Dr. Kanianthra Mani Chandy

The Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology. He has been the Executive Officer of the Computer Science Department twice, and he has been a professor at Caltech since 1989. He has worked for Honeywell and IBM. From 1970 to 1989, he was in the Computer Science Department of the University of Texas at Austin, serving as chair in 1978?79 and 1983?85. He received his Bachelor?s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1965 and his Master?s degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Electrical Engineering at the Operations Research Center in 1969 with a thesis in Operations research. He does research in distributed computing, a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system is a software system in which components located on networked computers communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages. He described the Snapshot algorithm together with Leslie Lamport. In 1984, along with J Misra, he proposed a new solution to Dining philosophers problem; an example problem often used in concurrent algorithm design to illustrate synchronization issues and techniques for resolving them. He has served as a consultant to a number of companies including IBM and Bell Labs. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He received the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award for Computers and Communication in 1987 and the A.A. Michelson Award from the Computer Measurement Group in 1985. He has published three books and over a hundred papers on distributed computing, verification of concurrent programs, parallel programming languages and performance models of computing and communication systems, including the eponymous BCMP networks, a class of queueing network for which a product-form equilibrium distribution exists. Other Recent Publications include: (with Concetta Pilotto and Ryan McLean) ?Networked Sensing Systems for People Carrying Radiation Material,? Fifth Intn?l Conf. on Networked Sensing Systems, (INSS 2008), June 2008; (with Matt Wu and Annie Liu) ?Virtual Environments for Developing Strategies to Interdict Terrorists Carrying Dirty Bombs,? Intn?l Conf. on Inf.Syst. for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2008), May 2008; (with Sayan Mitra) "A Theory for Verifying Stability and Convergence of Automata Formalized in PVS", Theorem Proving in Higher Order Logics (TPHOLS 2008), August 2008; (with M. Charpentier, A. Capponi), "Towards a Theory of Events," Distributed Event Based Systems (DEBS 2007), June 2007; and (with M. Charpentier), "Self Similar Algorithms for Dynamic Distributed Systems," International Conf. on Distributed Computing Systems, (ICDCS 2007), June 2007.