Ben has a BIT, MIT, and PhD in computer science. He has contributed to many office suites such as Abiword, Calligra, and various ODF testing tools. He has been writing open source for over 10 years and has spoken at NLUUG, LCA many times, OLS, Linux Kongress many times, UKUUG, OSDC, Libre Graphics Meeting, and many academic conferences during his doctorate. Ben created libferris which is like plan9 filesystems for Linux. Robots have now also come onto the radar with the latest trend towards increasing the level of autonomy of each robot.