Computer Science++: Toward the Next 50!

Simon Peacock

Dean of Science, UBC

Bio: Dr. Peacock's research focuses on understanding the thermal, petrologic, and seismological structure of subduction zones — places on Earth where tectonic plates dive into the Earth's mantle triggering great earthquakes and explosive volcanism. His research integrates numerical heat-transfer models with petrologic models constrained by experiments and natural mineral assemblages in order to gain insight into processes operating at 20 to 700 kilometers depth in the Earth. The resulting integrated thermal-petrologic models are tested against seismological observations of modern subduction zones. In addition to subduction zone studies, Peacock and his students have conducted research on the thermal evolution of the crust during extension, the distribution of light elements in high-pressure metamorphic rocks, the exhumation and preservation of ultra-high pressure metamorphic rocks, and the origin of eclogite-facies rocks in Antarctica.

Ghislaine Chan BSc'00

Vice President, Applications Development, Broadridge Financial

Bio: Ghislaine is a business technology leader from Vancouver with 18 years of industry experience in Financial Technology (FinTech). Currently the Vice President of Applications Development, she leads the Wealth Management technology teams at Broadridge. She specializes in business development and technology-intensive projects in either a start-up environment or an established global corporation. She is involved in developing new financial products, on-boarding new clients, and implementing operational excellence. Ghislaine is also the Co-Managing Director of Girls in Tech Vancouver, a non-profit which supports and encourages young women to stay in technology. Ghislaine graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Bachelor in Computer Science. She is most passionate about people leadership and talent development.

David Cheriton BSc'73

Professor Emeritus, Computer Science, Stanford University

Bio: David Cheriton is an emeritus professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University and a world-renowned researcher in networking and distributed systems. He was a founder of Granite Systems, acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996, and founder of Kealia, acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2004. He is a senior technical fellow at Intel and has been a technical advisor with Google, Vmware, Tibco, Cisco and Sun and a number of startup companies. He was the co-founder and chief scientist of Arista Networks and is the co-founder and chief scientist of Apstra, BrainOfThings and OptumSoft.

Cheriton’s research includes the areas of high-performance distributed systems, and high-speed computer communication, with a particular interest in protocol design. He leads the Distributed Systems Group, focused on understanding and solving problems with the complex distributed systems. He has also been teaching and writing about object-oriented programming, building on his experience with OOP in systems building.

Cheriton received a BSc in mathematics from the University of British Columbia and has been instrumental in supporting UBC’s efforts to transform undergraduate science education, emphasizing a strong foundation in computational thinking. In 2014 he established the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at UBC.

Yvonne Coady PhD'03

Professor, University of Victoria

Bio: Yvonne Coady is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Victoria where she works with the MOD(ularity) Squad—the grooviest gang of students to ever attempt to improve the modularity of system infrastructure software! The group has co-authored over 170 papers and over 40 graduate students have been unleashed on the world. Current research interests include mixed reality systems, citizen science, advanced modularity across the software stack and distributed clouds, and new programming paradigms and pedagogy for immersive applications.

James Colliander

Director of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences

Bio: James Colliander is Professor of Mathematics at UBC and serves as Director of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences. He is also the Founder/CEO of Crowdmark, an education technology company based in Toronto. Colliander's research intertwines partial differential equations, harmonic analysis, and dynamical systems to address problems arising from mathematical physics and other sources. He received his PhD in 1997 from the University of Illinois. After an NSF Postdoc at the University of California Berkeley, Colliander joined the University of Toronto and became Professor in 2007. He moved to UBC in 2015. Colliander was Professeur Invité at the Université de Paris-Nord, Université de Paris-Sud, and at the Institut Henri Poincaré. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. Colliander received a Sloan Fellowship, the McLean Award, and is an award winning teacher.

Anamaria Crisan

PhD Student, Computer Science, UBC

Bio: Ana Crisan is a current PhD student in computer science at UBC studying how heterogenous types of public health data can be integrated and visualized. She is a CIHR Vanier Scholar and is jointly supervised by Dr. Tamara Munzner (Computer Science) and Dr. Jennifer Gardy (School of Population and Public Health). Prior to her PhD studies, Ana worked with the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control supporting research in genomic epidemiology, and had also previously worked on prostate cancer biomarker development with a Vancouver based start-up. A summary of her present and past work can be found on her website: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~acrisan.

Mik Kersten BSc'99, PhD'07

Tasktop

Bio: Dr. Mik Kersten is the founder and CEO of Tasktop. His mission is to help create the Value Stream Network layer needed for the world’s largest and most impactful organizations to succeed with their digital transformations. Prior to shifting focus to entrepreneurship and the intersection of software and business, Kersten created the Eclipse Mylyn project and contributed over one million lines of code across numerous open source projects. As a research scientist at Xerox PARC, Mik created the first aspect-oriented development tools. He then received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia for inventing the task-focused workflow widely used by developers today. Kersten has been named a JavaOne Rock Star speaker and one of the IBM developerWorks Java top 10 writers of the decade. He was selected as one of the 2012 Business in Vancouver 40 under 40 and has been a World Technology Awards finalist in the IT Software category. Kersten is the editor of the new IEEE Software department on DevOps. Contact him at mik@tasktop.com or follow @mik_kersten

Margo Seltzer

Professor, Computer Science, Harvard University
Incoming Canada 150 Research Chair and Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science, University of British Columbia

Margo Seltzer is a Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science and the Faculty Director for the Center for Research on Computation and Society in Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In September 2018, she will assume a Canada 150 Research Chair and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Systems at the University of British Columbia.

Her research interests are in systems, construed quite broadly: systems for capturing and accessing provenance, file systems, databases, transaction processing systems, storage and analysis of graph-structured data, new architectures for parallelizing execution, and systems that apply technology to problems in healthcare.

She is the author of several widely-used software packages including database and transaction libraries and the 4.4BSD log-structured file system. Dr. Seltzer was a founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB, and is now an Architect at Oracle Corporation. She serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Science and Technology (ISAT) study group. She also served on the Computing Research Association Board of Directors, the Computing Community Consortium, and was President of the USENIX Association. She is a Sloan Foundation Fellow in Computer Science, an ACM Fellow, a Bunting Fellow, and was the recipient of the 1996 Radcliffe Junior Faculty Fellowship. She is recognized as an outstanding teacher and mentor, having received the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award in 1996, the Abrahmson Teaching Award in 1999, and the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising in 2010.

Dr. Seltzer received an A.B. degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard/Radcliffe College in 1983 and a Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992.

Chris Thachuk PhD'13

Caltech

Bio: Chris Thachuk is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech, with Erik Winfree. Chris works in the areas of DNA computing and molecular programming - how one might compute or build new structures at the nano-scale with bio-molecules such as DNA. Having received his his PhD in Computer Science at UBC in 2012 and a MSc in Bioinformatics at SFU in 2007, much of Chris' computations now happen in a test tube.

Ryan Wong BSc'94

Visier

Bio: Visier’s President, Chief Technology Officer & co-founder, Ryan Wong is known for his industry-leading technology expertise and business acumen. With more than twenty years of Enterprise Software knowledge and expertise, Ryan Wong has pioneered some of the Business Intelligence industry’s leading technologies and products. At Visier, he oversees the Technology and Product Development, as well as the company’s day-to-day business operations. Prior to Visier, Ryan held senior engineering roles at Business Objects and, after their acquisition by SAP, was the Vice President of Engineering for the SAP Business Objects BI platform and tools. Ryan joined Business Objects from Crystal Decisions, where he was the original author and the Chief Software Architect for the Crystal Enterprise platform. Ryan is a UBC CS alumnus, graduate class of 94.