Tech Transfer Stories and Takeaways

Abstract: In this talk, Dahlia will share impressions from several industrial research project experiences that reached production and had profound and sometimes surprising effects on the foundations of distributed computing. She will go through four stories of how these systems transpired and their journey to impact. All of the stories are in the distributed computing arena, and more specifically, they revolve around the state-machine-replication paradigm. Yet, Dahlia hopes that the take-aways from the experience of building foundations for these systems may be of interest and value to everyone, no matter the discipline.

Bio: Dahlia is the Chief Technology Officer at Diem Association, Lead Maintainer of the Diem project, and Lead Researcher at Novi.

Dahlia applied and foundational research interest in broad aspects of reliability and security of distributed systems. For over two decades, she  participated in driving innovation in tech, notably: co-inventor of HotStuff, co-founder and technical co-lead of VMware blockchain, co-inventor of Flexible Paxos, the technology behind Log Device, creator and tech lead of CorfuDB, a database-less database driving VMware’s NSX-T distributed control plane (see Corfu github repo), and co-inventor of the FairPlay project.

Dahlia joined the Diem (Libra) team in June 2019, first as a Lead Reseacher at Novi and later as Chief Technology Officer at the Diem Association. In 2014, after the closing of the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley lab, she co-founded VMware Research and became a Principal Researcher at VMware until June 2019. From 2004-2014, she was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley. From 1999-2007, Dahlia served as tenured associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 1995-1999, she was a senior researcher at AT&T Labs, NJ. I hold Ph.D., M.S. and B.S. in computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.