Speakers

 

Invited Speaker: Yehuda Afek, Tel-Aviv University (Israel)

Biography: Faculty member in the school of computer science Tel-Aviv University. Yehuda Afek received a B.A.from the Technion in Electrical Engineering, and M.Sc and Ph.D. from University of California Los-Angeles (UCLA) in 1983 and 1985 respectively, both in Computer Science. He was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell-Labs from 1985 to 1988 when he joined the computer science department at Tel-Aviv University.

 

Invited Speaker: Carole Delporte, Université Paris Diderot- Paris 7 (France)

 

Invited Speaker: Shlomi Dolev, Ben Gurion University (Israel)

Biography: Shlomi Dolev received his B.Sc. in Engineering and B.A. in Computer Science in 1984 and 1985, and his M.Sc. and D.Sc. in computer Science in 1990 and 1992 from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. From 1992 to 1995 he was a postdoc at Texas A&M University. In 1995 he joined the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Ben-Gurion University where he is now a full professor and the dean of natural sciences. He was a visiting researcher/professor at MIT, DIMACS, and LRI, for several periods during summers. Shlomi is the author of the book "self-stabilization" published by the MIT Press. He published two hundreds journal and conference scientific articles, and patents. Shlomi served in the program committee of more than 90 conferences including: the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, and the International Symposium on DIStributed Computing. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, the Journal on Self Computing, and served as a guest editor of the Distributed Computing Journal and the Theoretical Computer Science Journal. His research grants include IBM faculty awards, Intel academic grants, Verisign, ISF, US Airforce, EU and NSF grants. Shlomi is the founding chair of the computer science department at Ben-Gurion University, where he now holds the Rita Altura trust chair in computer science. Shlomi serves as the chair of inter university computation center of Israel. His current research interests include distributed computing, distributed systems, security and cryptography and communication networks; in particular the self-stabilization property of such systems. Recently, he is involved in optical computing and brain science research.

 

Invited Speaker: Faith Ellen, University of Toronto (Canada)

Biography: Faith Ellen has been a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto since 1986. She received her B.Math. in Pure Mathematics and Computer Science in 1977 and her M.Math in Computer Science in 1978 from the University of Waterloo. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1982. From 1983 to 1986, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Washington. Faith Ellen was the vice-chair of SIGACT from 1997 to 2001 and was the chair of the steering committee for PODC from 2006 to 2009. Her main area of research is studying the complexity of problems in distributed computing, with the goal of understanding how parameters of various models affect their computational power.

 

Invited Speaker: Hugues Fauconnier, Université Paris Diderot- Paris 7 (France)

 

Invited Speaker: Pascal Felber, Université de Neuchâtel (Switzerland)

Biography: Pascal Felber received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. From 1998 to 2002, he has worked at Oracle Corporation and Bell-Labs (Lucent Technologies) in the USA. From 2002 to 2004, he has been an Assistant Professor at Institut EURECOM in France. Since October 2004, he is a Professor ofComputer Science at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, working in the field of dependable and distributed systems. He has published over 100 research papers in various journals and conferences.

 

Invited Speaker: Rachid Guerraoui, EPFL (Switzerland)

Biography: Rachid Guerraoui is professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where he leads the Distributed Programming Laboratory. He has also been affiliated with MIT in Boston, HP in Palo Alto as well as CEA and Ecole des Mines in Paris. His works spans concurrent and distributed algorithms, programming languages and systems. He is ACM fellow and is the recipient of the Google Focused Award and the ERC Advanced Grant.

 

Invited Speaker: Maurice Herlihy, Brown University (USA)

Biography: Maurice Herlihy has an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T. He served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, on the staff of DEC Cambridge Research Lab, and is currently Professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. He is the recipient of the 2003 Dijkstra Prize, the 2004 Goedel Prize, the 2012 Dijkstra Prize, and the 2013 IEEE McDowell Award.  He is an ACM Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

 

Invited Speaker: Anne-Marie Kermarrec, INRIA-Rennes Campus (France)

Biography: Anne-Marie Kermarrec is a senior researcher at INRIA Rennes where whe leads the large scale dynamic systems group. She has been with Microsoft Research (200-2004 ) and Vrije Universiteit (1997) in the past. She is the PI of the ERC Starting Grant Gossple. She is the chair of the ACM Software System Award committee and the Vice-Chair of Eurosys. She is mostly known for her work in P2P systems and event dissemination systems. Her research interests are in distributed systems, epidemic protocols and social networks.

 

Invited Speaker: Euripides MarkouUniversity of Central Greece (Greece)

Biography: Euripides Markou received his B.Sc. (in Physics) from the University of Ioannina, Greece, and his Ph.D. (in Theoretical Computer Science) from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He has been a postdoctoral research fellow at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, and at McMaster University, Canada, at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece and at the Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique (LaBRI), France before joining the Department of Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Central Greece in 2008. His research interests include the design of algorithms and the study of the computational complexity for problems especially in the areas of distributed computing, algorithmic game theory, computational geometry and bioinformatics.

 

Invited Speaker: Maged Michael, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Centre (USA)

Biography: Maged M. Michael received the PhD degree in computer science from the University of Rochester in 1997. Since then, he has been a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center at Yorktown Heights, New York, USA. His research interests include concurrent algorithms, non-blocking synchronization, transactional memory, multicore systems, and concurrent memory management. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering.

 

Invited Speaker: Eliot MossUniversity of Massachusetts (USA)

Biography: Eliot Moss received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, culminating in a Ph.D. in computer science in 1981, on the subject of nested transactions. He served in the U.S. Army until 1985 when he joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he now holds the rank of Professor. He co-directs the Architecture and Language Implementation Laboratory. Dr. Moss's research focuses on efficient implementation of modern and emerging language features on modern and future hardware. He is a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE and co-recipient of the Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing in 2012.

 

Invited Speaker: Michel Raynal, University of Rennes I (France)

Biography: Michel Raynal is a professor of computer science at the University of Rennes, France. He is a senior member of ious the prestig"Institut Universitaire de France". His main research interests are the basic principles of distributed computing systems. He is the author of numerous papers on distributed computing (more than 130 in journals and 280 in conferences) and is well-known for his books on distributed computing. He has chaired the program committee of the major conferences on the topic, has served on the program committees of many international conferences, and is the recipient of several "Best Paper" awards (e.g., ICDCS 1999, 2000 and 2001, SSS 2009, Europar 2010, DISC 2010). Michel Raynal is regularly invited by universities all over the world to give lectures on distributed computing. Very recently (2013) he has published a book devoted to concurrent objects, titled "Concurrent Programming: Algorithms, Principles, and Foundations" (515 pages, Springer). His last book titled "Distributed algorithms for message-passing systems" is in print at Springer (July 2013).

 

Invited Speaker: Eric Ruppert, York University (Canada)

Biography: Eric Ruppert received his PhD from the University of Toronto under the supervision of Prof. Faith Ellen. He has been a postdoc at Brown University working with Prof. Maurice Herlihy. He is currently an associate professor at York University, Toronto, Canada. He has been a visiting scientist at EPFL.

 

Invited Speaker: Assaf Schuster, Technion (Israel)

Biography: Professor Assaf Schuster has been a faculty member of the Technion Computer Science Department since 1991. He has been interested in various aspects of parallel and distributed computing, publishing more than 170 papers. His algorithms on data-race detection were implemented in Intel’s Thread Checker, and his patents on distributed shared memory were sold by the Technion. His papers triggered a rewrite of the Java Memory Model. He has built scalable production systems to handle petabytes of storage with off-the-shelf hardware. In recent years, his research group has focused on big data and scalable, real-time knowledge discovery in distributed data streams. From 2010, Prof. Schuster has also been working to establish TCE – the Technion Center for Computer Engineering, which he heads. TCE has grown to become a center of activity for about 60 faculty from the Technion and other universities in Israel and abroad, dozens of industry leaders, and hundreds of graduate students.

 

Invited Speaker: Nir ShavitMIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (USA)

Biography: Nir Shavit received a B.A. and M.Sc. from the Technion and a Ph.D. from the Hebrew University, all in Computer Science. From 1999 to 2011 he served as a member of technical staff at Sun Labs and Oracle Labs. He shared the 2004 Gödel Prize with Maurice Herlihy, the highest award in theoretical computer science. He is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at M.I.T. and the Computer Science Department at Tel-Aviv University. In 2012 he shared the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize In Distributed Computing with Maurice Herlihy.

 

Invited Speaker: Liuba ShriraBrandeis University (USA)

Biography: Liuba Shrira is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Brandeis University, and is affiliated with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. She received her PhD from Technion (Israel).  From 1986 to 1997 she was a research scientist at  MIT/CSAIL and joined Brandeis in 1997.  In 2004-2005 she was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, in 2010-2011 she was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and a visiting Professor in the Computer Science Department, Technion.

Her research interests span aspects of design and implementation of distributed systems and especially storage systems. This includes fault-tolerance, availability and performance issues. Her recent focus is on long-lived transactional storage, time travel (in storage), software upgrades, byzantine faults, and support for collaborative access to long-lived objects in the cloud.

Liuba Shrira is a member of ACM, she has been recognized as a Distinguished Scientist by ACM for "significant accomplishments in, and impact on, the computing field".

 

Invited Speaker: Gadi TaubenfeldInterdisciplinary Center (Israel)

Biography: Gadi Taubenfeld is a professor of computer science at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. During 2006-2012 he was also the school's dean. Before joining IDC, he was the head of the computer science division at Israel’s Open University; member of technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories; consultant to AT&T Labs-Research; and a research scientist and lecturer at Yale University. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. His primary research interests are in concurrent and distributed computing.

 

Invited Speaker: Theo UngererUniversity of Augsburg (Germany) 

Biography: Theo Ungerer received a Diploma in Mathematics at the Technical University of Berlin in 1981, a Doctoral Degree at the University of Augsburg in 1986, and a second Doctoral Degree (Habilitation) at the University of Augsburg in 1992. Ungerer was scientific assistant at the University of Augsburg, visiting assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine (1989-90), professor of computer architecture at the University of Jena (1992-1993) and the Technical University of Karlsruhe (1993-2001). Since April 2001 he is Chair of Systems and Networking at the University of Augsburg, Germany. 2003-2011 he served as scientific director of the Computing Center of the University of Augsburg. He is a founding member of the network of excellence HiPEAC, and coordinator of the EU projects MERASA (2007-2010) and parMERASA (2011-2014).

 

Invited Speaker: Pawel T. Wojciechowski, Poznań University of Technology (Poland)

Biography: Dr. Pawel Wojciechowski (pronounced: Pavel Voyciehovsky) graduated from Poznan University of Technology in Poland where he currently works as a lecturer. His research interests are semantics of programming languages, concurrency, type systems and program verification. He got a PhD degree from University of Cambridge. His most known work is on Nomadic Pict - a programming language for mobile computing and the foundational theory (joint work with Peter Sewell). More recently he did a postdoc at EPFL, working with Andre Schiper on modular group communication protocols