Full Program

The scale of cloud storage is immense and growing. In this talk I will cover some of the work that the team in Microsoft Research has been doing in creating storage technologies for cooler and cold data in the cloud in the last 8 years. I will talk about our initial efforts to use HDD-based storage, using clean-slate rack-scale design and disaggregation, and talk about the limitations. I will then talk about how this has driven us to a radical rethink of what longer term cold storage should look like, and how we are building a new storage system from the media up based on using glass as the media.

Ant Rowstron is a Principal Researcher and Deputy Lab Director at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. His research interests are broad, covering the spectrum of systems, distributed systems, storage and networking. He has worked on many things in the last two decades, and most recently has been leading a team investigating how to build clean-slate storage technologies, from the media up, for the cloud. Currently, he is learning a lot about how to write and read data in glass! He received an MEng degree in Computer Systems and Software Engineering in 1993 and a DPhil degree in Computer Science in 1997 both from the University of York, UK. After his DPhil studies, he joined Cambridge University in 1996, and then moved in May 1999 to Microsoft Research in the UK, where he has worked since. He was awarded the 2016 ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award.

As our computational infrastructure races gracefully forward into increasingly parallel multi-core and clustered systems, our ability to easily produce software that can successfully exploit such systems continues to stumble. For years, we've fantasized about the world in which we'd write simple, sequential programs, add magic sauce, and suddenly have scalable, parallel executions. We're not there. We're not even close. I'll present a radical, potentially crazy approach to automatic scalability, combining learning, prediction, and speculation. To date, we've achieved shockingly good scalability and reasonable speedup in limited domains, but the potential is tantalizingly enormous.

Margo Seltzer is currently the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science and the Faculty Director for the Center for Research on Computation and Society in Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In September 2018, she will assume a Canada 150 Research Chair and become the Director of the Computer Systems Laboratory at the University of British Columbia.
Her research interests are in systems, construed quite broadly: systems for capturing and accessing provenance, file systems, databases, transaction processing systems, storage and analysis of graph-structured data, new architectures for parallelizing execution, and systems that apply technology to problems in healthcare and the judicial system. Dr. Seltzer was a founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB, and is also an Architect at Oracle Corporation. She is a past President of the USENIX Association, a Sloan Foundation Fellow in Computer Science, and an ACM Fellow. She is recognized as an outstanding teacher and mentor, having received the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award in 1996, the Abrahmson Teaching Award in 1999, and the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising in 2010.

Cryptographers focus on provable cryptographic primitives. Standards bodies focus on syntax of messages. But there are many system issues that get ignored, leading to interesting security problems. Examples include trust models for PKI, misuse of web cookies, name issues, and placing unreasonable demands on users.

Radia Perlman is a Fellow at Dell EMC. Her specialties include network routing protocols, and network security. She developed the technology for making network routing self-stabilizing, largely self-managing, and scalable. She also invented the spanning tree algorithm, which transformed Ethernet from a technology that supported a few hundred nodes within a single building, to something that could support large networks. She also has made contributions in network security, including scalable data expiration, distributed algorithms despite malicious participants, DDOS prevention techniques, and user authentication. She is the author of the textbook “Interconnections” (about network layers 2 and 3) and coauthor of “Network Security” (applied cryptography). She has been recognized with many industry honors including induction into the National Academy of Engineering, the Inventor Hall of Fame, and lifetime achievement awards from Usenix and SIGCOMM. She has a PhD in computer science from MIT.

Radia Perlman is a Fellow at Dell EMC. Her specialties include network routing protocols, and network security. She developed the technology for making network routing self-stabilizing, largely self-managing, and scalable. She also invented the spanning tree algorithm, which transformed Ethernet from a technology that supported a few hundred nodes within a single building, to something that could support large networks. She also has made contributions in network security, including scalable data expiration, distributed algorithms despite malicious participants, DDOS prevention techniques, and user authentication. She is the author of the textbook “Interconnections” (about network layers 2 and 3) and coauthor of “Network Security” (applied cryptography). She has been recognized with many industry honors including induction into the National Academy of Engineering, the Inventor Hall of Fame, and lifetime achievement awards from Usenix and SIGCOMM. She has a PhD in computer science from MIT.

Margo Seltzer is currently the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science and the Faculty Director for the Center for Research on Computation and Society in Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In September 2018, she will assume a Canada 150 Research Chair and become the Director of the Computer Systems Laboratory at the University of British Columbia.
Her research interests are in systems, construed quite broadly: systems for capturing and accessing provenance, file systems, databases, transaction processing systems, storage and analysis of graph-structured data, new architectures for parallelizing execution, and systems that apply technology to problems in healthcare and the judicial system. Dr. Seltzer was a founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB, and is also an Architect at Oracle Corporation. She is a past President of the USENIX Association, a Sloan Foundation Fellow in Computer Science, and an ACM Fellow. She is recognized as an outstanding teacher and mentor, having received the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award in 1996, the Abrahmson Teaching Award in 1999, and the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising in 2010.

Tova Milo received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in 1992. After graduating she worked at the INRIA research institute in Paris and at University of Toronto and returned to Israel in 1995, joining the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv university, where she is now a full Professor and holds the Chair of Information Management. She served as the Head of the Computer Science Department from 2011-2014. Her research focuses on large-scale data management applications such as data integration, semi-structured information, Data-centered Business Processes and Crowd-sourcing, studying both theoretical and practical aspects. Tova served as the Program Chair of several international conferences, including PODS, VLDB, ICDT, XSym, and WebDB, and as the chair of the PODS Executive Committee. She served as a member of the VLDB Endowment and the PODS and ICDT executive boards and as an editor of TODS, IEEE Data Eng. Bull, and the Logical Methods in Computer Science Journal. Tova has received grants from the Israel Science Foundation, the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation, the Israeli and French Ministry of Science and the European Union. She is an ACM Fellow, a member of Academia Europaea, a recipient of the 2010 ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award, the 2017 VLDB Women in Database Research award, the 2017 Weizmann award for Exact Sciences Research, and of the prestigious EU ERC Advanced Investigators grant.

Aya Soffer is Director of AI Tech for the IBM Research AI organization. In this role, she inspires hundreds of IBM scientists around the world and helps shape their ideas into new AI technology that can bring scientific and commercial value. The goal of the AI Tech organization is to develop technologies that will help us reach the point where computers can truly master visual and textual information in all its richness. To accomplish this, we need to advance the state-of-the-art AI capabilities for understanding unstructured data, including image, video, speech, text, and multi-modal data. Going beyond the data, we are teaching computers to extract knowledge from data, apply reasoning, and interact through dialog and natural language queries. In my 19 years at IBM, Dr. Soffer has led several strategic initiatives that grew into successful IBM products and solutions. She has authored over 50 papers, served in numerous conference organization roles, and delivered a TED talk at the TEDMED event in Jerusalem.