Yair Amir is Professor of Computer Science, and director of the Distributed Systems and Networks lab (www.dsn.jhu.edu) at Johns Hopkins University. His goal is to invent resilient, performant and secure distributed systems that make a difference, collecting friends along the way.

Dr. Amir served as Department Chair of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins (2015-2018), as Vice Chair of the IFIP 10.4 Working Group on Dependable Computing (2016-2018), and as Program co-Chair of the 2015 IEEE/IFIP Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) conference.

His awards include the Best Paper award in the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), the 2014 Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award, the highest teaching award in the School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, and the DARPA Dynamic Coalitions program Bytes-for-Buck trophy in 2002. He was nominated to the DARPA agency-wide "Performer with Significant Technical Achievement" award in 2004.

He is a creator of the Spread toolkit (www.spread.org), the first scalable group communication system with strong semantics, the Spines overlay network platform (www.spines.org), the SMesh wireless mesh network (www.smesh.org), the first seamless 802.11 mesh with fast lossless handoff, the Prime Byzantine replication engine, the first to provide performance guarantees while under attack, and the Spire intrusion-tolerant SCADA for the power grid (www.dsn.jhu.edu), the first to protect against both system-level and network-level attacks and compromises. Some of these technologies are deployed in mission critical systems, support data center applications, are included in commercial products, and are used for research and teaching in universities and research labs around the world.

Until 2016, Dr. Amir led the development of the LTN cloud (www.ltnglobal.com). He continues to provide technical leadership at LTN. LTN offers a global transport service for broadcast-quality live TV that is used by major broadcasters including CNN, Fox, Disney, ABC, Bloomberg, CBS, CNBC, ESPN, NBC, PBS, and Turner.

Dr. Amir holds B.Sc. (1985) and M.Sc. (1990) from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D (1995) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.