Timothy Roscoe

Research area

Operating Systems, Networking, and Distributed Systems.

Timothy Roscoe started as a Professor in the Computer Science department at ETH Zurich in January 2007, where he performs research in computer systems.  He was made an ACM Fellow in 2014 for his contributions to operating systems and networking research.

Before joining ETH Zurich, he was a Principal Researcher at Intel Research''s Berkeley Lab, Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, and a visiting researcher in the ERTOS program at National ICT Australia. At Berkeley he helped to design and build (among other things) the PlanetLab platform for wide-area distributed systems, and the P2 Declarative Networking engine.

He joined the Intel Berkeley Lab from Sprint Labs, where he worked for 3.5 years on cloud computing infrastructures and wide-area fine-grained network measurement, and was also a visiting Fellow in the Computer Science Department of the University of California at Berkeley with the Sahara and Oceanstore projects.

He received a PhD from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in 1995, where he was a designer and builder of the Nemesis multiservice operating system, as well as working on the Pandora multimedia system and the Wanda microkernel. He designed and built the memory management system and, with Simon Crosby, the object request broker used in the first coffee machine on the World Wide Web. After Cambridge he was hired for a three-year spell as head of research at a small, ill-fated software company in North Carolina called Persimmon IT, where he led and managed a team designing and building a web-based collaboration toolkit using CORBA, XML, Java, and C++.

Courses taught

Distributed Systems Laboratory