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

Biography

Kaashoek earned his Master of Arts degree in 1988 and his Doctorate degree in Computer Science in 1992 from Vrije Universiteit. He completed his Doctorate research under the guidance of Andy Tanenbaum for his thesis titled "Group communication in distributed computer systems."

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

Kaashoek was among a small group of researchers who received 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 his work in 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 also received the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser award and the 2010 ACM Prize in Computing.

Work

Kaashoek's research focuses on operating systems, networking, programming languages, and computer architecture for systems that work together, move around, and handle many tasks at once. Recently, his work has included checking if systems work correctly.

In 1998, Kaashoek helped start a company called SightPath, which created software for digital distribution. Cisco Systems bought SightPath in 2000. In the early 2000s, Kaashoek helped found Mazu Networks Inc. and was on its board of directors until Riverbed Technology bought the company in 2009.

Publications

• 1992. Group communication in distributed computer systems
• 2009. Principles of Computer System Design: An Introduction. 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: Support for composing distributed applications. Location: Sintra, Portugal. Publisher: 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.