Klaus KernKlaus Kern is Professor of Physics at EPFL and Director and Scientific Member at the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. He also is Honorary Professor at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His present research interests are in nanoscale science, quantum technology and in microscopy at the atomic limits of space and time. He holds a chemistry degree and PhD from the University of Bonn and a honorary doctors degree from the University of Aalborg. After his doctoral studies he was staff scientist at the Research Center Jülich and visiting scientist at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill before joining the Faculty of EPFL in 1991 and the Max-Planck-Society in 1998. Professor Kern has authored and coauthored close to 700 scientific publications, which have received nearly 60‘000 citations. He has served frequently on advisory committees to universities, professional societies and institutions and has received numerous scientific awards and honors, including the 2008 Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz Prize and the 2016 Van‘t Hoff Prize. Prof. Kern has also educated a large number of leading scientists in nanoscale physics and chemistry. During the past twenty-five years he has supervised one hundred PhD students and sixty postdoctoral fellows. Today, more than fifty of his former students and postdocs hold prominent faculty positions at Universities around the world.
Willy ZwaenepoelWilly Zwaenepoel received his B.S. from the University of Gent, Belgium in 1979, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1980 and 1984, respectively. In September 2002, he joined EPFL. He was Dean of the School of Computer and Communications Sciences at EPFL from 2002 to 2011. Before joining EPFL, Willy Zwaenepoel was on the faculty at Rice University, where he was the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering.
He was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1998, and Fellow of the ACM in 2000. In 2000 he received the Rice University Graduate Student Association Teaching and Mentoring Award. In 2007 he received the IEEE Tsutomu Kanai award. He was elected to the European Academy in 2009. He won best paper awards at SigComm 1984, OSDI 1999, Usenix 2000, Usenix 2006 and Eurosys 2007. He was program chair of OSDI in 1996 and Eurosys in 2006, and general chair of Mobisys in 2004. He was also an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems from 1998 to 2002.
Willy Zwaenepoel has worked in a variety of aspects of operating and distributed systems, including microkernels, fault tolerance, parallel scientific computing on clusters of workstations, clusters for web services, mobile computing, database replication and virtualization. He is most well known for his work on the Treadmarks distributed shared memory system, which was licensed to Intel and became the basis for Intels OpenMP cluster product. His work on high-performance software for network I/O led to the creation of iMimic Networking, Inc, which he led from 2000 to 2005. His current interests include large-scale data stores and software testing. Most recently, his work in software testing led to the creation of BugBuster, a startup based in Lausanne.