Roy Levin
Distinguished Engineer
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Roy Levin is a Distinguished Engineer who joined Microsoft in August, 2001, as a founder of the Microsoft Research’s Silicon Valley lab, which now has approximately 35 researchers. The lab focuses on the theory and practice of distributed systems, that is interpreted broadly to include self-managing systems, security and privacy, tools for developing concurrent systems, Web search and analysis, distributed algorithms, and eScience, among others.
From 1996 until he joined Microsoft in 2001, Levin was Director of the Compaq's Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California. Before that he was a senior researcher in the Center since its founding in 1984 by Digital Equipment Corporation. During those years, he was a primary contributor and project leader for the Topaz programming environment and its micro-kernel operating system, the first to provide high-performance, light-weight process scheduling and inter-process communication on a multiprocessor workstation. He also was project leader and a primary contributor for Vesta, a software configuration management system embodying novel technology and tools for source control, version management, and building of large software systems.
Before joining Digital, Levin was a Principal Scientist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. He was project co-leader and a principal developer of Cedar, an experimental programming environment for high-performance workstations. Cedar set the standard (c. 1982) for integrated programming environments for ALGOL-tradition languages, incorporating significant advances in language technology, file systems, network communication (RPC), and user interfaces. Levin also was a co-developer of Grapevine, a landmark electronic mail system.
He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1977 and his B.S. in Mathematics from Yale University in 1970. He is a member of the ACM, and a former chair of ACM SIGOPS. He is author or co-author of approximately 25 technical papers, books and patents.
