Neil Conway

I am a software engineer and computer scientist. My interests include data management, distributed systems, programming languages, and infrastructure for AI/ML.

I was the CTO and co-founder of Determined AI (2017-2021). In 2021, Determined AI was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Following the acquisition, I worked at HPE as a Senior Director of Engineering from 2021-2024.

Previously, I worked on Apache Mesos and DC/OS as a Technical Lead at Mesosphere, and built quantiative trading systems at Voleon. I completed a PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. My advisor was Prof. Joseph M. Hellerstein.

In the past, I was a major contributor to PostgreSQL. I was also an early employee at Truviso, a stream processing company. I received my undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Queen's University in 2007.

Contact

$first DOT $last AT gmail DOT com
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GitHub
Twitter

Publications

Conference Papers

Edelweiss: Automatic Storage Reclamation for Distributed Programming. With P. Alvaro, E. Andrews, and J. M. Hellerstein. VLDB, 2014.
Blazes: Coordination Analysis for Distributed Programs. With P. Alvaro, J. M. Hellerstein, and D. Maier. ICDE, 2014.
Consistency Without Borders. With P. Alvaro, P. Bailis, and J. M. Hellerstein. SoCC, 2013.
Logic and Lattices for Distributed Programming. With W. R. Marczak, P. Alvaro, J. M. Hellerstein, and D. Maier. SoCC, 2012.
Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach. With P. Alvaro, J. M. Hellerstein, and W. R. Marczak. CIDR, 2011.
BOOM Analytics: Exploring Data-Centric, Declarative Programming for the Cloud. With P. Alvaro, T. Condie, K. Elmeleegy, J. M. Hellerstein, and R. Sears. EuroSys, 2010.
MapReduce Online. With T. Condie, P. Alvaro, J. M. Hellerstein, K. Elmeleegy, and R. Sears. NSDI, 2010.
Usher: Improving Data Quality With Dynamic Forms. With K. Chen, H. Chen, J. M. Hellerstein, and T. S. Parikh. ICDE, 2010 (Best Student Paper).
Continuous Analytics: Rethinking Query Processing in a Network-Effect World. With M. J. Franklin, S. Krishnamurthy, A. Li, A. Russakovsky, N. Thombre. CIDR, 2009 (Perspectives Track).

Journal Papers

Usher: Improving Data Quality with Dynamic Forms. With K. Chen, H. Chen, J. M. Hellerstein, T. S. Parikh. Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Volume 23, August 2011.

Workshop Papers

BloomUnit: Declarative Testing for Distributed Programs. With P. Alvaro, A. Hutchinson, W. R. Marczak, and J. M. Hellerstein. DBTest, 2012.
Confluence Analysis for Distributed Programs: A Model-Theoretic Approach. With W. R. Marczak, P. Alvaro, J. M. Hellerstein, and D. Maier. Datalog 2.0, 2012.
Dedalus: Datalog in Space and Time. With P. Alvaro, W. R. Marczak, J. M. Hellerstein, D. Maier, and R. Sears. Datalog 2.0, 2011.
I Do Declare: Consensus in a Logic Language. With P. Alvaro, T. Condie, J. M. Hellerstein, and R. Sears. SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 43, Issue 4, January 2010.

Demos

Online Aggregation and Continuous Query support in MapReduce. With T. Condie, P. Alvaro, J. M. Hellerstein, J. Gerth, J. Talbot, K. Elmeleegy, and R. Sears. SIGMOD, 2010 (Demo Track).
Improving Data Quality with Dynamic Forms. With K. Chen, H. Chen, H. Dolan, J. M. Hellerstein, and T. S. Parikh. ICTD, 2009 (Demo Track).

Technical Reports and Theses

Language Support for Loosely Consistent Distributed Programming. Ph.D. Thesis (Fall 2014), UC Berkeley. UCB Technical Report EECS-2014-153
Confluence Analysis for Distributed Programs: A Model-Theoretic Approach. With W. R. Marczak, P. Alvaro, J. M. Hellerstein and D. Maier. UCB Technical Report EECS-2012-171.
Transactions and Data Stream Processing. B.Sc. Thesis (May 2007), Queen's University.

Talks

April 2019: Golden Age for AI, Dark Ages for AI Infrastructure (NorCal DB Day'19)
August 2016: Building Highly Available Mesos Frameworks, 2.0 (MesosCon EU'16)
June 2016: Building Highly Available Mesos Frameworks (MesosCon'16) (video)
May 2016: Service Backplanes for the Modern Data Center (NABDConf'16)
September 2014: Edelweiss: Automatic Storage Reclamation for Distributed Programming (VLDB'13)
May 2013: Bloom: Big Systems, Small Programs (RICON East) (video)
March 2013: Disorderly Distributed Programming with Dedalus and Bloom (UCLA)
February 2013: Disorderly Distributed Programming with Bloom (Université de Nantes, INRIA / LIP6)
June 2012: Logic and Lattices for Distributed Programming (BashoChat #004) (video)
February 2011: Consistency Analysis in Bloom (Berkeley OSQ Seminar)
May 2010: Dedalus: Datalog in Time and Space (Berkeley OSQ Retreat)
April 2010: BOOM Analytics: Exploring Data-Centric, Declarative Programming for the Cloud (EuroSys'10)
March 2010: Cloud Programming: From Doom and Gloom to BOOM and Bloom (Datalog 2.0 Workshop)
December 2009: MapReduce Online
November 2009: Cloud Programming: From Doom and Gloom to BOOM and Bloom
April 2009: BOOM: Data-Centric Programming For The Data Center (Stanford InfoLunch)
October 2007: Query Execution Techniques in PostgreSQL
June 2006, May 2007: Introduction to Hacking PostgreSQL (tutorial)
May 2007: Introduction to Data Stream Query Processing
September 2006: TelegraphCQ: A Data Stream Management System
May 2005: Inside the PostgreSQL Query Optimizer