Alberto Lerner has a mixed profile of industrial and academic work with over thirty years of experience. He worked as research or software technical staff at numerous tech companies, such as IBM, Google, and MongoDB and as a consultant at many database start-ups. His interest revolves around high-scale, high-performance distributed systems, particularly using heterogeneous hardware to support them. He has participated in designing and implementing several such systems, including, more recently, the X-SSD device and ongoing efforts to create more easily programmable co-designed devices. Alberto has been a Senior Researcher at the Computer Science Department of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland since 2018. He has been on several Program Committees for the Database and Systems communities, including SIGMOD, VLDB, CIDR, EDBT, ICDE, and Usenix ATC.Philippe Bonnet is an experimental computer scientist with a background in database systems. For thirty years, Philippe has explored the design, implementation, and evaluation of database systems in the context of successive generations of computer classes, including wireless sensor networks, computer clusters, and most recently disaggregated heterogeneous computers. Philippe is an expert on storage system software. He contributed to the uFlip Benchmark, the Linux multiqueue block layer, the Linux framework for Open-Channel SSDs, the OX architecture for computational storage, the xNVMe library, and Delilah, a prototype for eBPF offload on computational storage. Philippe has been a professor in the department of Computer Science at the IT University of Copenhagen since 2016. He is a trustee of the VLDB Endowment and currently chairs the ACM EIG on Reproducibility and Replicability.
