Jonathan Appavoo

Jonathan Appavoo, PhD is an Associate Professor at Boston University in the department of Computer Science. Prior to that he was a Research Staff Member at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. Professor Appavoo loves to hack on computers and dream about future systems and has surprisingly found a way to make a living at it. As a graduate student at the University of Toronto (UofT) he began his PhD working in Computer Vision hoping to build robots. He quickly realized the error of his ways and switched to working on the Tornado operating systems – a novel multiprocessor OS for an ambitious large scale NUMA multiprocess being designed and built at UofT. He followed Tornado’s journey to IBM and worked on IBM’s K42 Research OS and then the Libra library OS. After this he
helped found Project Kittyhawk to explore the construction of a global-scale computer and its attendant cloud based usage model. Through these experiences he nurtured a vision of a novel Programmable Smart Machine (PSM) computer model, that combines biologically inspired mechanisms, where the system’s performance and efficiency grow automatically as a function of its size and usage. He received an National Science Foundation CAREER Award to pursue the PSM model. Professor Appavoo, along with his graduate students, continue to hack on OSes and work on the PSM model. Professor Appavoo has been very fortunate to have worked with amazing colleagues and students and is thankful to all of them (especially for their patience).