collation software, and repository software, and he is the lead developer of the CollateX collation tool. He also conducts workshops to teach researchers how to use scripting languages in combination with digital editions to enhance their research.

Mary Holstege
Mary Holstege spent decades developing software in Silicon Valley, in and around markup technologies and information extraction. She has most recently been pursuing artistic endeavours. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Computer Science, and has a long history of throwing concepts from linguistics at computing problems.

Jean Kaplansky
Jean Kaplansky is a proven and experienced Publishing Content Platform Solutions Architect with a background in working in small, medium, and enterprise business environments across multiple industries, including Software, Hardware, Aerospace, Insurance, Scholarly Publishing, and instructional design and publishing of education content. Throughout her career, Jean has worked on MathML projects of all sizes within various publishing platforms. Jean enjoys challenges, solving problems, and explaining technical things to non-technical people. Jean has contributed to publishing taxonomies, schemas, authoring tools, Content Management, and Automated Publishing systems development. Jean also contributes to designing new business workflows and processes based on information architecture, knowledge management science, and best practices.

Michael Kay
Michael Kay’s 50 years in the IT business falls neatly into two halves. The second half, falling into the current century, will be familiar to many members of the markup community; since the dawn of XSLT in 1999 he has been leading standards efforts in W3C alongside the development of the Saxon software library. His previous role, in a previous century, was less visible and is less well documented: after a PhD in database research at the University of Cambridge in 1975, he joined the British mainframe manufacturer ICL (since absorbed into Fujistu) where he became responsible for mainframe database software products, subsequently being appointed an ICL Fellow, in which role he was often asked to give advice to the company’s management on competing demands for technology investment. This talk will therefore draw on a wide range of experience with a wide range of technologies, and on extensive experience of backing the wrong horse.

Deborah A. Lapeyre
Debbie is a Senior Consultant for Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in helping their clients toward better publishing through XML, XSLT, and Schematron solutions. She works with Tommie Usdin as architects and Secretariat for JATS (ANSI NISO Z39.96-2019 Journal Article Tag Suite), NISO STS (NISO Z39.102-2022, STS: Standards Tag Suite (Version 1.2)), and BITS (Book Interchange Tag Suite). She has taught hands-on XML, XSLT, DTD and schema construction, and Schematron courses as well as numerous technical and business-level introductions to XML and the JATS family of tag sets. Debbie has been working with XML and XSLT since their inception and with SGML since 1984 (before SGML was an ISO standard). In a previous life, she wrote code for systems that put ink on paper as well as programmed in, taught, and documented a proprietary generic markup system named “SAMANTHA”. Hobbies, besides Balisage, include pumpkin carving parties.

John Lumley
A Cambridge engineer by background, John Lumley created the AI group at Cambridge Consultants in the early 1980s and then joined HPLabs Bristol as one of its founding members. He worked there for 25 years, managing and contributing in a variety of software/systems fields, latterly specialising in XSLT-based document engineering, in which he subsequently gained a PhD in early retirement. Rarely happier than when writing XSLT to write XSLT to write XSLT, he spent the next several years helping develop the Saxon XSLT processor for Saxonica, including developing the XSLT-based XSLT compiler now used in SaxonJS. Now in proper retirement for a couple of years he still likes to 'potter' with XSLT and is active in both the QT4 and iXML community groups as well as continuing to develop a JavaScript-based processor for InvisibleXML to attach to SaxonJS.

James David Mason
James David Mason, originally trained as a mediaevalist and linguist, became a writer, systems developer, and manufacturing engineer at U.S. Department of Energy facilities in Oak Ridge since the late 1970s. In 1981, he joined the ISO’s work on standards for document management and interchange. He chaired ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34, which is responsible for SGML, DSSSL, Topic Maps, and related standards, for more than 20 years. Dr. Mason has been a frequent writer and speaker on standards and their applications. For his work on SGML, Dr. Mason has received the Gutenberg Award from Printing Industries of America and the Tekkie Award from GCA. He recently retired from working on information systems to support manufacturing and documentation at DOE’s Y-12 National Security Complex (Y-12) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Ari Nordström
Ari Nordström is an independent markup geek based in Göteborg, Sweden. He has provided angled brackets to many organisations and companies across a number of borders over the years, some of which deliver the rule of law, help dairy farmers make a living, and assist in servicing commercial aircraft. And others are just for fun.

Ari is the proud owner and head projectionist of Western Sweden’s last functioning 35/70mm cinema, situated in his garage, which should explain why he once wrote a paper on automating commercial cinemas using XML.

Jean Paoli
Jean Paoli is the Founder of Docugami Inc., a startup that uses AI to transform the unique document business processes of individual companies, making frontline users more efficient while giving COOs better compliance and insights — inspired by his deep belief that openness and interoperability raises all boats. He was formerly President of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., and one of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Throughout his career, Jean has worked in startups: before Microsoft, with Inria, the renowned French research Labs (Gipsi S.A. and Grif S.A.); and within Microsoft creating four new startups: XML, InfoPath, opening the Office formats and MS OpenTech (Microsoft’s open source subsidiary). The startups he built created breakthrough platform technologies used today by millions. He is the recipient of multiple industry awards for his work on XML, semi-structured data, the convergence of documents and data and openness at large. In addition to core technical design, Jean takes deep care at building healthy ecosystems at worldwide scale. He is credited as one of the key leaders responsible for shifting in a fundamental way, under the guidance of the CEO, Microsoft’s strategy to embrace and love open source.

Alan Paxton
Alan is a Senior Engineer at Evolved Binary Ltd, where he works on Database Development and Testing, in Java and C++. Alan started his career at DEC, in VMS Development, where he worked on transactional components and novel filesystems. He developed an interest in formal methods and returned to academe to work on a PhD which linked proof and testing. Back in industry, he worked in a variety of software development roles, moving into Mobile Phone development when it was new and interesting. Returning to his database and storage roots, Alan’s career has come full circle.

Paul Prescod
Paul Prescod has more than 20 years of software design and development experience, spanning enterprise software, document processing, healthcare, and even games. His early contributions to the field include advising on the design of XML at the World Wide Web Consortium and authoring “The XML Handbook.” During this period, he played a key role in popularizing the REST Architectural Style and advised organizations on integrating it into their web services stack.

At Elation Health, Paul is dedicated to applying AI to reduce documentation burnout for primary care physicians.

Liam Quin
Liam Quin was stolen as a child by fae folk and raised in fairyland, where it developed into a monster that would eventually become capable of reading XML and writing XSLT.

It was part of the W3C group that created XML, and later worked at W3C where it was in charge of complaining about XML, as well as influencing XQuery, XPath, XSLT, and other magical creations, using its fairyland powers to try to defuse arguments.

It now runs delightfulcomputing.com, writes and maintains XSLT stylesheets and XQuery applications for people, edits specifications and proposals for the wise and adventurous, and gives training courses for would-be explorers.

Gregory Renard
Gregory Renard is the Head of Applied Machine Learning at Docugami, a startup that uses AI to transform the unique document business processes of individual companies, making frontline users more efficient while giving COOs better compliance and insights. Gregory is seasoned expert with over two decades of experience in Natural Language Processing and AI. He holds specializations in Generative AI with Large Language Models , NLP, and AI. As a distinguished mathematics teacher, Greg has taught at several universities in Belgium and France, and has been a guest Applied AI lecturer at Stanford and UC Berkeley. A pioneer in Speech Dialog Systems (SDS), he designed and launched Angie, the first personal assistant in French (French Siri) in 2012. He has developed innovative AI solutions for NASA and SETI, earning multiple awards, including the NASA - SETI - FDL Award of Merit 2022.

Allen Renear
Allen Renear is a professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he has served as dean of the iSchool and as director of the Illinois Institute for Informatics. Prior to coming to Illinois, he was Director of the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University. In the 1980s Renear was an “Observer” at X3V1.TG8 during the finalization of ISO 8879 and he has never recovered from that. He has served on several early TEI committees (he was the American Philosophical Association’s delegate on the first TEI Advisory Board), was involved in various roles in the Brown University (now Northeastern University) Womens Writers Project (1330-1830), and was the first Chair of the Open eBook Publication Structure Working Group (now ePUB/IDPF). He has been coming to Balisage and its predecessors for longer than he can remember. His current academic focus is on the conceptual foundations of information systems.
Allen H Renear, Professor, School of Information Sciences
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
614 E Daniel St, Rm 5150/ Champaign, IL 61820-6211
renear@illinois.edu; phone/text: 217-390-9369 (mobile)

Adam Retter
Adam is the Director of Evolved Binary Ltd, a software, consultancy, and training company in the UK that also specialises in XML and LinkedData technologies. Adam is also a co-founder of eXist Solutions GmbH in Germany who specialise in TEI Publisher software. Adam is passionate about Open Source software, Open Technical Communities, and enjoys researching and solving difficult software engineering problems. Adam was an invited expert to the W3C XQuery Working Group, and has been a core developer on eXist-db for 19 years. Adam also created the Elemental Native XML Database, and FusionDB.

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen is the founder and principal of Black Mesa Technologies, a consultancy specializing in helping people use XML technologies.

He served as editor in chief of the TEI Guidelines from 1988 to 2000, and has also served as co-editor of the World Wide Web Consortium’s XML 1.0 and XML Schema 1.1 specifications.

Phillip Tornroth
As one of Elation Health’s earliest and longest-tenured employees, Phill Tornroth has, in the words of Forbes Magazine, “quietly built a leading electronic health record for primary care physicians” in close collaboration with Elation’s co-founders, Kyna and Conan Fong. Phill is passionate about using disruptive technology to reduce the documentation burden for PCPs. Since his first “physician shadowing” in 2010, Phill’s approach has always been to frequently engage with doctors and express empathy through engineering and leadership through listening.

In his current role as VP, Phill leads Elation’s strategy to find safe, effective, and ethical ways to adapt AI for this purpose.

Norman Tovey-Walsh
Norm Tovey-Walsh is currently a senior software developer at Saxonica Ltd, working out of his home in Swansea Wales. Previously, he was employed by MarkLogic Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Arbortext, and O’Reilly Media (then O’Reilly & Associates).

B. Tommie Usdin
B. Tommie Usdin is President of Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consultancy specializing in XML for textual documents. Ms. Usdin has been working with SGML since 1985 and has been a supporter of XML since 1996. She chairs the Balisage conference. Ms. Usdin has developed DTDs, Schemas, and XML/SGML application frameworks for applications in government and industry. Projects include reference materials in medicine, science, engineering, and law; semiconductor documentation; historical and archival materials. Distribution formats have included print books, magazines, and journals, and both web- and media-based electronic publications. She is co-chair of the NISO Z39-96, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite Working Group and a member of the BITS Working Group and the NISO STS Standing Committee. You can read more about her at http://www.mulberrytech.com/people/usdin/index.html. and see some of her photos on: flickr.

Zubin Rustom Wadia
Zubin Rustom Wadia is a product manager at Docugami Inc., a startup that uses AI to transform the unique document business processes of individual companies, making frontline users more efficient while giving COOs better compliance and insights. Zubin has worked with numerous Fortune 500 and Government organizations to unlock the full value of their content repositories. He is a former member of the Java Content Repository 2.0 expert group, and co-author on three books about software programming and architecture. In 2009, he founded a critically acclaimed startup that raised the standard for public safety alerting in the United States: CiviGuard. He holds an MBA from MIT Sloan.

Jingzhu Wei
Jingzhu Wei is a professor in the School of Information Management at Sun Yat-sen University, where she served as assistant dean of the School from 2010 to 2016. She serves as a standing committee member in the IFLA LHG section and associate director in Library Science Publication section of Chinese Library Society of China. She teaches courses and conducts research in the foundations of information management, information ethics, digital culture, and intellectual property. She is the chief expert of a major project from the National Social Science Foundation.