Keynotes

We have the pleasure of welcoming our keynote speakers at CompSys'25.

Wednesday May 21, 10:00
Title: IT & environment: an inconvenient combination?
By Bernard van Gastel (Radboud University)
Abstract: We are digitalizing our whole society, from elderly care to our school systems. We are connected constantly, and there seems to be no limit to our need for digitalization and computation. But there are side effects. What are the effects on our environment? This presentation will give an overview of the resource consumption of IT in the Netherlands, both in energy and water. It will show a number of trends, both in energy consumption and approaches to minimize our environmental impact. It closes with naming a number of challenges for computing scientists.
Short bio: Bernard van Gastel is an assistant professor Sustainable Digitalization working at the computing science institute of the Radboud University. Besides his research in analysis methods to predict the energy consumption of software and make that info available to software developers, he researches sustainability in a broader sense. This includes the effects of software on society, such as privacy. He often works together with academics from other disciplines. Presently, he is quartermaker for sustainability at the Institute for computing and information sciences (iCIS), for both research and education. There he set up the Software Energy Lab to measure the energy consumption of software. On the education side, he is integrating sustainability in the curriculum of computing science. Regularly his work results in societal impact. For example, he found errors in solid state drives of vendors making two thirds of the world wide storage devices. This resulted in adjustments in the Windows operating system and storage devices itself. He designed a large system for privacy friendly storage of medical research data, so that the impact of data breaches is minimized.

Thursday May 22, 9:00
Title: Towards Designing Systems for Uncompromized Efficiency
By Jan Rellermeyer (Leibniz University Hannover)
Abstract: The exponential performance improvements in the era of Moore’s Law and the commoditization of computer resources through cloud computing have led to liberal spending of energy on computation, especially big data processing. The availability of a developer workforce willing to deal with the ever-increasing complexity of systems has so far concealed the growing divide between hardware and software. I term this trend the Efficiency Gap and believe that it is going to significantly shift future priorities in computer science. It is time to re-visit the entire system stack and prepare for the new era in which efficiency matters--beyond niches like High-Performance Computing. In this talk, I will outline my vision for researching new design principles to structure large-scale data processing systems in a way that enables higher efficiency without burdening developers. I challenge multiple assumptions of contemporary system stacks like the treatment of applications as black boxes and the orthogonal scheduling of resources. Many of them are based on fundamental abstractions that have been largely inherited from the 1980s but now inhibit efficient use of modern and emerging hardware. As an alternative, I propose a new design principle called Exo-Modularity which exposes critical application structure to the system and enables system software to make smarter decisions on resource allocation and scheduling. As a result, the system is put into a position to automatically optimize the resource allocation by prioritizing parts of the application where the flow of data is bottlenecked, thereby unlocking the true potential of the hardware and closing the efficiency gap.
Short bio: Jan S. Rellermeyer graduated from the Systems Group at ETH in 2011 under the supervision of Gustavo Alonso and Timothy Roscoe. Afterwards, he worked for IBM Research in Austin, TX as a research scientist for several years and served as an adjunct member of the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin. In 2017, he returned full-time to academia by joining TU Delft as an Assistant Professor in Distributed Systems. Since 2022, Jan is now Full Professor and Chair for Scalable and Dependable Software Systems at Leibniz University Hannover. He has contributed to different open-source projects under the Apache and Eclipse Foundation and was project lead of the Eclipse Concierge project. Furthermore, he was active in standardization bodies like the OSGi Alliance in which he held the position of an invited researcher from 2008-2011. Together with his co-authors, Jan received Test of Time Awards of the 2017 ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference for just work on the R-OSGi middleware and of the 2022 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) for his work on studying and mitigating robustness issues in the Android inter-component communication system.

Thursday May 22, 14:00
Title: The Era of Compilers and DSLs
By Stephan Herhut (NVIDIA)
Abstract: The physical limitations of chip manufacturing have led to increasingly heterogeneous and distributed architectures. While these designs have enabled significant advancements in performance and computational capabilities, we can no longer automatically benefit from such progress solely through improvements in architecture design. Instead, software must be specifically tailored to new architectures to leverage their capabilities, necessitating the co-design of software and hardware. Efficiently mapping algorithms to architectures now requires specialized tools, either to automate the process or to enable engineers and researchers to directly tailor algorithms. Consequently, there has been a proliferation of compilers and domain-specific languages (DSLs). In this keynote, I will review the evolution of hardware and discuss why no single tool or framework can fully enable programmability. Embracing the plurality of tools is inevitable, and our goal should be to build a cohesive platform that facilitates reuse for users and supports the development of systems software.
Short bio: Stephan Herhut is an accomplished compiler engineer and currently serves as Distinguished Compiler Engineer at NVIDIA, driving compiler architecture. His experience includes nearly ten years at Google, where his last role was Staff Software Engineer, leading the development of XLA CPU and GPU machine learning compilers. At Google, he also developed compilers for platforms and languages such as V8, Android, Dart, MLIR, and embedded systems. Earlier in his career, his research at Intel Labs explored auto-parallelization techniques and language design, with a focus on functional programming languages. He is passionate about sharing his knowledge and insights into compiler design.

Friday May 23, 9:00
Title: Integrating Resilience and Sustainability into Mobile Networks
By Suzan Bayhan (University of Twente)
Abstract: While mobile networks evolve to support increasing demands for capacity, low latency, and diverse applications, traditional design goals focused solely on efficiency and performance are no longer sufficient. Two critical challenges drive the need for a broader design perspective. First, the climate crisis calls for design and operation of mobile networks with a sustainability objective. Second, the growing reliance on mobile connectivity from operation of critical services to daily activities demands enhanced network resilience. In this talk, I will discuss how the principles of sustainability and resilience can be embedded into mobile network architecture and operation. In particular, I will highlight strategies such as multi-connectivity and infrastructure sharing that can help achieve these objectives.
Short bio: Suzan Bayhan is an Associate Professor at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. Her research interests include mobile networks and sustainable communication/computing continuum. Before joining UT, she was a senior researcher at TU Berlin, and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, where she is currently a docent in computer science. With co-authors, her research papers received a best paper award from ACM ICN and IEEE WoWMoM, and a best demo award from IEEE INFOCOM. Suzan has served as the N2Women mentoring co-chair in the past and currently she is the Scientific Director of 4TU.NIRICT.