Career in Industry Panelist
Company: Facebook
Name: Sanjeev Kumar
Short Bio
Sanjeev Kumar is a Director of Engineering at Facebook working on highly-scalable infrastructure. He focuses on three areas: infrastructure for messaging and videos product; a set of core systems used to build all the custom services at Facebook; and a team that fosters collaborations and exchange of ideas between Facebook and the academic research community. Over the years, he has worked on a wide variety of systems projects including (a) exabyte-scale storage systems (for photos and videos, for cold storage, and for data warehouse); (b) power and energy management in data centers; (c) software architecture to enable Facebook to serve users from a set of distributed datacenters; and (d) reliability and disaster recovery capabilities.
Prior to Facebook, Sanjeev was a Senior Staff Researcher at Intel Corp. where he investigated software, hardware, and applications for many-core processor architectures.
Sanjeev holds a Ph.D. From Princeton University, a M.S. from Indiana University, and a B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai (all in Computer Science).
Company: Google
Name: Alon Halevy
Short Bio
Alon Halevy heads the Structured Data Management Research group at Google. Prior to that, he was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he founded the database group. In 2004, Dr. Halevy founded Transformic, a company that created search engines for the deep web, and was acquired by Google. Dr. Halevy is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2000. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1993. Halevy is the author of "The Infinite Emotions of Coffee", and a co-author of the book "Principles of Data Integration", published in 2012. He is a member of the board of the Alliance for Coffee Excellence.
Company: IBM
Name: Laura Haas
Short Bio
Laura Haas is an IBM Fellow and Director of IBM Research’s Accelerated Discovery Lab. She was Director of Computer Science at IBM’s Almaden Research Center from 2005 to 2011, and had worldwide responsibility for IBM Research’s exploratory science program from 2009 through 2013. From 2001-2005, she led the Information Integration Solutions architecture and development teams in IBM's Software Group. Previously, Dr. Haas was a research staff member and manager at Almaden. She is best known for her work on the Starburst query processor, from which DB2 LUW was developed, on Garlic, a system which allowed integration of heterogeneous data sources, and on Clio, the first semi-automatic tool for heterogeneous schema mapping. She has received several IBM awards for Outstanding Innovation and Technical Achievement, an IBM Corporate Award for information integration technology, the Anita Borg Institute Technical Leadership Award, and the ACM SIGMOD Codd Innovation Award. Dr. Haas was Vice President of the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees from 2004-2009, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the IBM Academy of Technology, an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Vice Chair of the board of the Computing Research Association.
Company: Oracle
Name: Eric Sedlar - Vice President and Technical Director Oracle Labs
Short Bio
Eric Sedlar is Vice President & Technical Director of Oracle Labs (formerly Sun Labs). This position entails figuring out how to transfer research results from Labs research into Oracle products & services, as well as setting overall technical direction for new research projects in Oracle Labs. Eric manages over 180 fulltime researchers working on over a dozen separate research areas.
Eric's own research interests are in domain-specific languages and acceleration of database operations both via new hardware and using JIT compilation.
Previously, he led the effort for XML-native storage inside Oracle, starting with Oracle 9iR2. Eric has held various architecture and development management positions at Oracle since starting there in 1990. He holds over 68 patents, and has served on standards organizations for Oracle in the W3C and IETF. He co-authored the Best Paper at SIGMOD 2010 on architecture-sensitive search trees.
Company: SAP
Name: Alexander Boehm
Short Bio
Dr. Alexander Boehm is a database architect working on SAP's HANA in-memory database management system. His focus is on performance optimization and holistic improvements of enterprise architectures, in particular application server/DBMS co-design. Prior to joining SAP, he received his PhD from the University of Mannheim, Germany, where he worked on the development of efficient and scalable applications using declarative message processing.
Company: Tableau
Name: Patrice Pelland
Short Bio
Patrice Pelland is a Senior Director of Platform Development at Tableau. He has 20+ years of software engineering and technical leadership experience in areas including agile development, parallel computing, low-level system development, query generation+optimization, caching platforms, highly optimized in-memory columnar data store, web services, scalability, cryptography, developer tools and SDKs, visual analysis, build systems, developer engineering metrics, programming languages, statistics & predictive analysis, and computer graphics. He was also teaching computer science classes in College in Canada for 7 years.
Company: Twitter
Name: Karthik Ramasamy
Short Bio
Karthik is the engineering manager and technical lead for Real Time Analytics at Twitter. He has two decades of experience working in parallel databases, big data infrastructure and networking. He cofounded Locomatix, a company that specializes in real timestreaming processing on Hadoop and Cassandra using SQL that was acquired by Twitter. Before Locomatix, he had a brief stint with Greenplum where he worked on parallel query scheduling. Greenplum was eventually acquired by EMC for more than $300M. Prior to Greenplum, Karthik was at Juniper Networks where he designed and delivered platforms, protocols, databases and high availability solutions for network routers that are widely deployed in the Internet. Before joining Juniper at University of Wisconsin, he worked extensively in parallel database systems, query processing, scale out technologies, storage engine and online analytical systems. Several of these research were spun as a company later acquired by Teradata.
He is the author of several publications, patents and one of the best selling book "Network Routing: Algorithms, Protocols and Architectures." He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UW Madison with a focus on databases.
