Yitzhak
Birk has been on the faculty of the Electrical Engineering
Department
at the Technion since October 1991, and heads its Parallel
Systems
Laboratory (PSL). He received the B.Sc. (cum laude) and
M.Sc.
degrees from the Technion in 1975 and 1982, respectively, and
the
Ph.D. degree from StanfordUniversity
in 1987, all in electrical
engineering.From 1976 to 1981, he was project engineer in
the Israel
Defense
Forces.From 1986 to 1991, he was a
Research Staff Member at
IBM's
AlmadenResearchCenter, where he worked on parallel
architectures,
computer subsystems and passive fiber-optic interconnection
networks.From 1993 to 1997, he also
served as a
consultant
to HP Labs in the areas of storage systems and
video
servers, and was later involved with several companies.
Dr.
Birk's research interests include computer systems and subsystems,
as
well as communication networks. He is particularly interested in
parallel
and distributed architectures for information systems, including
communication-intensive
storage systems (e.g., multimedia servers) and
satellite-based
systems, with special attention to the true
application
requirements in each case. The judicious exploitation of
redundancy
for performance enhancement in these contexts has been the subject of much of his recent work. He is also engaged in
research into various facets of processor architecture, attempting “cross
fertilization” between his various areas of research.