I hail from the beautiful city of Haifa, in Palestine/Israel — where my heart remains even as my professional work takes me across the seas. My parents live there still.
It is also where my Alma Mater, the Technion IIT is located. I got my Batchelor’s degree in Computer Science there, then continued on to do research work on Combinatorial Property testing, advised by Prof. Eldar Fischer; this makes me an academic grandson of the esteemed Noga Alon - which might help you place my academic origins within the world of Mathematics and Computer Science. I was also active in the collective affairs and struggles of junior and untenured academic staff - as teachers and researchers - in different capacities; and between 2009 and 2011 I served as the vice-chairperson of the Technion Graduate Student Organization.
After completing my Ph.D. work I veered off the course of Computer Science theory, looking for a different path (within and without of Computer Science). About two years later I joined Huawei Research Israel (a.k.a. Toga Networks), where a new Heterogenenous Computing group was forming as part of Huawei Research’s Shannon Lab. My two years in the group brought me down from the ‘Olympus’ of abstract theory to the ‘pits’ of close-to-the-metal software work, counting clock cycles, measuring bandwidths and performing other dark arts in the pursuit of maximum performance. My time there is what got me hooked on GPUs, and other exotic computational devices in general, and picqued my interest in DBMSes.
In 2015 I took the opportunity of a second “round” in academia, in the Database Architectures Group at CWI, Amsterdam (The Dutch national institute for Math and Computer Science). During that time I fashioned and hewed intuitions and insights from my work at Huawei, tempering it with the knowledge and experience of preexisting research; I should thank my host, Prof. Dr. Peter Boncz, for helping to fully immerse myself in the field. I also matured as a developer and designer of modern C++ software, catching up with much of the change the language has undergone in recent years.
With most post-doc concluded, I now hope to continue my architectural research, while doing consulting / freelance development work on related subjects.
Outside of my professional work, I follow world politics, and try to keep up-to-date with the innumerable social struggles going on back home in Israel/Palestine. When I’m there, I try to be active — participate and educate. I’m also into cinema, and in the spare time I never have I sneak in some reading and Ashtanga Yoga. In Amsterdam, I was privileged to be able to bike around every day, but when you live on a mountainside, that doesn’t really work. Perhaps my next home will be on a plane again? Who knows…
Back in Haifa I also used to head a tenant’s committee in the condominium where I stayed, which was all rented out to working-class small families and students. That’s where I developed my hobby for fixing things up — as the landlords rarely paid what was necessary for even the most fundamental maintenance. So with my tools, my ladder and occasional help from my neighbors (a painter-and-lifeguard, a IT technician, a single-mother French teacher, and a friendly eccentric whose occupation I never quite figured out) we patched up walls and painted them, added railings and more lighting, got rid of tree branches growing into our windows and so on. I suppose all of that also inspires my tendency to tinker with computing hardware as well.