Michael J. Freedman - Episode 69

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, Rashmi Mohan hosts ACM Fellow Michael J. Freedman, Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University and co-Founder and CTO of Timescale. Michael’s research interests are in distributed systems, networking, and security. Over the course of his student and professional career, he designed and operated the Coral Content Distribution Network, a peer-to-peer content distribution network; co-founded (with Martin Casado) Illuminics Systems, an IP analytics company; and designed TimescaleDB and JetStream. His many honors and recognitions include the 2018 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award.

Michael shares what drew him to computer science, highlighting the value of initiative and gumption as an undergraduate student, and how he became interested in security and privacy, working on peer-to-peer systems before cloud computing became ubiquitous. He discusses his work on Coral CDN during his PhD research, applying research outcomes to build scalable systems and learning to harness customer feedback good user experience. Michael also talks extensively about Timescale, one of the fastest databases for real-time analytics, or time series data, and explains the roles of CTO and head engineer at a technology company.