Calton Pu (calton@cs.columbia.edu) was born in Taiwan and grew up in Brazil. (He still helps Brazilian expatriates keep in touch via email.) He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UWashington in 1986, then became an assistant professor in the Dept. of Computer Science at Columbia University. He is also a member of IEEE and ACM.

Calton is leading three research projects. The Harmony project has two aspects: 1) superdatabases that provide atomic transactions across heterogeneous database boundaries, and 2) high performance query/transaction processing in very large distributed database systems. A superdatabase called Supernova is operational. Calton recently introduced epsilon-serializability -- a generalization of transaction processing -- which increases database concurrency, availability, and autonomy.

His second project, also operational, is the Synthesis distributed operating system. It combines an orthogonal high- level kernel interface with efficient execution obtained from dynamic kernel code synthesis.

Calton's Netwatcher project measures end-to-end application performance over wide-area networks. He is also working on extended transaction models for long, open-ended activities, and on application of kernel-code synthesis to distributed software systems.