Kenneth P. Birman

Ken Birman is the N. Rama Rao Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/ken). His work is concerned with ways of creating large-scale distributed systems with strong assurance properties, such as fault-tolerance, consistent behavior, rapid response, security, or other kinds of coordination. Over the 30 years of his career, Ken created platforms that became widely used in many critical settings: his Isis system was used in the French Air Traffic Control System, the New York and Swiss Stock Exchanges, and the US Navy AEGIS, and other systems he built were the basis of products and platforms at Amazon.com, IBM, Microsoft, EMC, and many others. His is also a prolific author of research papers, with more than 150+ publications in major journals and conferences, and has written several textbooks. Winner of the 2009 IEEE Tsukomo Kanai Award and the ACM Fellow Award, Birman has held a wide variety of roles within the field.

His most recent software platform, Isis2, is designed to help developers create high-assurance cloud computing systems; it can be used from C++, C#, Python, VB and many other languages and is available, free, for download from http://www.cs.cornell.edu/ken/isis2. His new textbook, "A Guide to Reliable Distributed Systems", will be available from Springer Verlag early in 2012.