Marc Shapiro Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer, Concordant

Marc Shapiro, father of the CRDTs (conflict-free replicated data type) and Distinguished Research Scholar Emeritus at INRIA (French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology) joins Concordant as chairman and chief scientific officer.

The French researcher is back to the business side to promote “his technology baby“.

Dr. Shapiro is a Distinguished Research Scholar Emeritus at Sorbonne Université and Inria. He is a known scholar in effective distributed algorithms and in distributed systems engineering, with over 100 scientific publications and 40 invited talks; he has advised 22 PhDs. He is the inventor of the proxy, co-inventor of CRDTs, and co-architect of distributed systems, such as AntidoteDB. His international career brought him to MIT, Inria, Cornell University, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft Research Cambridge, where he headed the distributed systems group for 6 years. He has led several collaborations with industry, most recently the EU project SyncFree and the ANR project RainbowFS.

CRDTs are used by various applications such online chat systems, online gambling, and in the SoundCloud audio distribution platform. The NoSQL distributed databases Redis, Riak and Cosmos DB have CRDT data types. Even TomTom employs CRDTs to synchronize navigation data between the devices of a user. Facebook implements CRDTs in their Apollo low-latency “consistency at scale” database. Haja Networks’ OrbitDB uses operation-based CRDTs in its core data structure, IPFS-Log. Apple implements CRDTs in the Notes app for syncing offline edits between multiple devices.