Michael Franklin

Michael J. Franklin is the inaugural holder of the Liew Family Chair of Computer Science. An authority on databases, data analytics, data management, and distributed systems, he also holds appointments as Senior Advisor to the Provost on Computation and Data Science and as Faculty Co-director of the Data Science Institute. Franklin leads campus initiatives to dramatically expand Computer Science and to establish the University of Chicago as a leading center for data science education and research. He is a member of the Faculty Advisory Board for the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.

 

Previously he was Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was on the faculty for 17 years and served a term as Chair of the Computer Science Division of the EECS Department. He was also Director of the Algorithms, Machines, and People Laboratory (AMPLab) and was Principal Investigator of the lab’s National Science Foundation Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) "Expeditions in Computing" award. He is one of the original creators of Apache Spark, a leading open source platform for data analytics and machine learning that was initially developed at the lab.

 

Franklin was founding CEO and CTO of Truviso, a data analytics company acquired by Cisco Systems. He is a technical advisor to data-driven technology companies and organizations, including AMPLab spin-outs Databricks and Alluxio and Chicago-based Ocient and Zengines. He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He currently serves on the ACM Fellows Selection Committee and was recently a member of the National Science Foundation CISE Advisory Committee and a Board Member of the Computing Research Association. He has received the 2022 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award, two ACM SIGMOD “Test of Time” awards, and Best Paper awards at leading computing systems and database conferences. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin in 1993, a Master of Software Engineering from the Wang Institute of Graduate Studies in 1986, and a B.S. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts in 1983.