M. Frans Kaashoek

Charles Piper Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Associate Director, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Top researcher in the area of computing systems software. Worked to improve the robustness and security of computer systems. Among his many contributions, three stand out: his work on exokernels, which showed how to improve the robustness, flexibility, and performance of operating systems by moving functionality out of the kernel; his work on distributed hash tables (DHTs), which provides a robust decentralized approach to naming in the Internet; his work on decentralized information flow control as a way to prevent leaks of confidential information. All of his work has had major impact on research and industry (his paper on DHTs, for example, was the most cited paper in 2001 according to Google Scholar and has had more than 6,000 citations to date) and has resulted in a number of startups, including SightPath (later acquired by Cisco).