Professor Kenneth P. Birman
Cornell University
Professor Birman has worked on problems in security, fault-tolerance and scalability for more than two decades.  Widely used software developed by his team includes the Isis Toolkit (now used by the New York and Swiss Stock Exchanges, the French Air Traffic Control System, the AEGIS Warship and the Florida Electric Power and Gas distributed system), the Horus and Ensemble Systems, Astrolabe and Kelips.  Birman founded two companies, Isis Distributed Systems and Reliable Network Solutions, that commercialized DARPA-developed technologies successfully.  He headed the 1995 DARPA ISAT study on building Highly Assured Critical Infrastructure Systems, an effort that led to a substantial DARPA activity in the area from 1996 through 2000, and has testified before many government agencies and task forces.  He is the author of several books on building secure, reliable distributed systems, and has written more than 100 research papers, including some 25 papers in major journals and some 50 in major peer-reviewed conferences.  Professor Birman has been Editor in Chief of ACM Transactions on Computer Science, is a Fellow of the ACM, and is Program Committee Chair for the upcoming 20th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP-20).  


Professor Johannes Gehrke
Cornell University
Professor Gehrke's research interests are in the area of data mining, database systems, and distributed computing, and he is the recipient of an NSF Career Award, an IBM Faculty Award, and a Sloan Fellowship. Gehrke’s group has built the Cougar System, a distributed database system for sensor networks as part of the DARPA SensIT program, and his group is currently building a large-scale distributed mining and monitoring system for the Intelligence Community as part of recent counter-terrorism activities. Professor Gehrke is the co-author of one of the leading undergraduate database textbooks, and he has widely published in database systems and data mining. He currently serves as the program co-chair of the 2004 ACM SIGKDD Data Mining Conference.   

 


Professor Paul Francis
Cornell University
Professor Francis has worked in the area of large scale, self-organizing networks for over fifteen years.  He is well known for producing highly original research, and for contributing a number of key ideas to both the research and commercial networking communities.  His work on Yoid end-system multicast pioneered the concept of self-organizing overlay multicast.  Likewise, his work on IDMaps initiated the entire research area of scalable discovery of host proximity, an important aspect of any overlay network.  Professor Francis is the inventor of Network Address Translation, a ubiquitously deployed technology that is, more than anything else, responsible for extending the number of IP addressable hosts beyond the 32-bit limitation.  He has contributed key concepts to IPv6.  His early work on Landmark hierarchies can be found in current ad hoc wireless networking proposals, and the distributed name-to-address resolution method used with Landmark anticipated modern Distributed Hash Table (DHT) based P2P systems by over a decade.  Professor Francis has over a dozen USA and international patents, numerous research publications, and has held chairperson positions in two IETF working groups  


Dr. Robbert van Renesse

Cornell University

Dr. van Renesse received his PhD degree for his work on designing and implementing the well-known Amoeba operating system, one of the first operating systems designed to have a very small “microkernel” and to provide other functionality outside of the kernel’s address space.  This style of system rapidly became important, and the approach is at the core of Microsoft’s Windows XP platform.  Subsequently, van Renesse became involved in communications challenges for modern networks, building the Horus system (a modernized version of the Isis Toolkit that set performance records for fault-tolerance and replication in demanding settings), and most recently invented Astrolabe.  Dr. van Renesse has published extensively, co-authored one book, and participated in dozens of program committees and other positions of responsibility within the field.   

 


Dr. Werner Vogels
Cornell University
Dr. Vogels is a world expert on the challenges of building extremely large Web Services and Web-based database systems.  He was the first author on the architecture paper that set down the principles underlying Microsoft’s NT Clusters platform (core of their data center technologies), and has emerged as a leader in efforts to tackle issues of reliability and high availability in the new Web Services architecture, which is rapidly becoming the most important standard for computer-to-computer interactions.  Dr. Vogels is uniquely positioned to help us identify ways that our SRS technologies might transition into this standards activity, and integrate with Web Services platforms and tools.   


Louis P. DiPalma
Raytheon
Lou DiPalma is the Manager of the Integrated Warfare and Sensor Systems Software Department of the Integrated Defense Systems Operation of the Raytheon Company.  Lou is Principal Investigator for the DARPA Adaptive and Reflective Middleware Systems (ARMS) Open Experimentation Platform contract.  He has been involved in the design and development of Submarine Combat Control Systems for all variants of submarines in the US Navy’s fleet, Weapon Launching System Programs, as well as Command and Control Systems for surface combatants including DD(X).  His focus has been centered on the infusion of new technology, including Advanced Middleware and Intelligent Systems Technology, into the Raytheon IDS product line, with a primary focus on Naval Combat Systems.  

 


Paul R. Work
Raytheon
Paul Work is currently a Senior Software Principal Engineer with Raytheon’s Integrated Defense Systems (IDS) business unit.  Paul is the Principal Investigator for the ONR Real-Time Data Distribution Services for the FORCEnet Architecture Framework program.  He is also one of the senior contributors and architects in the DARPA Adaptive and Reflective Middleware Systems (ARMS) Open Experimentation Platform program.  Paul is responsible for the coordination of advanced technology development, system architecture, and information infrastructure across a number of submarine and surface ship programs.  Paul has over 29 years of experience in management, systems engineering, software engineering, programming, and operating commercial client/server systems, military tactical, and non-tactical real-time systems.  Paul has a BS in Computer Science from Roger Williams University, Rhode Island, and a MS in Engineering Management from Drexel University, Pennsylvania.

 


Dr. Stefan Pleisch received his Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Switzerland. He is currently working as a Post Doctoral Researcher at Cornell University. For the last couple of years he has made contributions to the field of distributed systems, particularly on group communication, fault-tolerant mobile agents, distributed systems management, and predicate detection in faulty environments. His research interests include distributed systems, fault tolerance, mobile agents, mobile ad-hoc networks, replication, and transactions.

Dr. Stefan Pleisch

Cornell University

 


 

Maya Haridasan joined the Ph.D. Program in Computer Science at Cornell University in the Fall of 2003 after graduating from the University of Brasilia, Brazil. Her experience during undergraduate studies includes clock synchronization and performance monitoring of parallel applications in clusters. Her current interest is in publish/subscribe systems and related topics in distributed computing.

Maya Haridasan

Cornell University

 


Mahesh Balakrishnan joined the Ph.D. program at Cornell in Fall 2003. He is interested in the intersection of traditional distributed system paradigms like group communication with newer technologies such as overlay networks and p2p systems. He is currently working on scalable membership tracking, along with specialized multicast protocols with unique reliability guarantees. He has a BS from Georgia Tech, where his work included transparent methods for allowing components to be hot-swapped.

Mahesh Balakrishnan

Cornell University

 


Krzysztof Ostrowski joined the Ph.D. program in CS at Cornell in Fall 2003, after receiving M.Sc. from University of Warsaw, Poland, and spending over four years working in the industry in projects such as storage virtualization and distributed management in a clustered storage system, or automated policy and workflow management in a large networked storage system, among others. He is generally interested in building autonomous distributed systems capable of adapting to changes in the environment, in particular self-configuring, fault-tolerant and scalable. His most recent research focus is on the scalability of reliable multicast

Krzysztof Ostrowski

Cornell University