The ELISA Ambassador Program is created to bring together a group of technical leaders to collectively
- Educate others on the mission and goals of the ELISA Project
- Raise awareness, visibility, and impact of the ELISA community work
- Promote the results of use case analysis by ELISA Working Groups
- Engage with the safety and Linux kernel community
- Bring in and onboard new contributors to the ELISA community
ELISA Ambassadors are qualified to speak on behalf of the ELISA Project at conferences and local events and meetups. They’re available to contribute tutorials, articles, and blogs. And they’re willing to share their knowledge and help mentor and onboard new contributors into the community.
Ambassadors
Elana Copperman
Elana Copperman, PhD is a System Safety Architect at Mobileye (part of Intel).
She provides support for designing safety features in Mobileye products, including system boot; drivers; and Linux infrastructure. Before working at Mobileye, she worked as a Security Architect for Cisco-Il (formerly NDS) and more recently as a security consultant for major European automotive concerns on behalf of various Israeli startups. Her research interests focus on software engineering methodologies and security engineering.
Eli Gurvitz
Eli Gurvitz is a Functional Safety Architect at NVIDIA.
Eli Gurvitz is a Functional Safety Architect at NVIDIA. Prior to NVIDIA, Eli was working on the safety concept for Linux for Mobileye’s SoCs since 2018 and is keen to promote the use of Linux in Safety Critical applications at Intel. Prior to Intel, Eli was a System and SW architect at Pace (UK) where de designed DRM systems. Before Pace Eli developed SW and led development groups in the Pay-TV industry and in network management. Eli has mastered the English language from IBM S/360 User Manuals. His favorite reading was “This page intentionally left blank”.
Jason Smith
Jason Smith is currently the Principal Engineer for Robotics and Control Systems Consumer Technology at UL LLC.
Jason Smith is currently the Principal Engineer for Robots and Control Systems in Consumer Technology at UL LLC, based in Northbrook, IL, and has been at UL for 16 years, at which time Jason also served as UL’s Principal Engineer for Functional Safety. Jason has extensive working knowledge and experience in US, Canadian, and International Functional Safety standards such as UL 991, UL 1998, IEC/UL 60730-1, IEC 61508, ISO 13849, as well as standards for safety analyses, hazard analysis, and risk assessment in ISO 12100, IEC 60812, and Systems Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA). In addition, Jason has worked with robotic safety standards such as UL 1740, UL 3100, UL 3300, ISO 10218, ISO 13482, and autonomous systems standard UL 4600. He is presently a member of IEC Technical Committees TC44, TC65, and TC116 Functional Safety ad hoc group, ISO/TC 299, IECEE CMC WG32, CSA C22.2 No. 340 for Battery Management Systems, and Enabling Linux in Safety Applications (ELISA).
Jason holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Northern Illinois University, and has over 20 years of experience working with software, embedded control systems, and Functional Safety. When Jason isn’t working, he enjoys spending time with his wife and two daughters, traveling, playing bass guitar in a rock & roll band, and golfing.
Jeffrey Osier-Mixon
Jeffrey "Jefro" Osier-Mixon is a Principal Community Architect with Red Hat.
Jefro currently focuses on automotive efforts. As a community architect, Jefro is responsible for maintaining Red Hat’s relationship with automotive-oriented communities, and he acts as the current chair for the CentOS Automotive Special Interest Group.
Jefro has worked in open source for nearly three decades, having started his career as a technical writer with Cygnus Support working on documentation for the GNU tools. He has worked with Wind River and Montavista/Cavium Networks on embedded operating systems, and spent five years at Transmeta. He switched careers in 2011 and went to Intel to serve as the community and program manager for the Yocto Project, where he was the board chair for 7 years. During that time, he also helped launch Zephyr and Project ACRN. Most recently, he spent two years at the Linux Foundation as a program manager for RISC-V International and LF Energy.
Jefro has been on the program committee for the Embedded Linux Conference series since 2010, and he speaks regularly at open source conferences. It’s best to catch him after the coffee kicks in.
John MacGregor
John MacGregor is currently spicing up his retirement by participating in various ELISA working groups.
John started his long career as a scientific programmer, switched to Unix programmer and system architect, then progressed to project manager in telecommunications. He worked for several decades as Senior Expert for Software Technology in the Corporate Research Division of Robert Bosch GmbH. Among other things, he worked on software process improvement, software reuse, automotive software architecture and IoT technologies. Before retiring, John participated in the SIL2LinuxMP project, which focused on certifying Linux under IEC 61508 at the SIL2 level, and then continued to contribute to the ELISA project.
John holds a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering, specializing in operations research and information systems, as well as an MBA, specializing in marketing and finance.
Kate Stewart
Kate Stewart is the VP, Dependable Embedded Systems at The Linux Foundation.
She is responsible for the Open Source Compliance and Safety Certification related programs. She is acting representative from the medical devices working group to the TSC. Since joining The Linux Foundation, she has launched Real-Time Linux, Zephyr Project, CHAOSS, ELISA and ACT programs.
With almost 30 years of experience in the software industry, she has held a variety of roles and worked as a developer in Canada, Australia, and the US and for the last 20 years has managed software development teams in the US, Canada, UK, India, and China. She received her Master’s in computer science from University of Waterloo and Bachelor’s of computer science (co-op program) from the University of Manitoba.
Lukas Bulwahn
Lukas is a community member since the inception of the ELISA project.
Lukas Bulwahn received a diploma in computer science and a PhD in formal methods from Technische Universität München. From 2012 to 2021, he worked at BMW on research and development of an open-source software platform for autonomous driving systems.
One part of this research has been the development of Adaptive AUTOSAR, a standard to develop future software in C++ on top of POSIX operating systems. As another part of this research, he considers if Linux is sufficient for use as operating system for autonomous driving, which ultimately led to his participation in the OSADL SIL2LinuxMP project and Linux Foundation ELISA project, where this question is answered in an industrial collaboration.
He has presented his work at various industrial and open-source conferences, including FOSDEM, ELCE ‘17 & ‘18, Open-Source Summit Japan 2017, safe.tech 2018, Verification Futures 2018, Functional Safety 2019 and many more. He is active in collaboration with academia, in the program committee of Formal Verification of Autonomous Vehicles Workshop, Empirical Formal Methods Workshop and Industry Program Committee International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering 2019, and on the scientific board of Operational Safe Systems 2019.
Philipp Ahmann
Philipp Ahmann is a technical business development manager at Robert Bosch GmbH with focus on Open Source activities.
Philipp Ahmann is a technical business development manager at Robert Bosch GmbH with focus on Open Source activities. He represents the ELISA project of the Linux Foundation as an ambassador and TSC member.
He has more than 10 years of experience in the field of Linux automotive SW base platforms working as engineer, team leader for all test activities and as project manager. All of these projects utilized complex multi-core chipsets.
In his current position he contributes to a project focusing on embedded Linux in industrial applications and wider IoT scope beyond pure Automotive use cases.
Roberto Paccapeli
Roberto Paccapeli is a Functional Safety Manager and Community Leader at Red Hat.
Roberto supports the planning and coordination of Intel safety programs. Currently, he leads FuSa LC MRC, an Intel committee responsible to establish, implement and maintain FuSa Lifecycle, and he collaborates with different internal groups on enforcing the standardized “quality” development process against “systematic failures”, as defined by ISO 26262 and IEC 61508.
He achieved the Doctorates in “Mathematical Methods Applied to Science” (University of Rome Sapienza) and in “Mechanics” (University of Paris VI) in 2011. As of 2019, he is part of ELISA (Enabling Linux in Safety Applications) project, hosted by Linux Foundation, and he covers the role of ELISA Ambassador.
Safety standard experience: He regularly contributes to industry standards efforts as member of the Italy-task forces involved on ISO 26262 and IEC 61508.
As of 2020, he is leading the ISO 26262-8 Part “Supporting processes”.
Shuah Khan
Shuah Khan is a Kernel Maintainer & Linux Fellow at The Linux Foundation.
Shuah is an experienced Linux Kernel developer, maintainer,
and contributor. She leads the Linux Foundation Mentorship program
<https://linuxfoundation.org/a
aimed at increasing diversity in open source projects at the Linux
Foundation. She serves on the Linux kernel Code of Conduct committee
<https://www.kernel.org/code-o
In addition, she serves as the ELISA <https://elisa.tech/> TSC Chair
focusing on connecting ELISA Safety community with the Linux kernel
community and overseeing ELISA technical direction. She authored A
Beginner’s Guide to Linux Kernel Development
<https://training.linuxfoundat
Sudip Mukherjee
Sudip is a Kernel Engineer at Codethink Ltd.
Sudip has a B.Sc degree and also hold a Diploma in Electronics Engineering. He has been a mainline kernel contributor since 2014. Sudip is also a Debian Developer and has worked in multiple automotive projects for Codethink’s clients.
Are you interested in becoming an official ELISA Ambassador?
Requirements for becoming an official ELISA Ambassador are:
- Affiliated with an ELISA Member organization or an active contributor to the community.
- Good understanding of safety in general and the basics of the Linux kernel and able to answer FAQs around ELISA, Linux, and Safety
- Available to speak on behalf of ELISA at conferences and events or contribute to blogging or documentation
- Actively engaged with the community in some significant way, whether that’s in a role as a technologist, a contributor, a speaker, or an influencer.
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