Professor Gregory Chockler
Biography
I am a Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Surrey, UK, where I am the head of the Distributed and Networked Systems group and a member of the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security.
I joined University of Surrey in January 2020 as a Full Professor. From 2012 and until January 2020, I served as a tenured faculty at Royal Holloway, University of London starting as an Associate Professor (Reader), and being promoted to Full Professor in 2017. Between 2005 and 2012, I was a Research Staff Member at IBM Research. From 2003-2005, I was a Postdoctoral Associate with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. I have held visiting scientist positions at EPFL, KTH, SICS, Emory University, IBM, and IMDEA Software Institute.
Research
Research interests
My research interests span both fundamental and applied aspects of fault-tolerance and trustworthiness of distributed systems. While at IBM, I co-invented and participated in the development of a new event-monitoring technology, which incorporated concepts from random graph theory and weak consistency, to boost scalability of the control planes of IBM WebSphere line of products (notably WebSphere Virtual Enterprise), by several orders of magnitude. I also co-invented Speculative Paxos, a new reconfigurable replication protocol, which was integrated into the management tiers of several IBM cloud offerings (notably, IBM WebSphere Liberty and PureApp) to improve their availability and failure resilience. For this work, I received several corporate-level awards including two Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and a Scientific Accomplishment Award. My recent work focuses on blockchain and scalable information diffusion and is funded by the Stellar Development Foundation Academic Research Grant (October 2020), IBM Shared University Research Award (2017) and Facebook Faculty Award (2015).