Dan Alistarh

Chemin Salomon-Penay 2,
1217 Meyrin, GE
Email: d.alistarh@gmail.com
Tel: +41 76 611 18 21

Education

09/2012 – 12/2013 Theory of Computation Group, MIT, USA

Postdoctoral Fellow/Associate, working on large-scale distributed systems.

09/2007 – 08/2012 Distributed Programming Laboratory (LPD), EPFL, Switzerland

PhD in Computer Science, under the supervision of Prof. Rachid Guerraoui.

09/2004 – 06/2007 Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany

Double B.Sc. degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, on a merit-based scholarship.

08/2006 – 12/2006 Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Semester abroad as an exchange student in the School of Computer Science.

Interests and Expertise

Distributed Systems
Algorithms and Data Structures
Data Analytics and Machine Learning

Work Experience

05/2016 – present Senior Researcher, Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich

Research in Applied Algorithms, in particular concurrent data structures and distributed
algorithms, with applications to machine learning and large-scale distributed optimization.

01/2014 – 05/2016 Researcher, Microsoft Research Cambridge, and

Morgan Fellow, Downing College, University of Cambridge
Research in Algorithms and Computer Systems, in particular distributed algorithms,
optimization for data-intensive applications, and next-generation wireless protocols.

09/2007– 09/2012 Research Assistant, Distributed Programming Lab, EPFL

Research on the design and implementation of efficient and reliable distributed systems.
The work resulted in new algorithms and frameworks for scalable distributed computation.

09/2007 – 08/2012 Internship, TU-Berlin/T-Mobile Research, Berlin Germany

Research on routing attacks and countermeasures, in the context of
fault-tolerant systems deployed at Internet scale.

09/2004 – 06/2007 System Developer, Cylab Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University

Research resulting in a working prototype of a three-dimensional pointing device.
The work included hardware and software design, and development of data filtering algorithms.
 Awards and Achievements
2012-2016 Microsoft Research / MIT
Elected as the Morien Morgan Research Fellow at Downing College, University of Cambridge.
Papers in PODC’14, SPAA’15, PPoPP’16 highlighted as top 5% of accepted papers.
Papers in STOC‘14 and PPoPP ‘15 highlighted by Communications of the ACM and Slashdot.
2007 – 2013 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL)
Awarded Swiss National Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for a research stay at MIT.
Awarded 2011 Technion “Aly Kaufmann” Postdoctoral Fellowship (declined).
Best Paper Award at ICDCN 2011.
Elected by the student body as the student representative in the Doctoral School committee.
2004 – 2006 Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany
Member of the Jacobs University President’s List for high academic achievement.
Merit-based grant from Jacobs University.
Selected for the Carnegie Mellon exchange program by the Computer Science faculty.
2005 – 2006 International Mathematics Olympiad for University Students (IMC)
3rd Prize in Bulgaria, 2005. Honourable Mention in Ukraine, 2006.
2000 – 2002 Romanian National Mathematical Olympiad
2nd Prize Ramnicu Valcea, 2002. 3 rd Prize, Targu Mures, 2001.

Academic Activity
Program PC Member, Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), 2016.
Committees: PC Member, Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), 2016.
PC Member, International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), 2013, 2015.
PC Member, International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking, 2012-2016.
Invited “Complexity and Analysis of Distributed Algorithms,” Oaxaca, Mexico, 2016.
Workshop “Probabilistic Techniques for Shared Memory Computation,” Banff, Canada, 2012.
Participation: “Abstractions for Scalable Multi-core Computing,” Dagstuhl, Germany, 2012.
“Randomized Algorithms for Distributed Computing,” Rennes, France, 2014.

Journal reviews: Journal of the ACM, SIAM Journal of Computing, Distributed Computing Journal

Conference reviews: International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC) 2009-2015

ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) 2010-2015
ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA) 2009-2015
IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) 2014, 2015
ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC) 2014, 2015

Advising and Teaching

MSR PhD co-adviser to Enrique Flynn (with Fernando Pedone), University of Lugano
Interns: Rati Gelashvili (MIT), Jennifer Iglesias (CMU), Hyun-Jik Kim (Oxford)
MIT Guest lecturer for MIT 6.172, Performance Engineering of Software Systems
EPFL Principal teaching assistant for Concurrent Algorithms, EPFL
In charge of tutorials, and of a series of classes on randomized distributed algorithms.
Principal teaching assistant for Distributed Algorithms, EPFL

Skills
Languages: English: fluent Italian: working knowledge
French: working knowledge German: basic
Romanian: mother tongue Spanish: basic
Hobbies: Sports (basketball, tennis, target shooting), chess, piano, travelling