Marinus Frans (Frans) Kaashoek was born in 1965 in Leiden, Netherlands. He is a Dutch expert in computers, a business owner, and holds the title of Charles Piper Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Biography

Kaashoek earned his MA in 1988 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1992 from Vrije Universiteit. He completed his Ph.D. thesis, titled "Group communication in distributed computer systems," under the guidance of Andy Tanenbaum.

In 1993, Kaashoek was named Charles Piper Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems group.

Kaashoek was among a small group of researchers honored with the NSF National Young Investigator Award in 1994 and the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in 2010. In 2004, he was named an ACM Fellow. In 2006, he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to computer systems, distributed systems, and content-distribution networks. In 2012, he was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a recipient of the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser award and the 2010 ACM Prize in Computing.

Work

Kaashoek's research interests include operating systems, networking, programming languages, and computer architecture for systems that work together over networks, systems that move data, and systems that handle multiple tasks at once. More recently, his work has focused on checking if systems function correctly.

In 1998, Kaashoek helped start a company called SightPath, which made software for sharing digital content online. Cisco Systems bought the company in 2000. In the early 2000s, Kaashoek helped start another company, Mazu Networks Inc., and was on the board of directors until the company was bought by Riverbed Technology in 2009.

Publications

• 1992. Communication among groups in distributed computer systems
• 2009. Principles of Computer System Design: An Introduction. Co-authored with Jerome H. Saltzer.

• M. Frans Kaashoek, Robbert van Renesse, Hans van Staveren, and Andrew S. Tanenbaum (1993). FLIP: an internetwork protocol for supporting distributed systems. Published in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, volume 11, pages 73–106.
• David Mazières; M. Frans Kaashoek (September 1998). Escaping the Evils of Centralized Control with self-certifying pathnames (PostScript). Presented at the 8th ACM SIGOPS European workshop on Support for composing distributed applications. Held in Sintra, Portugal, by MIT. Retrieved on December 23, 2006.
• Stoica, I.; Morris, R.; Karger, D.; Kaashoek, M. F.; Balakrishnan, H. (2001). "Chord: A scalable peer-to-peer lookup service for internet applications" (PDF). Published in ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, volume 31, issue 4, page 149. DOI: 10.1145/964723.383071.
• David Andersen; Hari Balakrishnan; Frans Kaashoek; Robert Morris (December 2001). "Resilient overlay networks." Presented at the eighteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles. Pages 131–145. DOI: 10.1145/502034.502048. ISBN 978-1581133899. S2CID 221317942.