John C. Duchi
Area of Focus: Machine learning
John’s research actually has two main areas of focus- one being to study the growing size of modern datasets that require new and efficient learning algorithms, for streaming, online, and the likes of distributed data. He also aims to develop both practical and theoretical understanding of new procedures that allow computers to learn in spite of being faced with problems that were considered difficult up until then. He is a PhD candidate at the Berkeley University in Computer Science.

Tyler Harter
Area of Focus: Storage Systems
Being a person who believes in the “measure and then build” philosophy, Tyler thinks that the needs of today’s data-driven society could be met if one constantly improved the storage stack. His previous study on the I/O behavior of various desktop applications has led him to conduct his research on the Hadoop File System (HDFS). He hopes to build a HDFS emulator after measuring the system, and that his work will meet the scaling needs of the social internet. He is currently an intern at Google.