Credence / Cornell Tech Summer School

Winner of the 1992 Turing Award and many other prestigious awards and prizes, Butler Lampson Butler Lampson is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft Corporation and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT. He was on the faculty at Berkeley and then at the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC and at Digital’s Systems Research Center. He has worked on computer architecture, local area networks, raster printers, page description languages, operating systems, remote procedure call, programming languages and their semantics, programming in the large, fault-tolerant computing, transaction processing, computer security, WHSIWYG editors, and tablet computers. He was one of the designers of the SDS 940 time-sharing system, the Alto personal distributed computing system, the Xerox 9700 laser printer, two-phase commit protocols, the Autonet LAN, the SDSI/SPKI system for network security, and several programming languages.

At Microsoft he has worked on anti-piracy, security, fault-tolerance, and user interfaces. He was one of the designers of Palladium, and spent two years as an architect in the Tablet PC group. Currently he is in Microsoft Research, working on security, privacy, and fault-tolerance, and kibitzing in systems, networking, and other areas.

Bettina Kemme is an Associate Professor and Director of the School of Computer Science at McGill University, Montreal, where she leads the distributed information systems lab. Her research focuses on large-scale distributed data management. Her current research focuses are on managing data analytics, performance monitoring and micro-services. She holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from ETH Zurich, and an undergraduate degree from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universitaet Erlangen, Germany. Bettina has published over 100 publications in major journals and conferences in the areas of database systems and distributed systems. In 2010, she won the VLDB 10-year test-of-time award. She has served on the program committee and as PC or area chairs of major database and distributed systems conferences such as SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, ICDCS, Middleware, SRDS and many more. She is a senior IEEE Member.

I’m the Rao professor of computer science at Cornell University, where I’ve worked on cloud computing and reliable distributed computing for my entire career. My style of work spans from practical to theoretical, but centers on creating real solutions that people can actually use, and that challenge assumptions about what the cloud can be made to do. I especially enjoy working on applications that push the limits of existing solutions, like smart power grids and smart farms, high integrity systems for cooperating mobile devices (including autonomous drones), scalable data center infrastructure platforms like file systems and DHTs, and other kinds of data center replication tools. I’m a fellow of the ACM and IEEE, have been the Editor of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, and have played PC roles for many systems conferences (including PC-chair for SOSP in 2005). I also helped found the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing.

Dr. Cole is the Chief Information Officer for Weill Cornell Medicine and the Frances and John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Libraries and Information Technology. He is an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine and Healthcare Policy and Research at Weill Cornell and practices Internal Medicine at the New York Presbyterian Hospital.

As CIO, Dr. Cole is responsible for the Wood Library, the core IT infrastructure for Weill Cornell, the core software and web development groups, the user support organization, telephony, as well as the enterprise applications including research and educational administrative systems, the ERP and EMR.

After medical school at Cornell he was a resident then a Clinical Investigator in Medical Informatics at NYH. He joined Weill Cornell as the Director of Information Services and later became the Chief Medical Information Officer. Dr. Cole was the co-Director of the CTSC Bioinformatics Core for five years and now serves as an Associate Director. He has also worked to develop training programs in Healthcare Informatics and Healthcare Technology and holds an appointment as Innovator in Residence at CornellTech.

His prior research has focused on payor-provider transactional efficiency, terminology services, using the semantic web for research networking, patient safety, and patient portals. His current work is focused on secondary use of clinical data, research informatics, and precision medicine. He is part of the Insight Clinical Data Research Network that is unifying data from the leading academic medical centers in NYC.

Outside of Cornell, Dr. Cole is on the board of the Medicare Rights Center, a consumer service organization that works to ensure access to affordable health care for older adults and people with disabilities. He also serves on the board of Citizens Union, a nonpartisan good government group committed to making democracy work for all New Yorkers.

Fabíola Greve is a full professor of computer science at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazil. She received her Ph.D. in computer science at Rennes University, INRIA Labs, France. Her interests are at the intersection of distributed computing and fault-tolerance. She has published a number of papers in these areas, particularly on distributed systems, fault tolerance, consensus and agreement protocols. She is the co-author of book chapters entitled “Blockchain and the Revolution of Consensus On-Demand”, and “Blockchain: Consensus Algorithms and Implementation on the Hyperledger Fabric Platform”, both published by the Brazilian Computing Society (SBC).

Currently, Fabíola is vice-president of the Administrative Board of the National Education and Research Network (RNP), the Brazilian infrastructure of the advanced network for collaboration and communication. She has served as the chair of the special board on computer networks and distributed systems of SBC, and the chair of the special board on fault tolerance of SBC. She served as the TPC co-chair and general chair of the Brazilian Symposium on Distributed Systems and Computer Networks (SBRC). She held visiting positions at Paris-Sorbonne, Orsay and Rennes Universities in France.

My research focuses on the security and scalability of distributed systems, in particular blockchain protocols and trusted execution environments. I have previously worked on distributed storage algorithms and data aggregation in sensor networks. I completed my Ph.D. in 2013 in the Technion’s Electrical Engineering Department under the supervision of Prof. Idit Keidar and Prof. Raphi Rom.

Sarah Meiklejohn is an Associate Professor in Cryptography and Security at University College London. She has broad research interests in computer security and cryptography, and works on topics such as anonymity in cryptocurrencies, privacy-enhancing technologies, and bringing transparency to shared systems.

Nalini Venkatasubramanian is currently a Professor in the School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California Irvine. She has had significant research and industry experience in the areas of distributed systems, adaptive middleware, pervasive and mobile computing, cyberphysical systems, distributed multimedia and formal methods and has over 250 publications in these areas. As a key member of the Center for Emergency Response Technologies at UC Irvine, Nalini’s recent research has focused on enabling resilient and sustainable communities using IoT/CPS technologies. In particular, her research addresses scalable observation and analysis of situational information from multimodal input sources; dynamic adaptation of the underlying systems to enable information flow under massive failures and the dissemination of rich notifications to members of the public at large. She is the recipient of the prestigious NSF Career Award, multiple Teaching Excellence Awards and best paper awards. Prof. Venkatasubramanian has served in numerous program and organizing committees of conferences on middleware, distributed systems and multimedia and on the editorial boards of journals. She received and M.S and Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Prior to arriving at UC Irvine, Nalini was a Research Staff Member at the Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California.

Veronica Estrada Galiñanes (Vero) is Associate Professor in Science and Technology at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Vero has a PhD from University of Neuchatel, Switzerland (2017) where she worked on practical codes for storage systems. Additionally, she has substantial international experience in the industry and academia. Her main research interests are dependable systems, distributed storage systems, particularly decentralized systems and their applications to empower individuals, communities and societies. To solve complex questions, she often conducts interdisciplinary research and includes the socio-technical and ethical perspective in the design and development of distributed systems. She collaborates at different levels with various non-profit organizations (Lecturers without borders, Open Humans, Fair Data Society & Ethereum Swarm).

Hakim Weatherspoon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University and Associate Director for Cornell’s Initiative for Digital Agriculture (CIDA). His research interests cover various aspects of fault-tolerance, reliability, security, and performance of internet-scale data systems such as cloud and distributed systems.

Weatherspoon received his Bachelors from the University of Washington and PhD from University of California, Berkeley. Weatherspoon has received awards for his many contributions, including the University of Washington, Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, Alumni Achievement Award; Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship; National Science Foundation CAREER Award; and a Kavli Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences.

He serves as Vice President of the USENIX Board of Directors and serves on the Steering Committee for the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing. Weatherspoon has also been recognized for his work to promote diversity, earning Cornell’s Zellman Warhaft Commitment to Diversity Award. Since 2011, he has organized the annual SoNIC Summer Research Workshop to help prepare between students from underrepresented groups to pursue their Ph.D. in computer science.

Hein Meling is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Stavanger, Norway, where he heads the reliable systems lab, and work on systems and protocols to improve the robustness of network services, blockchains and smart contracts. He is the project manager for the BBChain project, funded by Research Council of Norway, to conduct research on efficient trustworthy computing with blockchains and biometrics. Previously he was co-PI on two large research projects funded by the Research Council of Norway. Meling has coauthored more than 60 publications and has successfully supervised five PhD studentss. He received a PhD in 2006 from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Leander Jehl is an Associate Professor at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Leander received a Diploma in Mathematics from the University of Freiburg, Germany in 2011. In 2016 he received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Stavanger with the topic “Reconfiguration for Fault Tolerant Services in an Asynchronous System”. His research interest include both practical and theoretical aspects of distributed computing, including membership systems, byzantine fault tolerance and blockchains, and event based systems.

Roman Vitenberg is a professor at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo. His research interests lie broadly in the area of distributed applications, middleware and algorithms; including specification, design, analysis, implementation, performance evaluation, and software engineering. In particular, he has been working on large-scale communication, privacy and security, data storage, distributed event-based systems, fault-tolerant distributed computing, and more recently, blockchain. He is an Associate Editor for the EAI Transactions on Cloud Computing and a Steering Committee member for ACM DEBS and ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware. He has over 70 publications in peer-reviewed venues and 5 filed patents. His papers were presented best paper awards at ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware, ACM SAC, and ACM DEBS conferences.