Abstract

Every few years, a revolution changes the way we use computers. Think of huge mainframes in the 1960s, minicomputers in the 1970s, personal computers in the 1980s and smartphones over the last decade. Cloud computing is poised to be the next big paradigm shift in the computing landscape by bringing together advances in technologies like Virtualization, massive scale computing, communication formats and flexible data protocols. With advances by Microsoft, Amazon and other leaders in computing, this field is slated as the fastest growing segment of the technology industry in terms of investment, development and recruitment.

Join us in the Microsoft Cloud Computing workshop to learn more about this exciting development and about Windows Azure – Microsoft’s internet-scale cloud services platform, which provides an operating system and a rich set of developer services that allow you to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities.

Bio

Krishna Kumar is an Academic Relations Manager at Microsoft where he partners with faculty and researchers around their teaching and research needs. His professional interests lie in the field of parallel and distributed enterprise computing with special emphasis on the cloud, especially around Windows Azure - Microsoft's cloud platform. He leads the national academic effort around Azure by working with early adopters around cloud research and curriculum incorporation. He is also in the process of putting the finishing touches on a developer focused book on Azure for Addison-Wesley to be published in Summer 2010. He tweets at @KrishnaOnAzure and administers the http://AzurePilot.com faculty portal.

Krishna has been with Microsoft for over 9 years in various roles working with multiple technologies, all of them developer focused. Forever the perennial student, he is finishing up his third Master’s degree from Northwestern University in Medical Informatics (the previous two being in Computer Science and Business Administration). He lives with his wife and 1 year old son near Chicago.