The Association for Computing Machinery has named Professor Samer Al-Kiswany an ACM Senior Member. Initiated in 2006, the ACM Senior Member program recognizes computer scientists with at least a decade of professional experience in the Association and who have demonstrated excellence through technical leadership and professional contributions.
ACM’s Senior Members are part of a distinguished cadre of colleagues to whom ACM and its members look for guidance and leadership in computing and information technology. ACM Senior Membership represents an important career milestone, and its status is a globally acknowledged and respected distinction.
Professor Al-Kiswany completed his PhD in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of British Columbia. During his doctoral studies, he completed internships at Microsoft Research Lab, Microsoft Azure, IBM Research, NEC Labs, and Argonne National Lab. After his PhD, Professor Al-Kiswany joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a postdoctoral researcher, working with Professors Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, before joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science.
Professor Al-Kiswany leads WASL — the Waterloo Advanced Systems Lab — a group whose research is on computing systems with a special focus on distributed and operating systems. He and his students focus on building the next generation of high-performance, reliable, and scalable distributed systems. His research group’s efforts and expertise span low-level file system designs to network optimizations to large-scale data storage and processing systems. They explore designs and methodologies to build highly efficient systems by leveraging recent advances in hardware technology and by exploiting domain-specific optimizations from big data analytics to high-performance science applications.
In addition to his recognition as an ACM Senior Member, in 2019 Professor Al-Kiswany was elevated to the grade of Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, an honour bestowed to IEEE members who have made significant contributions to their profession.