About the conference

Rachid Guerraoui is a professor in computer science at EPFL where he leads the Laboratory of Distributed Computing. He worked in the past with Ecole des Mines de Paris, CEA Saclay, HP Labs in Palo Alto, and MIT. He has been elected ACM fellow and professor of the College de France. He was awarded a Senior ERC Grant and a Google Focused Award.

Maurice Herlihy has an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T. He has served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University and the staff of DEC Cambridge Research Lab. He is the recipient of the 2003 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, the 2004 Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science, the 2008 ISCA influential paper award, the 2012 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, and the 2013 Wallace McDowell award. He received a 2012 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Natural Sciences and Engineering Lecturing Fellowship, and he is fellow of the ACM, a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Michael L. Scott is the Arthur Gould Yates Professor of Engineering and incoming Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, in Rochester, NY, USA. A Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, he is best known for work in synchronization and concurrent data structures, in recognition of which he shared the 2006 SIGACT/SIGOPS Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize. He is the author or co-author of more than 170 refereed publications, including Programming Language Pragmatics (4th ed., Morgan Kauffman, 2016), a textbook in use at more than 200 schools around the world, and Shared Memory Synchronization (Morgan & Claypool, 2013), a standard reference in the field. He received the University of Rochester's Goergen Award for Distinguished Achievement and Artistry in Undergraduate Teaching in 2001 and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in 2018. His textbook on programming language design and implementation (Programming Language Pragmatics, 4th ed., Morgan Kauffman, 2016) is used at more than 200 universities around the world.

In the java.util.concurrent library, he is a co-inventor of the ConcurrentLinkedQueue, Exchanger, and SynchronousQueue classes.

Vitaliy Aksenov currently is a researcher at ITMO University. His research focuses on practice and theory of concurrent data structures.

Before ITMO University, Vitaliy was a post-doc in IST Austria under the guidance of professor Dan Alistarh and received his PhD from Paris 7 Diderot and ITMO University under the guidance of professor Petr Kuznetsov.

Nir Shavit received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in 1984 and 1986, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1990. Shavit is a co-author of the book The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. He is a recipient of the 2004 Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science for his work on applying tools from algebraic topology to model shared memory computability and of the 2012 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing for the introduction of Software Transactional Memory. He is a past program chair of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) and the ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA).

His current research covers techniques for desinging scalable software for multiprocessors, in particular concurrent data structures for multicore machines.

Dan Alistarh is an Assistant Professor at IST Austria. His research focuses on concurrent data structures and distributed algorithms, and spans from algorithms and lower bounds to practical implementations.

Before IST, Dan was affiliated with ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK. Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT CSAIL, working with Prof. Nir Shavit. He received his PhD from the EPFL, under the guidance of Prof. Rachid Guerraoui.

His research is supported through a 2018 ERC Starting Grant.

Dr Martin Kleppmann is a researcher in distributed systems at the University of Cambridge, and author of the acclaimed "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" (O'Reilly Media, 2017). He mainly works on collaboration software, CRDTs, and formal verification of distributed algorithms. Previously he was a software engineer and entrepreneur at Internet companies including LinkedIn and Rapportive, where he worked on large-scale data infrastructure.

Cliff Click was the CTO of Neurensic (now successfully exited) and CTO and Co-Founder of h2o.ai (formerly 0xdata), a firm dedicated to creating a new way to think about web-scale math and real-time analytics.

He wrote his first compiler when he was 15 (Pascal to TRS Z-80!), although his most famous compiler is the HotSpot Server Compiler (the Sea of Nodes IR). Cliff helped Azul Systems build an 864 core pure-Java mainframe that keeps GC pauses on 500Gb heaps in the micro-second range, and worked on all aspects of that JVM. Before that he worked on HotSpot at Sun, and is at least partially responsible for bringing Java into the mainstream.

Cliff is invited to speak regularly at industry and academic conferences and holds a PhD in Computer Science and more than 20 patents.

Dr. Anastasia Braginsky is a member of the Scalable Search Systems Research team, part of Yahoo! Research Lab (part of VerizonMedia), based in Haifa, Israel. Her main research interests span parallel programming and concurrent data structures for multi-core architecture, scalable systems and platforms for big data processing, including scalable key-value stores. She contributes to open source projects (HBase, Oak) and publishes papers in academic conferences and journals. Anastasia received her B.A. (summa cum laude) and PhD (direct track) from the Faculty of Computer Science at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in 2004 and 2015 respectively. Her PhD is in the field of distributed and parallel computing, and focuses on concurrent, non-blocking data structures and their memory management. Prior to her graduate studies (2002-2009) she was a CAD Tools developer at Intel and later a microcode developer in storage group at IBM Haifa Research Lab (HRL).

Dr Heidi Howard is a research fellow based at Cambridge University's Department of Computer Science and Technology. Heidi's research focuses on improving consistency, reliability and performance in distributed systems. Heidi received her BA in Computer Science from Cambridge University in 2014. In 2019, Heidi received her PhD from Cambridge University for her research on distributed consensus. Heidi is probably most widely known for her generalizations of the widely used Paxos algorithm for solving consensus, including her work on Flexible Paxos.

Cindy Sridharan is a distributed systems engineer based out of San Francisco, California. She's the author of a book on Distributed Systems Observability (2018) and an upcoming book on distributed systems in the cloud (2022). She maintains a blog where she writes about building and maintaining reliable systems.