Yechiam Yemini (YY)

VMTurbo is the former name of Turbonomic.com. I have been one of 5 co-founders of VMTurbo. The core patented technologies of VMTurbo use economic balancing principles to allocate compute resource in virtual and cloud systems. These principles, based on seminal research at my lab, typically result in 30%-40% data-center efficiency. More recently I have been working on next generation extensions of these principles to accelerate Big Data systems.

I joined the CS department founding team at Columbia in 1980 and retired in 2011. In between I lead research of networked systems and developed the first top-down networking course -- to replace the bottom-up structure common then. I also ventured to teach a range of courses outside my field: from programming languages & translators, to computer games, to DataBases, to Neural Networks and Computational Biology. My lab introduced several seminal technologies and spin offs. I continue to believe that the impact of technology research is best accomplished by startups that distill its value into innovative products. I thus chose to combine academic career with serial co-founding of startups. Since retiring, I have continued to voluntary co-teach a popular course on Principle of Innovation Entrepreneurship (PIE). Students in the course build in-class launch-ready innovative startups. For example, one such startup explored peer-2-peer banking several years ahead of the birth of the lending-network industry.

Nextorage built software defined network (SDN) technologies and used them for content and storage processing applications. It preceded the SDN market by over a decade demonstrating a fully programmable software switch processing network streams at Gbps wire speeds. The company focused on video-multicast-to-storage applications -- where a user can exploit massive cheap storage to continuously download-and-play all video content of interest, at their desired time and quality. Unfortunately, with the financial crisis the VCs decided to shut the company down.

SMARTS was a spinoff from my lab, building the leading platform to automatically diagnose network problems from their observed symptoms. I lead the development of the patented codebook correlation technology at the core of SMARTS products. SMARTS was acquired by EMC In 2005 where codebook correlation continues to serve as the core of the Ionix product line.

I was a co-founder of COMVERSE technology and its Chief Scientific Advisor. Comverse built the world's first multimedia messaging server providing the stringent availability, scalability and flexible applications development, required by the telecom industry. It thus played a lead role in transitioning the telecom industry from voice telephony to store-&-forward voice and text messaging. The company has been one of a handful of pivotal startups that built the foundations for Israel's high-tech industry, with well over 100 high tech startups launched by Converse "graduates". In the mid 1990's the company joined the S&P500 and the Nasdaq100 lists and span off several multi-billion subsidiaries. It remained one of the very few 80's startups on these lists, whose technologies survived and prospered for over 20 years.