Astera

Esther Schneeweisz aka Astera is a robotics lover, automation enthusiast and technology fanatist, while at the same time she feels the urgent need of sharing her thoughts and futuristic fears with the world in order to save the planet from ZARs (zombie alien robots), the general ever-growing dumbing down, and the omnipresent stultification of human population, for example. When not working on shiny little twin robots at the Metalab, Vienna's awesome hackerspace, or automated home environment in her spare time, she works as industrial designer, consultant, coder and part-time sysadmin. Currently, Astera devotes every free minute to hackerspaces.org and the Republic of BLAH (boundless l33ts and hackers), which she just founded. Fortunately the angst of a robotic uprising and fall of all mankind keeps her wake almost all night, therefore prolonging her workday, leaving enough time to travel around the world and give enlightening talks.

George Shammas is a command line junkie and most recently worked for Etsy as a system administrator. Together with Bre Pettis, he was co-conspirer and -founder of New York City's hackerspace, the NYCResistor, where he could observe and help the creation of many robotic projects, witnessing the Sudo Make Me A Sandwich robot come to life in hours, not weeks; or seeing the RepRap project unfold and gain ability from just a few hackers. At the time, George splits his time between systems management, distributed computing, and hardware hacking projects, while travelling Europe for 3 months, crashing conferences and hackerspaces along his way. Knowing of the development in robotics and the impending robot invasion however, he can no longer sleep at night unless the world finds a solution to the potentially upcoming war.