Jobs & Education

Senior Data Science Fellow & Affiliate Professor, Compute Science & Engineering

University of Washington, Seattle, Washington

2014–Present

Interdisciplinary work with biologists, such as studies of adaptive mutations in microbial communities, and development of courses that promote cross discipline collaboration, such as "Biochemistry for Computer Scientists". I am also building tools that enhance the computational capabilities of scientists who lack training in software, such as the SciSheets project that empowers scientists to create scalable and reusable spreadsheets that operate on complex data.

Manager, Computational Discovery for Science (eScience)

Google, Inc., Seattle, Washington

2011-2014

Enhancing scientific discovery through scalable computational frameworks (eScience); creating 21st century eScience businesses; and research into information processing done by biological systems. My team developed a supercomputer that used "waste" cycles from the Google Cloud for several compute and data intensive research projects including: mechanisms of a class of signaling molecules (G-protein coupled receptors) that are critical to 40% of the currently marketed pharmaceuticals; analyses for the design of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope; and protein folding research.

Manager, Performance Analytics

Google, Inc., Seattle, Washington

2008-2011

Developing methodologies and tools for managing the performance of Google's cloud infrastructure. Innovations include the use of control theory based techniques for CPU scheduling of Google servers, and the development of capacity planning and performance tools that operate at scale.

Principal Architect

Microsoft, Inc., Redmond, Washington

2006-2008

Cross company leadership in the use of control theory to engineer resource management solutions for workload dynamics. Applied resource management engineering to Hotmail, Microsoft Exchange, and MSTV to mitigate demand spikes and achieve resource management objectives such as fairness. Parallelism enhancements for .NET 4.0. Developed a novel “hill climbing” algorithm for managing concurrency within the Common Language Runtime (CLR) .

Senior Manager, Adaptive Systems Department (and related positions)

IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY

1984-2006

Major projects: (1) Integration of control theory into performance engineering of IBM's database product DB2 for self-tuning memory management and throttling DB utilities; (2) Automated provisioning of software in enterprise environments using on-the-fly generation of BPEL workflows; (3) Quantitative measures of process complexity for service delivery; and (4) Event mining for real-time analysis and action taking in service delivery. Led Research Division technical strategy for systems management. Senior manager for the 25 person Adaptive Systems Department (which I created). Program Committee member and/or chair for Network Operations and Management, Integrated Management, and Distributed Systems Operations and Management. Published two books and over 100 peer-reviewed technical articles in major conferences (e.g., HotOS, SIGMETRICS, MASCOTS, ICDCS) and journals (e.g., IEEE Trans. Computer, IEEE Trans. SW Engineering). Adjunct professor at Columbia University.

Education

• 1984 - PhD Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles. Thesis: Updating Replicated Files in Real Time Distributed Processing Systems.

• 1974 - BA Mathematics, University of Michigan.