Sylvain Maret is a security expert with 17 years of experience who gave a presentation on strong authentication in web applications in 2012. He discussed various strong authentication technologies like PKI with digital certificates, biometrics, and one-time passwords. He explained how these technologies work at a technical level and emphasized standards from the Initiative for Open AuTHentication. Maret also touched on topics like token-based key generation and storage, and how strong authentication integrates with web applications and impacts application security best practices.