Thilo Kielmann (Vrije Universitait Amsterdam)

Thilo Kielmann is Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. 
He studied Computer Science at Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, before receiving a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering in 1997, and the habilitation in Computer Science in 2001, the latter both from the University of Siegen, Germany. His research interests include clusters, cloud and grid computing, performance analysis of networked applications, and parallel and distributed programming. Before joining contrail, he has been the VUA team leader in the EC-funded projects GridLab and XtreemOS, and in the CoreGRID network of excellence. 

Guillaume Pierre (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Guillaume Pierre is an associate professor at VU University Amsterdam. His research focuses on the management of very large-scale distributed systems. He particularly studied Web applications as a good example of demanding large-scale systems and Cloud computing platforms. His research addresses a variety of questions such as how to make applications scale, how to control their non-functional properties, and how to design large-scale decentralized infrastructures where they can be deployed. Guillaume Pierre has been the main architect of the Globule collaborative content distribution network and work package leader in the XtreemOS FP6 project. He now leads the work on ConPaaS, the Platform-as-a-Service component of Contrail.

Matthew Johns (Rackspace inc.)

Matthew works in Product Marketing in Rackspace's London office, focussing on the Rackspace Cloud, servers, networking and software.  Matt arrived at Rackspace in early 2006, having spent a considerable number of years working for a variety of blue chip companies like IBM, Barclays and Shell, and some startup businesses selling hosted virtual desktops and hosted email.  Before finding his home at Rackspace, his favourite job had been working for a company specialising in webcasts from movie premieres, which involved a month or two every year in the South of France at the Cannes Film Festival and other arduous tasks such as interviewing Angelina Jolie.

Henri Bal (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Henri Bal is a full professor at the Faculty of Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit, where he heads the High Performance Distributed Systems research group. He received a M.Sc. in mathematics from the Delft University of Technology in 1982 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Vrije Universiteit in 1989. His research interests include parallel and distributed programming, smart phones, and e-Science. He is the author of more than 120 articles and (co-)author of three books. He was program chair of several conferences, including CCGrid 2002 and  HPDC 2005.
 

Renato Figueiredo (University of Florida)

Renato J. Figueiredo is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Florida. Dr. Figueiredo received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Universidade de Campinas in 1994 and 1995, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 2001.  From 2001 until 2002 he was on the faculty of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Northwestern University at Evanston, Illinois. His research interests are in the areas of virtualization, distributed systems, overlay networks, computer architecture, and operating systems. Dr. Figueiredo's research has contributed to systems that were among the first to apply resource virtualization techniques in the context of Grid and cloud computing, including In-VIGO, Grid Appliances, and Archer. He has published over 90 journal and conference papers, and his research has been funded by government and industry sponsors that include the National Science Foundation, Intel Corp., IBM Corp., NOAA, and NASA.

Ad Emmen

Studied physics at the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. From 1980 until 1995, he worked at the foundation for Academic Computing Services Amsterdam (SARA) in several positions. He published papers on supercomputing and publishing technology; was co- founder of the journal "Supercomputer" and sat on the award committee of the SuParCup. In 1996, he set up Genias Benelux, of which he is currently the managing director. He is the editor of Primeur Monthly and Virtual Medical Worlds Magazine. Ad Emmen participated in the European Esprit projects HOISe-NM, EROPPA, and Dynamite (ES 23499) and the IST projects WebSET and IERAPSI (IST-1999-12175). Ad Emmen is the managing director of the Foundation AlmereGrid and Member of the board of Gridforum Nederland. He was the industrial chair of the European Grid Conference EGC2005. He was editor of the market research report: "Grid Computing: A Vertical Market Perspective 2006-2011" published by The Insight Research Coorporation. On behalf of AlmereGrid, he was Dissemination Manager for the FP7 projects EDGI, DEGISCO, and  EDGeS., and currently for the IDGF-SP project.Ad Emmen is also Dissemination manager of the FP7 Cloud project Contrail.

Massimo Coppola (CNR)

(Ph.D. 2002) is a researcher at ISTI-CNR, who was leading the XtreemOS CNR team. He joined ISTI in 2003, after being research assistant at the C.S. Dept. of Pisa. His interests include high-level parallel programming, software component models for Grids and Clouds, peer-to-peer networks, resource management and autonomic computing. He has been involved in the past in writing and managing several of the aforementioned national and EU projects (among those GridCoord, CoreGRID, BeinGrid, and XtreemOS).

Nick Trigg (Constellation Technologies)

Nick Trigg is CEO of Constellation Technologies a consortium member of the Contrail project and the work package leader for the Exploitation effort. He founded and has developed Constellation into a leading company selling products and services into the "big data bioinformatics on the cloud" space. The company is a spin out from the UK particle physics academic community and as such as considerable experience in "big data" technologies and services. The company also has skills in bioinformatics and supplies products and services to pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Nick has an engineering degree from Oxford University and a MBA from INSEAD.

Jens Jensen

Michael Berlin

Michael Berlin is currently employed at the Zuse-Institute Berlin (ZIB) and works on the XtreemFS file system as part of the Contrail EU project. He received a degree in Computer Science from Humboldt University Berlin, Germany in 2011. His research interests are in distributed systems and data-management in the cloud.

Piyush Harsh

Piyush Harsh received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in August 2003, then received his doctorate degree (PhD) in Computer and Information Science from University of Florida in August 2010. In the past he has worked on alternate authentication methods using fractals, covert channels, anonymity research, and distributed systems. Since Jan 2011, he is working as Research Engineer with INRIA Rennes Bretagne-Atlantique center. He is the development coordinator of WP5 in Contrail project. He is also the joint-coordinator of OpenNebula Interoperability Working Group.

Robert Cascella (INRIA)

Roberto Cascella is currently working at Inria Rennes as technical manager of the FP7 Contrail project. Before this, he was a postdoc at Inria Sophia Antipolis working on Internet measurements and traffic classification, and a research scientist at University of Trento working on trust and reputation mechanisms for autonomic systems. He obtained his Ph.D. (2007) in Information and Communication Technologies from the University of Trento. Prior to that, he received the Laurea (2003) in telecommunication engineering from Politecnico di Torino (Italy) and the M.Sc. (2003) from KTH (Sweden) in the framework of a double degree exchange program. His research interests include cloud computing, Internet measurements, trust and reputation management, and security for autonomic systems.