Christophe Bisciglia

Christophe Bisciglia (born 1980) is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur known for helping to popularize MapReduce while at Google, for co-founding Cloudera, a Palo Alto-based company providing tools, services, and support around Apache Hadoop, and more recently for co-founding WibiData, a San Francisco-based company that provides big data applications for enterprises to personalize their customer experiences. Prior to Cloudera he founded and lead Google's Academic cloud computing initiative which provides Google hosted computational resources to facilitate education and research to universities around the world. In February 2008, the National Science Foundation joined this initiative to distribute Google's computational resources to the national research community.

Computer science

Bisciglia's primary contribution to computer science has been the introduction of hands-on large-scale computing into the undergraduate computer science curriculum originally developed at the University of Washington. In 2008, along with co-authors, Aaron Kimball and Sierra Michels-Slettvet, Bisciglia published a paper titled "Cluster Computing for Web-Scale Data Processing." This paper details the first MapReduce based large-scale computing course ever offered to undergraduate students, and has provided the foundation for similar courses at CMU, MIT, and Tsinghua University.

Biography

Bisciglia attended the University of Washington from 1999 to 2003 and graduated with a B.S. degree from the department of Computer Science and Engineering. During his time at UW, he assisted in teaching classes on introductory programming, data structures, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. After graduating he joined Google to work on search quality. Eventually he became a senior engineer before he decided to change focus and broaden his interest outside of engineering.

Bisciglia was raised primarily in Gig Harbor, Washington. He was home schooled, ranging between part and full-time, for most of his youth which allowed him to raise Icelandic horses and pursue other hobbies.

Selected publications

• Kimball, A.; Michels-Slettvet, S.; Bisciglia, C. (2008). "Cluster computing for web-scale data processing". ACM SIGCSE Bulletin. 40: 116. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.107.151. doi:10.1145/1352322.1352177.