Karin Strauss is a senior principal research manager at Microsoft (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research) and an affiliate full professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (http://www.cs.washington.edu/) at University of Washington (http://www.washington.edu/). Her research lies at the intersection of computer architecture, systems, and biology. Her work includes hardware accelerators for machine learning, emerging memory technologies, and the use of biotechnology to the benefit of the IT industry. Lately, her focus has been on creating an end-to-end system that stores digital data in synthetic DNA, for which she was named one of the 2016 “100 Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company. Along with Luis Ceze, she has recently received the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award for their work on DNA data storage. The DNA data storage project has also been chosen as “Best of What’s New” by Popular Science in 2016, one of the "Top 10 Emerging Technologies" by the World Economic Forum in 2019, and highlighted by influential publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, and Scientific American. Karin received her PhD in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007.

Harini Muthukrishnan is a final year Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Michigan where she is advised by Prof. Tom Wenisch. Her research focuses on improving strong scaling in multi-GPU systems by optimizing fine-grained transfers and is in collaboration with Systems Architecture Research Group at NVIDIA Research.

I am a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Onur Mutlu and Prof. Phil Gibbons. My research focuses on the interaction between programming models, system software, and hardware architecture, and explores how richer cross-layer abstractions can enhance performance, programmability, and portability. I am excited about rethinking the roles played by different levels of the stack in the modern era of rapidly evolving, specialized, and data-centric computing landscapes. During my Ph.D., I have been fortunate to intern at Microsoft Research, Nvidia Research, and Intel Labs. I am currently a visiting student at ETH Zurich.

I joined the faculty at the Colorado School of Mines in January 2022 and serve as Department Head of Computer Science. Before joining Mines, I was on the faculty at Brown University for 26 years and held dual appointments as Professor of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science. My research interests focus on energy-efficient and reliable computing, from the system level to device level. Most recently this includes the design of robotics systems.