Objective

Become a world-leading expert and be known for the high-quality research and development work in the area of information/knowledge representation, management, and processing at scale. Lead the architecture, design, and development of technologies to enable an ecosystem of "knowledge-aware", large-scale Internet services and ap-plications.

Interests

• Distributed, high-performance, scalable computing. The use of the Internet as the platform for knowledge-driven applications. Dealing with all the problems associated with designing, developing, deploying, and main-taining the infrastructure necessary for gaining insight from the processing of data and information.
• The Internet as a platform to support users who are equally producers and consumers of semantically rich, machine-processable, and, why not, machine-interpretable information.

Profile

• Co-author of the popular "REST in Practice" book by O'Reilly.
• Architecture, development, and technical leadership in Microsoft's Big Data Management and Bing teams.
• Recently appointed to the position of Visiting Professor at the School of Computing Science, Newcastle Uni-versity, UK, as recognition of contributions in research and industry.
• Architecture, program management, and prototyping work in Microsoft Research's External Research group and Microsoft's Connected System Division architecture team.
• Architecture, research, and prototyping work for one of UK's regional e-Science centers. Responsible for the technical vision, technology adoption, and design work for bio-informatics, neuro-informatics, astronomy, etc. related applications. Interactions with scientists and analysis of their application and infrastructure require-ments. Built prototypes demonstrating ideas for composing Internet-scale scientific applications.
• PhD and post-doctoral research in the area of software-based support for high-performance, distributed-memory, parallel architectures.
• Management of research and Grid-related infrastructure teams.
• Extensive knowledge of Web Services standards and specifications. Author of suite of specifications for de-scribing the messaging behavior of services (SOAP Service Description Language, SSDL, http://ssdl.org). Owned and co-edited the WS-MetadataExchange and WS-Transfer on behalf of Connected System Division's architec-ture team. Worked on the OASIS WS-Business Transaction Protocol (the first Web Services-based protocol for transactions).
• Technical writer/blogger and author of many publications. Able presenter and communicator of new ideas and research work.

Professional Experience

• Principal Developer (Dec. 2009 - present) - Microsoft Corporation
  I currently work in the Big Data management space as a developer/architect for a yet-to-be-announced cloud service. I am responsible for the work related to large-scale distributed computation (e.g. map-reduce), NoSQL stores, and cloud services. I was recently awarded with my second "Gold Star", which is Microsoft's recogni-tion for high achievement and quality of work, and ranked as a "top performer" in the annual review.
• Principal Developer (Dec. 2008 - 2009) - Microsoft Corporation
  I designed and prototyped Semantic search infrastructure for Bing.
• Architect (Nov. 2006 - Nov 2008) - Microsoft Corporation
  I joined Microsoft's Technical Computing Group, reporting to Corporate Vice President Tony Hey, in order to work on technologies, services, and tools that help scientists and researchers be more productive and effi-cient. I was awarded with a "Gold Star" for my work. Highlights:
  • Architected, prototyped, and lead the team that implemented Zentity, a SQL Server 2008/Entity Framework-based solution for a semantic computing platform to store and manage the research out-put of an organization; lead the team of 20 offshore engineers to execute on the implementation;
  • Technical lead of External Research's "Cloud Computing for Science" vision, implementation, and de-ployment.
  • Program management of the Microsoft-Intel joined sponsorship of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers;
  • Design and development of various plugins for Office to be used for research (now released as open source);
  • Interactions with leading scientists worldwide;
  • Whitepapers about the future of computing for science, social networking, and semantics that reached Bill Gates who positively commented on them.
• Program Manager (2005 - Oct. 2006) - Microsoft Corporation
  I joined Microsoft's Connected Systems Division architecture team to investigate possible directions for the next generation development platform. While working for Brad Lovering's team of architects, I gained valuable experience on how Microsoft technol-ogies move from ideas and prototypes to products. I was also given the chance to own two Web Services spec-ifications and lead the necessary technical work and negotiations with IBM.
• Principal Research Associate (2003 - 2005) - School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle
  My research while at the University of Newcastle focused in the areas of service-oriented, distributed, high-performance computing with an emphasis on Internet-scale architectures. The focal point of my investigations was the articulation of architectural principles for Internet-scale computing and how they could be applied us-ing Web Services technologies.
• Chief Software Architect (2003 - 2005) - North-East Regional e-Science Centre (NEReSC), University of Newcastle
  In addition to being a principal research associate, I was also NEReSC's chief software architect. NEReSC was involved in a large number of high-profile projects in the areas of data-intensive computing, bioinformatics, virtual organizations, and high-performance, distributed computing. My architectural duties included involve-ment with all the centre's research projects during their design and architecture phases, setting the direction in terms of the set of technologies used for all implementations, and providing advice on Web and Grid stand-ards and specifications.
• Private (2001 - 2002) - Greek army
  Fulfillment of the military service duty (awarded a distinction of honor). Although my duties in the Greek army were not related to computing science, I experienced the disciplined life of an army and learned how to work within a team.
• Senior Software Engineer (2001) - Hewlett Packard
  Co-investigator in an R&D team in the area of Transactions for Web Services. Principal role in the research, de-sign, and implementation of the XML Transaction Service (XTS) the prototype on which the HP-WTS 1.0 prod-uct was based.
• Research Associate (2000 - 2001) - Dep. of Computing Science, University of Newcastle
  Post-doctoral research in the area of parallel, high-performance computing using clusters of workstations and object-oriented, visual programming languages for parallel computing.

Education

• Doctor of Philosophy in Computing Science (1996 - 2000) - University of Newcastle upon Tyne
  Title of PhD thesis: Run-time Support for Parallel Object-Oriented Computing.
  The research work involved the implementation of an all in software object-based DSM system, novel object caching techniques for distributed systems, and a new lazy task creation technique. The thesis dealt with de-sign and implementation issues in the areas of load-balancing, high-speed communications, and clustering.
• Master of Science in Computing Software and Systems Design (1995 - 1996) - University of Newcastle upon Tyne
  Achieved highest marks in year. My dissertation work was in the area of run time support for mobile agents.
• Bachelor of Science in Information Technology (1991 - 1995) - Dep. of Software Engineering, TEI of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
  Second in class, final year project on DNS and sendmail was awarded with distinction.

Selected Publications

• REST in Practice (book),
  Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis, Ian Robinson, O'Reilly, 2010, http://restinpractice.com
• A platfrom for all that we know: creating a knowledge-driven research infrastructure
  Savas Parastatidis, invited chapter in the book "The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery"
• A "smart" cyberinfrastructure for research
  Savas Parastatidis, Evely Viegas, Tony Hey, Communications of the ACM, volume 52, issue 12, Dec 2009
• Protocol-based Integration using SSDL and Ï€-calculus
  Simon Woodman et al., Chapter in 'Workflows for e-Science', Taylor et al (eds), Springer, 2007
• Asynchronous Messaging between Web Services Using SSDL
  Savas Parastatidis et al., IEEE Internet Computing, 10(1), p26-39, 2006
• WS-GAF: A Framework for Building Grid Applications Using Web Services
  Savas Parastatidis et al., Journal of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 17(2-4), p391-417, 2005
• For a more complete list of publications please visit http://savas.me/publications.aspx.

Community Participation

• Workshop Organizer
  • Manycore Computing Workshop 07
  • Building Service Based Grids - GGF 11
  • Experiences and Future Challenges in Building Grids from Open Standards - UK e-Science AHM 2004
  • Service Grids: Current Activity & Middleware Requirements
  • e-Science Workflow Services
• Journal Reviewer/Editor (sample)
  • ACM Transactions on Internet
  • IEEE Distributed Systems Online
  • International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, special issue on 'Middleware for Web Services'
  • Journal of Web Services Research, Guest Editor
  • Journal of Web Services Research, Review Board Member
• Conference Program Committee Member (sample)
  • WWW 2006, 2007
  • Grid 2006: 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing
  • Cluster Computing and Grid 2005, 2006, 2007

Professional Memberships

• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), since 1996
• IEEE Computer, since 1996
• Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), since 1996