MPI-SWS faculty member Jonathan Mace has received an honorable mention for the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Launched in 2013, the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award was created by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (ACM SIGOPS) to recognize research in software systems and to encourage the creativity that Dennis Ritchie embodied. Only one winner is chosen annually, and this year, Jonathan Mace's dissertation received an Honorable Mention for the award.

"Many tools for monitoring and enforcing distributed systems," Jonathan explains, "capture information about end-to-end executions by propagating in-band contexts." In his thesis---A Universal Architecture for Cross-Cutting Tools in Distributed Systems---he characterizes a broad class of such cross-cutting tools and extends these ideas to new applications in resource management and dynamic monitoring. Finally, he identifies underlying commonalities in this class of tools, and proposes an abstraction layering that simplifies their development, deployment, and reuse.

Jonathan Mace has joined the institute as a tenure-track faculty member, effective September 1, 2018.  He is joining us from Brown University, USA, where he has completed his Ph.D. in computer science.  Jonathan's research focuses on tools, techniques, and abstractions to make it easier to develop and operate cloud distributed systems.  In particular, he is interested in making it easier to reason about and control complicated, end-to-end system behaviors at runtime.

Before starting his Ph.D., Jonathan worked for two years at IBM UK, and earned his undergraduate degree from Oxford University.  He is a recipient of the Facebook Fellowship in Distributed Systems, an SOSP Best Paper Award, and the Honorable Mention for the Dennis Ritchie Thesis Award.

Antoine Kaufmann is joining us from the University of Washington in Seattle,
where he obtained his Ph.D. in computer science. His research investigates the
design and implementation of efficient, scalable, and robust systems for
rapidly evolving modern platforms, with a current focus on data centers. He
addresses these challenges from a systems perspective, with solutions that span
multiple layers of the systems stack, from operating systems through networks
down to hardware, but also programming languages and applications.

Antoine joins the institute as a research group leader, effective Aug 6, 2018. Before
his Ph.D., Antoine obtained his Master's and Bachelor's degree from ETH Zurich.