Dr. Andrew HERBERT
Managing Director, Microsoft Research Cambridge
Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft Corporation
微软剑桥研究院院长，微软公司“杰出工程师”
http://research.microsoft.com/users/aherbert/

BIO:
Andrew Herbert is a distinguished engineer, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and managing director of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. Initially joining Microsoft Research in 2001, as an assistant director, in March 2003 he succeeded the founding director, Roger Needham.

Herbert’s research interests include networks, operating systems, programming languages and distributed information sharing.

Before joining Microsoft Research in 2001, he was director of Advanced Technology at Citrix Systems Inc, where he was instrumental in steering the company toward internet thin-client technologies and initiating development of products for web-based application deployment and for the emerging application service provider market.

Herbert joined Citrix in 1998 from Digitivity Inc, which he founded in 1996 to develop a product to enable secure deployment of Java clients for business-to-business applications. Digitivity was spun-off from APM Ltd, a research and consulting company Herbert founded in 1985. APM managed ANSA, an industry-sponsored programme of research and advanced development into the use of distributed systems technology to support applications integration in enterprise-wide systems. ANSA's work included research on support for interactive multimedia services, object technology for World Wide Web applications, distributed systems management, mobile object systems and security for electronic commerce. Herbert led ANSA's technical programme, built up its team, created its architecture, and made ANSA known and respected in the industry.

Before starting ANSA in 1985, Herbert was a faculty member in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England, where he worked with Roger Needham and Maurice Wilkes on seminal developments in local area networks (LANs) and distributed computing. In 1979 Herbert helped Needham and Wilkes edit "The Cambridge CAP Computer and Its Operating System", and in 1982 he co-authored "The Cambridge Distributed Computing System" with Needham. In 2003, Herbert co-edited a monograph of papers written in tribute to Needham, "Computer Systems: Theory, Technology and Applications", with Karen Spärck Jones.

Herbert is a fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, a member of St. John's College Cambridge, and a liveryman of the City of London Worshipful Company of Information Technologists. In 1975 he graduated from the University of Leeds with a BSc in computational science and in 1978 with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in computer science.

Presentation Title: Software Transactions

Abstract:
Web software is necessarily concurrent: a server has to process requests from many clients and rich client interfaces often connect to multiple web service simultaneously. Coupled with the hardware trend towards multi-core and many-core processors it is increasingly urgent to give programmer better abstractions for handling parallel computation and concurrent access to data. In most current languages concurrency features consist of a thread library and some basic synchronization based on locks, a model that has not changed much since the late 60s. These models are notoriously difficult to use and debug and do not readily permit programmes to be built by combining independent software components. Recent work on software transactions has shown promise as an approach that overcomes these problems and the ideas have been widely explored by researchers in the Microsoft Cambridge and Redmond laboratories. The talk will introduce the key design and implementation concepts behind software transaction memory and discuss a number of important open issues.