Christopher De Sa is an Assistant Professor in the Cornell Department of Computer Science, with additional field membership in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Statistics and Data Science. His research covers algorithmic, software, and hardware techniques for high-performance machine learning, with a focus on relaxed-consistency variants of stochastic algorithms such as asynchronous and low-precision stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and Markov chain Monte Carlo. He received a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 2017.
Peter Druschel is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) and Associate Chair of the Chemistry, Physics, and Technology Section of the Max Planck Society in Germany. Previously, he was a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas. His research interests include distributed systems, mobile systems, privacy and compliance. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, a Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award, and the EuroSys Lifetime Achievement Award. Peter is a member of Academia Europaea and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
Anja Feldmann is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. She studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned an M.Sc. in 1991 and, four years later, her Ph.D. In the next four years she did research work at AT&T Labs Research, before taking professor positions at Saarland University and TU Munich. From 2006 to 2018, Anja was professor at TU Berlin and the Telekom Innovation Laboratories. In May 2012, she was elected the first woman on the employer side of the Supervisory Board of SAP. Her current research interests include Internet measurement, traffic engineering, and traffic characterization, network performance debugging, and network architecture. She has published more than 70 papers and has served on more than 60 program committees, including as Co-Chair of ACM SIGCOMM 2003 and ACM IMC 2011 and as Co-PC-Chair of ACM SIGCOMM 2007, ACM IMC 2009, and ACM HotNets 2014. She is a recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Preis 2011, the highest honor awarded in German research, the Berliner Wissenschaftspreis 2011, and the Schellingpreis 2019. She is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the BBAW, and acatech.
Tom Goldstein is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. His research lies at the intersection of machine learning and optimization, and targets applications in computer vision and signal processing. He works at the boundary between theory and practice, leveraging mathematical foundations, complex models, and efficient hardware to build practical, high-performance systems. Before joining the faculty at Maryland, Tom completed his Ph.D. in Mathematics at UCLA, and was a research scientist at Rice University and Stanford University. Tom has been the recipient of several awards, including SIAM’s DiPrima Prize, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, and a Sloan Fellowship.
Immanuel Trummer is assistant professor for computer science at Cornell University. He works in the area of databases and data analysis. In particular, he is interested in the question of how to make data processing more efficient via smarter planning and tuning. Beyond that, he focuses on making data access more user-friendly via voice and natural language interfaces. Immanuel’s papers were selected for “Best of VLDB”, “Best of SIGMOD”, for the ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award, and for publication in CACM as CACM Research Highlight. He holds a Ph.D. from EPFL and is an alumnus of the German National Academic Foundation.
David Van Horn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interests are in programming languages and formal methods, where he works toward making the construction of reusable, trusted software components possible and effective. He publishes regularly in the flagship SIGPLAN conferences, POPL, PLDI, OOPSLA, and ICFP, and his work has been recognized with a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a CRA Computing Innovation Fellowship, a Communications of the ACM Research Highlight, an OOPSLA Distinguished Paper Award, and several invitations to special issues of the Journal of Functional Programming devoted to ICFP. He is the co-author of “Realm of Racket,” an illustrated book on programming video games, written and illustrated with undergraduate students.