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

Roy Levin is a Distinguished Engineer and Director of Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley, which he co-founded in August, 2001.  The lab presently numbers approximately 50 researchers working in the area of distributed computing and operates in a highly collaborative style that embraces the technical spectrum from theory to practice.

From 1996 until he joined Microsoft, Roy was Director of the Digital/Compaq Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California. Previously, he was a senior researcher in the Center since its founding in 1984. During those years he was a primary contributor and project leader for the Vesta software configuration management system and for the Topaz multi-processor programming environment and its micro-kernel operating system. Before joining Digital, Roy was a researcher at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where he was a principal developer and project co-leader of Cedar, an experimental programming environment for high-performance workstations.  He was also a developer of Grapevine, a landmark electronic mail system.

Roy received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1977 and his B.S. in Mathematics from Yale University. He is a member of the ACM, and a former chair of ACM SIGOPS. He is author or co-author of approximately 20 technical papers, books, and patents.

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.