Ken Birman

Education

University of California, Berkeley.

Career

He is best known for developing the Isis Toolkit, which introduced the virtual synchrony execution model for multicast communication and then and founding a company, Isis Distributed Systems, that used it as the basis for a wide range of robust software solutions for stock exchanges, air traffic control, and factory automation. Although the company no longer exists, Isis operated the New York and Swiss Stock Exchanges for more than a decade, and continues to be actively used in the French air traffic control system and the United States Navy AEGIS warship. The technology permits these and other systems to automatically adapt themselves when failures or other disruptions occur, to securely share keys and security policy data, and to replicate critical services so that availability can be maintained even while some system components are down.

A new version of the Isis technology, called Vsync, is now available as an open-source free library.

Other widely cited systems from his Cornell research effort include the Bimodal Multicast (a probabilistically reliable broadcast protocol that uses the gossip paradigm) and Astrolabe (a scalable tool for monitoring, data mining and managing large systems). An Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow, Birman is also the author of several books, most recently "Reliable Distributed Computing: Technologies, Web Services, and Applications", which was published by Springer-Verlag in May 2007.

He was Editor in Chief of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Computer Systems from 1993-1998. Birman’s primary research emphasis is currently concerned with the scalability of distributed systems, security technologies, and system management tools employed in cloud computing systems

, Daniel A. Doctor

Achievements

• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Technical Committee on Distributed Processing Outstanding Achievement Award 2009 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Tsutomu Kanai Award for Distributed Computing 2009 Research Visionary Award (Cisco Corporation) 2008 Appointed N. Rama Rao Professor of Computer Science 2009 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Senior Member (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) 2012 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award 2013 (for "Exploiting Virtual Synchrony in Distributed Systems", published in the 1987 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SOSP conference).