Ken Birman

Ken Birman is the N. Rama Rao Professor of Computer Science. His research is on reliable, secure, and scalable distributed systems. Current projects include Vortex, a platform for speeding up AI and ML inference or knowledge retrieval tasks by fully leveraging cutting edge hardware accelerators and reimplementing key data paths to reduce or eliminate copying and other delays; Cascade, an exceptionally performant storage framework for Vortex; and Derecho, a highly optimized library for accelerating communication that leverages RDMA when available. Jointly, these three elements enable dramatic improvements in the cost of ML hosting and sharp reductions in ML latencies. In more entrepreneurial roles, Ken founded a series of companies. One focused on software fault tolerance and created a variety of cloud computing infrastructure solutions. Another architected and implemented the core of the New York Stock Exchange trading floor, the Swiss Exchange, the French Air Traffic Control System communication platform, and created a secure, high-speed data sharing capability for the U.S. Navy AEGIS warship. Ken received his Ph.D. and master's degrees in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley and his B.A. in computer science from Columbia University, is an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow, and won the IEEE Tsutomo Kanai award for his innovations in distributed computing.