Alex Kogan is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Oracle Labs, Burlington, MA, where he works in the Distributed Systems group. His research interests are in the area of machine learning, distributed systems, parallel computing, and especially, in exploring and boosting the performance of modern multi-core systems by devising efficient concurrent algorithms. He is also interested in other aspects of distributed computing, in particular, in the area of cloud computing. Prior to Oracle, Alex interned with IBM Research at Haifa, Israel and Microsoft Research at Redmond, WA. He received his Ph.D. (2012), M.Sc. (2008) and BA (Summa Cum Laude, 2002) from the Department of Computer Science, Technion, Israel.