Amazon.com Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Dr Werner Vogels delivered a Masterclass entitled ‘From Research to Production: Applying Distributed Computing Concepts to the Real World’ to students on the MSc programme in Computer Science on his recent visit to Trinity.

Trinity’s MSc programme features a series of Masterclasses given by distinguished academic and industry leaders who can bring a wider perspective on the development of the field to the programme.

Dr Werner Vogels is one of the key forces behind Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. His masterclass provided students with a unique opportunity to engage with someone  who, as the CTO of Amazon.com, is widely recognised as one of the world's foremost thought leaders on the development and evolution of Internet-scale computer systems.

In his lecture Dr Vogels explored emerging trends in the development of large-scale systems and their applications within Amazon and beyond as well as broader perspectives on the necessity but not sufficiency of research to underpin the design of future systems.

His visit also provided an opportunity for discussion around technology, sustainability, and interdisciplinarity – key themes in Trinity’s E3 initiative of which the MSc programme forms a significant part.

Vinny Cahill, Professor of Computer Science at Trinity, said:

“We were delighted to welcome Werner back to Trinity. He is rightly recognised as one of the world's foremost thought leaders on the development and evolution of Internet-scale computer systems and is an inspiring speaker, whose roots in academia and impact in the commercial world will have resonated with and hopefully inspired our students.”

 

About E3

Trinity’s vision for E3 is to bring world-leading research, education and entrepreneurship together to stimulate the innovation – and innovators – of a more sustainable future. At E3’s heart is the philosophy that the natural world and the societies and cultures it sustains can flourish alongside vibrant economies.

Recognising the growing importance of securing a sustainable future for humanity and the importance of technological development in addressing the challenges that presents, E3 will educate engineers and scientists for employment in existing and new technology sectors and equip them with the skills and attributes to lead in the creation of new businesses. The state-of-the-art Martin Naughton E3 Learning Foundry, housed on Trinity’s main campus, will provide thousands of students each year with advanced teaching and interactive learning facilities.

In addition, E3 will create synergistic research links between Trinity’s Schools of Engineering, Natural Sciences, and Computer Science & Statistics, and across the university. This will advance the multi-disciplinary approaches needed to deliver globally impactful solutions in tandem with the social change required for the most pressing challenges of our time.

Dr. Werner Vogels Bio:

Dr. Werner Vogels is Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company's customer-centric technology vision. As one of the forces behind Amazon's approach to cloud computing, he is passionate about helping young businesses reach global scale, and transforming enterprises into fast-moving digital organizations.

Dr. Vogels joined Amazon in 2004 from Cornell University where he was a distributed systems researcher. He has held technology leadership positions in companies that handle the transition of academic technology into industry. Vogels holds a PhD from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.

On his blog, all things distributed, Werner shares insights and thought leadership content on a range of topics, such as cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, as well as his annual technology predictions.