Jim Dowling is an Associate Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm as well as a Senior Researcher at SICS Swedish ICT. He received his Ph.D. in Distributed Systems from Trinity College Dublin (2005) and worked at MySQL AB (2005-2007). He is lead architect of Hops, a next generation, open-source distribution of Hadoop with support for distributed metadata. He is a regular speaker at Hadoop industry events.