Ion Stoica
Ion Stoica is a Romanian-American computer scientist specializing in distributed systems, cloud computing and computer networking. He is a professor of computer science at the University of California Berkeley and co-director of AMPLab. He co-founded Conviva, and Databricks, with other original developers of Apache Spark. Education. Stoica was born and raised in Romania and educated at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, graduating with a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1989. He went on to study at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) gaining a Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering in 2000 supervised  by Hui Zhang. Subjects included Chord (peer-to-peer), Core-Stateless Fair Queueing (CSFQ), and Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3). Career and research. Stoica's research interests include cloud computing, networking, distributed systems and big data. He authored or co-authored more than 100 peer reviewed papers in various areas of computer science. Stoica was a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Conviva in 2006, a company that came out of the End System Multicast project at CMU. In 2013 he co-founded Databricks, serving as its chief executive until being replaced by Ali Ghodsi in January 2016, when  he became executive chairman. Awards. Stoica won the Association for Computing Machinery doctoral dissertation Award in 2001. Stoica is the recipient of a SIGCOMM Test of Time Award (2011), the 2007 CoNEXT Rising Star Award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2003) and a PECASE Award (2002). Stoica is also an ACM Fellow. In 2019, Stoica received the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award.