Dr. Christopher Olston, Google

Dr. Christopher Olston is a staff research scientist at Google, working on infrastructure for “crunching big data.” He previously worked at Yahoo! (principal research scientist) and Carnegie Mellon (assistant professor). He holds computer science degrees from Stanford (2003 Ph.D., M.S.; funded by NSF and Stanford fellowships) and UC Berkeley (B.S. with highest honors).

At Yahoo, Olston co-created Apache Pig, which is used for large-scale data processing by LinkedIn, Netflix, Salesforce, Twitter, Yahoo and others, and is offered by Amazon as a cloud service. Olston is active in the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, serving as program co-chair in 2013 and giving a keynote in 2011. His 2009 paper at ACM SIGMOD won the best paper award. Earlier, during his flirtation with academia, Olston taught undergrad and grad courses at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, and signed several Ph.D. dissertations.