Publications. DBLP. ACM Digital Library. Google Scholar. Microsoft Academic. ORCID. OpenAlex.

Marc Shapiro Intro Biography Publications Projects PhD students Job offers Links Location & getting there

• Understanding replication and consistency. Replication is an essential feature of a distributed system, but updates cause the issue of consistency between replicas. Strong consistency is easy to understand but expensive (and impossible if there are failures); weaker models are complex. Rather than pre-defined consistency models, we propose a “Just-Right Consistency” approach, tailoring the consistency protocol to specific application requirements, and using static verification to ensure that the application remains correct.
• Concurrent programming. Programming concurrent programs with shared memory is incredibly bug-prone, yet (with multi-core processors) increasingly relevant. Fine-grain concurrency is especially challenging. I am particularly interested in garbage collection for managed runtime environments on large-scale many-core computers. This is related to my previous work on distributed garbage collection.

I am Distinguished Research Scholar (Emeritus) of Inria, the French National Institute for Computer Science and Control Science. I am part of Delys, a joint group between Inria and LIP6 (the Computer Science laboratory of Sorbonne Université, previously UPMC, previously Paris-6) in Paris.

I previously led the Cambridge Distributed Systems Group (Camdis) at Microsoft Research Cambridge (MSRC), from October 1998 to March 2005. For several years before that I was the leader of Inria's SOR (Systèmes d'objets répartis, Distributed Object Systems) group.

Short biography

Marc Shapiro is a Distinguished Research Scholar (DR0, Emeritus) in the Delys group of Sorbonne-Université-LIP6 and Inria. His research topics concern distributed computer systems, data replication and consistency algorithms, and multicore algorithms. He lead the SyncFree European project for highly-available cloud computing and storage, developing the Antidote planet-scale hybrid-consistency database. He is the co-inventor of Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) designed to reconcile availability and correctness. He invented the proxy concept, which is now universal on the Internet. Dr Shapiro's career started with a PhD in Toulouse (U. Paul Sabatier and LAAS), followed by a post-doc at MIT, research positions at CMIRH and Inria, and a sabbatical at Cornell. He is an author of some 160 international publications, some in the most prestigious venues, 18 recognised software systems, and six patents. He led the Cambridge Distributed Systems group at Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK) for six years. Dr. Shapiro, a Senior Member of the ACM, is known for his dedication to organising the Informatics community and making its voice heard in Europe, serving as:

• Speaker for ACM's Distinguished Speaker Programme (DSP)
• VP for research and member of the board of Société Informatique de France, the French learned society in Informatics.
• Member of the ACM Europe Council.
• Founder and chair of EuroSys, the European professional society in systems and European Chapter of SIGOPS.
• Vice-Chair of ACM SIGOPS (Special Interest Group on Operating Systems).
• Founder of the French chapter of Sigops, ASF, and Chair from 1996 to 2000.

He has been a member of several Program Commitees in operating systems, distributed systems, persistent systems, and garbage collection. Recent examples include:

• Founder and member of Steering Committee for the Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency.
• Programme Committee member of multiple editions of the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys).
• PC member for the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC).
• Co-organiser of the Dagstuhl Seminar on Data Consistency in Distributed Systems: Algorithms, Programs, and Databases, Feb. 2018.
• Member of the “Computer Science and Informatics” selection panel (PE6) for the ERC Consolidator Grants for 2012, 2014, 2016, and for the ERC Starting Grants in 2018.
• PC member of ASPLOS 2017.
• PC Co-chair of the 2014 Conference on the Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS), with Marcos Aguilera.
• PC co-chair (with Nuno Preguiça) of the W. on Principles and Practice of Eventual Consistency (PaPEC) 2014.
• PC member of OPODIS 2013 and OPODIS 2016.
• Co-Organiser of the Dagstuhl Seminar on Consistency in Distributed Systems, Feb. 2013.
• Co-organiser of the Dagstuhl Seminar on Security and Dependability for Federated Cloud Platforms, Jul. 2012.
• PC co-Chair for LADIS 2010 (with Marcos Aguilera).

Projects and Research Grants

• April 2023: project “Safe composition of distributed off-the-shelf components,” with Ahmed Bouajjani of IRIF, is funded by Amazon Research Awards grant of USD 78,000, as an unrestricted gift, with an additional USD 10,000 in AWS credits.
• ANR Project Centeanes, 2025--2029. Number ANR-24-CE25-5598-04.

• (French) ANR Project Adecods, 2019-10-01 to 2024-03-31. Number ANR-19-CE25-0007.
• (French) ANR Project RainbowFS, Feb. 2017 to April 2022. Number ANR-16-CE25-0013.
• CIFRE (industrial PhD grant) with Orange Labs, on distributed data in a telecommunications database, awarded to Jonathan Sid-Otmane (2017–2020).
• CIFRE (industrial PhD grant) with Scality, on “Scalable indexing for large-scale distributed storage systems”, awarded to Dimitrios Vasilas (2017–2020).
• (European) H2020 Project LightKone, 2017--2020.
• CIFRE (industrial PhD grant) with Scality, on "CRDTs for large-scale storage," awarded to Tao Thanh Vinh, 2014–2017.
• The SyncFree EU project (FP7 Strep) 2013–2016 aims to develop technologies for highly-scalable geo-replicated computation and storage. Building upon CRDTs, its academic contributions include the planet-scale database AntidoteDB, the Just-Right Consistency approach to tailoring consistency to application requirements, the distributed programming language LASP, and the framework for in-browser data sharing Legion. Industrial outcomes include Basho's BigSet technology, and ESL's WombatOAM tool for system operations, administration and management.
• The Euro-TM EU COST action on "Transactional Memories: Foundations, Algorithms, Tools, and Applications," 2011–2015.
• The ConcoRDanT ANR project (2010—2013) aims to study commutative replicated data types, a principled approach to eventual consistency.
• The Streams ANR project (2010—2014) studies peer-to-peer, real-time collaboration.
• The Prose ANR project (2009—2012) studies the sharing of mutable content (e.g., a shared wiki) over opportunistic communication.
• PhD student Marek Zawirski received a Google European Doctoral Fellowship towards his PhD on “Theory and practice of shared data types for cloud computing”.

PhD students

Ayush Pandey. Title: CALOCK : Topological Multi-Granularity Locking for Hierarchical data . Defended March 2025. Co-advisor: Mesaac Makpangou. Co-advisors: Marc Shapiro, Julien Sopena, Swan Dubois. Currently a post-doc at Télécom SudParis. Laurent Prosperi. Topic: Varda: a language for programming distributed systems by composition. Defended September 2023. Funded by a competitive Inria PhD grant CORDI-S. Co-advisors: Mesaac Makpangou and Ahmed Bouajjani. Currently Inspecteur at ANSSI. Saalik Hatia. Leveraging formal specification to implement a database backend . Defended June 2023. Currently Site Reliability Engineer at Scaleway. Benoît Martin. TTCC: Transactional-Turn Causal Consistency . Defended April 2023. Co-advisor: Mesaac Makpangou. Currently Research Engineer at CEA, Maison de la Simulation. Ilyas Toumlilt (Defended Dec. 2021). Colony: A Hybrid Consistency System for Highly-Available Collaborative Edge Computing. Funded by LightKone and RainbowFS. Currently Site Reliability Engineer at Critéo. Jonathan Sid-Otmane. A study of data consistency constraints in 5G, applied to >limiting resource usage in network slices. Co-advised with Sofiane Imadali and Frédéric Martelli, Orange Labs. CIFRE industrial PhD, defended Nov. 2021. Currently R&D Software Engineer at Lumen Technologies. Sreeja Nair. Thesis: Designing safe and highly available distributed applications. Defended June 2021. Winner of Séphora Berrebi Scholarship for Women in Advanced Mathematics & Computer Science 2020. Funded by LightKone and RainbowFS. Currently Senior Replication Engineer at Ditto. Dimitrios Vasilas. Thesis: A flexible and decentralised approach to query processing for geo-distributed data systems. CIFRE industrial PhD, co-advised with Brad King, Scality. Defended February 2021. Now Research Engineer at Scality, Paris, France. Francis Laniel defended Nov. 2020. Thesis: MemOpLight : Vers une consolidation mémoire pour les conteneurs grâce à un retour applicatif. Funded by a competitive grant from EDITE/Sorbonne-Université. Now Embedded System Developer at Amarula Solutions (Amsterdam, the Netherlands). Alejandro Z. Tomsic (defended April 2018) Thesis: Exploring the design space of highly-available distributed transactions. Prize for Best French PhD in systems and networking 2019, awarded by ASF and RSD. Currently Founder of Sick Tom Toms Music. Tao Thanh Vinh, co-advised with Vianney Rancurel, defended Dec. 2017. Thesis: Ensuring Availability and Managing Consistency in Geo-Replicated File Systems. Currently Engagement Backend Engineer at SmartNews, Inc. Mahsa Najafzadeh (April 2016). Thesis: The Analysis and Co-design of weakly-consistent applications. Now Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft. Lokesh Gidra, co-advised with Gaël Thomas and Julien Sopena. Thesis: Garbage Collector for memory intensive applications on NUMA architectures, September 2015. Now Senior Software Engineer at Google. Marek Zawirski. Thesis: Dependable Eventual Consistency with Replicated Data Types, Jan. 2015. Now Staff Software Engineer at Google, Zurichr.

Masoud Saeida Ardekani, co-advised with Pierre Sutra. Thesis: Ensuring Consistency in Partially Replicated Data Stores, 2014. Senior Software Engineer for Google Cloud, Silicon Valley, California, USA. Pierpaolo Cincilla, co-advised with Sébastien Monnet. Thesis: Gargamel : accroître les performances des DBMS en parallélisant les transactions en écriture, 2014. Cybersecurity Expert, Process & Compliance at Ampere. Pierre Sutra. Thesis: Efficient Protocols for Generalized Consensus and Partial Replication, 2010. Assistant Professor at Télécom Paris-Sud. Nicolas Richer. Stratégies de gestion mémoire dans les mémoires d'objets persistantes automatiques partitionnées, 2002. Fabrice le Fessant, co-advised with Jean-Jacques Lévy. “JoCaml : conception et implémentation d'un langage à agents mobiles”, 2001. Researcher at Inria Paris. Xavier Blondel. “Gestion mémoire dans PERDIS, un environnement réparti persistant à grande échelle”, 2000. Head of R&D Department, Senior Software Architect at ACA. Aline Baggio. “Objets distribués adaptables pour environnements mobiles”, 1999. Technical Product Consultant at TOPdesk and free-lance photographer. Georges Brun-Cottan, 1998. “Cohérence de données repliquées partagées par un groupe de processus coopérant à distance”. Software Engineer at Dell EMC. Julien Maisonneuve. “Hobbes : un modèle de liaison de références réparties", 1996. Standardisation Manager at Nokia. Paulo Ferreira. “Larchant: Persistence by Reachability in Distributed Shared Memory through Garbage Collection”, 1996. Senior researcher at INESC, and Associate Professor at IST Lisbon. Hervé Soulard. “Adaptation des systèmes de stockage aux besoins des utilisateurs : l'approche micro-systèmes de stockage et sa mise en œuvre dans BOSS”, 1995. Self-employed web developer and translator. David Plainfossé. “Ramasse-miettes réparti et gestion de références dans le système à objets SOUL”, 1994. Product Manager Orchestration at Airbus DS Government Solutions, Inc. Daniel Edelson, co-advised with Ira Pohl. “Type-Specific Storage Management”, 1993. Sr Director Software Systems Engineering at Broadcom. Michel Ruffin. “Kitlog : un service de journalisation générique”, 1992. Technical director for standardisation at Alcatel-Lucent France. Deceased, 2017. Yvon Gourhant. “Outils pour la programmation d'objets fragmentés”, 1991. R&D Program Leader at Orange Labs. Sabine Habert. “Gestion d'objets et migration dans les systèmes répartis”, 1989. Mesaac Mounchili Makpangou. “Protocoles de communication et programmation par objets : l'exemple de SOS”, 1989. Chargé de Recherche at Inria.

Links

• Faux amis : common (in Computer Science) French-English mis-translations or errors. PDF, Numbers.
• Links about myself:
  • Working with me: Masters' internships, PhD proposals, post-doc proposals.
  • Publications of Marc Shapiro
  • Habilitation à diriger les recherches.
  • Curriculum Vitæ or Resume (brief or detailed).
  • Research statement.
• Systems research in Europe:
  • The European Systems Conference: EuroSys, April every year
  • Our professional society is EuroSys, the European Chapter of the ACM SIG on Operating Systems (SIGOPS).
  • Association SIGOPS de France (ASF) , French chapter of SIGOPS
  • Directory of European research groups in Systems
  • A full history of the SIGOPS European Workshop series.
  • Catalog of European scientific societies in informatics (in French)
• BibTeX files:
  • my publications
  • other publications of interest in my research area.
  • Short and long abbreviations, for use with the above two files.
• My place of work and team:
  • Delys Team.
  • LIP6 (Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6).
  • Location of LIP6.
  My main affiliation is Inria:
  • Inria home page.
  • Inria Paris campus: 48 rue Barrault, 75013 Paris. (Note: this is not where I work!)

• Book: Nat Mayer Shapiro, Rigor and Joy / La rigueur et la joie. Silvana Editoriale, Milano, Italy. Hardcover, 23 × 28 cm, 168 pages, 222 illustrations. Bilingual English & French. ISBN 9788836655625.
• Art: Nat Mayer Shapiro, my father. Represented in France by Galerie Saphir.
• My hikes
• Climbing (in Fontainebleau or cliffs), ski-mountaineering (AKA randonnée ski), cross-country skiing, nordic skiing, snow-shoeing, hiking, bicycling, mountain bike: see CIHM.
• Escalade (escalade Fontainebleau, escalade falaise, escalade mur), ski de montagne (dit aussi ski de randonnée, ski de rando, ski alpinisme, ski de raid, ou ski de printemps), ski de fond (ski nordique, raquettes, randonnée en raquettes), randonnée (randonnée pedestre, marche sportive), vélo (cyclotourisme, randonnée en vélo), VTT (vélo tous terrains, randonnée VTT, raid VTT) : voir CIHM.

Postal address and location:

Marc Shapiro

Bureau 26-00/211, Laboratoire LIP6, Sorbonne-Université.

Boîte Courrier 169

4, place Jussieu

75252 Paris Cedex 05

France

Getting there: Public transportation within Paris: Métro Jussieu: lines 7, 10; Bus: lines 24, 47, 63, 67, 89. . By air, car, bike, etc.

Tel.: +33 1 4427 7093

Home page: https://perso.lip6.fr/Marc.Shapiro/.

E-mail: <MARC dot SHAPIRO atsign ACM dot ORG> (plain-text please; attachments in plain text or PDF only).

(Refer to 3D perspective view of campus, below.) Immediately after entering campus, turn left towards door marked "26". On Floor 2, leaving the street to your right, take door marked "26-00". My office is 211, on the left-hand side. If any of the doors is locked, dial 7-7093 from the phone at 2nd floor entrance, or call +33 1 4427 7093 from your mobile phone.

Other contacts:

• Pierre Sens, leader of Delys.