Chris Laffra

Chris Laffra was born in The Netherlands, obtained an MsC at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam and a PhD at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. At both the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center and Morgan-Stanley, Chris worked on tools for user interfaces, component infrastructures, and software development environments. He led the OTI Amsterdam lab for 3.5 years, working on WebSphere Studio Device Developer. After that, he worked with IBM Rational in Ottawa on Java runtimes and Eclipse, and co-authored the Eclipse Frequently Asked Questions book. Chris delivered many conference presentations and articles, wrote various books on Java and Eclipse, authored articles on “Ajax” on DeveloperWorks, and holds six patents. Chris has been product architect of Rational Business Developer (RBD) and development team lead for the EGL Rich UI. Chris was a founding member of the Quartz team at Bank of America in New York, and developed risk analysis and pricing platforms in Python. At Google, he worked on social graph analysis techniques to improve internal tools used by Googlers.