Roy Levin Distinguished Engineer and Director Microsoft Research Silicon Valley roy.levin [AT] microsoft.com Tel. +1 650.693.2108

Roy Levin joined Microsoft in August, 2001, to found the Silicon Valley Research lab.

From 1996 until he joined Microsoft, Roy was Director of the Compaq's Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California.  Previously, 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, Roy 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.  Roy also was a co-developer of Grapevine, a landmark electronic mail system.

Roy received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University and his B.S. in Mathematics from Yale University. He is a member of the ACM, and a former chair of ACM SIGOPS.

Publications and Patents

• Roy Levin.  A Perspective on Computing Research Management.  ACM Operating Systems Review 41(2), April 2007, pp. 3-7.
• Allan Heydon, Roy Levin, Tim Mann, and Yuan Yu. Software Configuration Management Using Vesta. Monographs in Computer Science, Springer, 2006.
• Roy Levin.  A Technology Transfer Retrospective. In Computer Systems: Theory, Technology, and Applications, Andrew Herbert and Karen Spärck-Jones (eds.), Springer-Verlag, 2004.
• Allan Heydon, Roy Levin, Tim Mann, and Yuan Yu. The Vesta Software Configuration Management System. Research Report 177, Compaq Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, January 2002.
• C. Allan Heydon, Roy Levin, Butler W. Lampson.  Method and apparatus for caching the results of function applications with dynamic, fine-grained dependencies.  U.S. Patent #6,145,056, November 7, 2000.
• Allan Heydon, Roy Levin, Tim Mann, and Yuan Yu. The Vesta approach to software configuration management. Research Report 168, Compaq Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, March 2001.
• Allan Heydon, Roy Levin, and Yuan Yu. Caching function calls using precise dependencies. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN '00 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), June 2000.
• Martín Abadi, James J. Horning, Butler W. Lampson, Roy Levin, Jean-Jacques Lévy, Yuan Yu.  Dynamic Fine-Grained Dependency Analysis for a Functional Language.  U.S. Patent #5,940,619, August 17, 1999.
• Christine B. Hanna and Roy Levin. Efficient method and apparatus for compiling and linking modules of computer code in a large software system.  U.S. Patent #5,748,961, May 5, 1998.
• Roy Levin and Christine B. Hanna.  Language Scoping for Modular, Flexible, Concise, Configuration Descriptions.  U.S. Patent #5,500,881, March 19, 1996.
• Allan Heydon, Roy Levin, Tim Mann, and Yuan Yu. The Vesta approach to software configuration management. Technical Note 1999-001, Compaq Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, June 1999.
• Allan Heydon, Jim Horning, Roy Levin, Tim Mann, and Yuan Yu. The Vesta-2 Software Description Language. Technical Note 1997-005c, Digital Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, June 1998.
• Chris Hanna and Roy Levin. The Vesta language for configuration management. Research Report 107, Compaq Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, June 1993.
• Sheng-Yang Chiu and Roy Levin. The Vesta repository: A file system extension for software development. Research Report 106, Compaq Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, June 1993.
• Roy Levin and Paul McJones. The Vesta approach to precise configuration of large software systems. Research Report 105, Compaq Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, June 1993.
• Andrew Birrell, John V. Guttag, Jim Horning, and Roy Levin. Synchronization primitives for a multiprocessor: A formal specification. Operating Systems Review, 21(5), November 1987. Also appeared as SRC Research Report 20. Revised version in "Systems Programming with Modula-3", Prentice Hall, 1991.
• Paul Rovner, Roy Levin, and John Wick. On extending Modula-2 for building large, integrated systems. Research Report 3, Compaq Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA, January 1985.
• Roy Levin and Dave Redell. An Evaluation of the Ninth SOSP Submissions, or, How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper. ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 17(3):35-40, July 1983. (HTML), (Copyright ACM 1983).
• Andrew Birrell, Roy Levin, Roger Needham, and Michael Schroeder.  Grapevine:  An Exercise in Distributed Computing, Communications of the ACM 25, 4, April 1982.
• William Wulf, Roy Levin, and Samuel Harbison.  Hydra/C.mmp:  An Experimental Computer System.  McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1981.
• Roy Levin and Michael Schroeder.  Transport of Electronic Mail through a Network, Proceedings of the IFIP Teleinformatics '79 Conference, Paris, July 1979.
• Roy Levin.  Program Structures for Exceptional Condition Handling.  Available from University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, June 1977.
• William Wulf, Roy Levin, and Charles Pierson.  An Overview of the Hydra Operating System Development, Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, November 1975.
• Roy Levin, Ellis Cohen, William Corwin, Frederick Pollack, and William Wulf.  Policy/Mechanism Separation in Hydra, Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, November 1975.
• William Wulf and Roy Levin.  A Local Network, Datamation, February 1975.