Prof. Savas Parastalidis has helped to facilitate links between Microsoft and Newcastle University. His work has led to many benefits for Newcastle including: funding research; several visits by Newcastle staff to meet senior staff at Microsoft in Seattle; providing Microsoft consultants' time to build a prototype with Newcastle; a 3 month internship in Microsoft Seattle for a PhD student; a place in an EU project that will give Newcastle 36 person month funding; and, a meeting with Bill Gates.
These links have not only benefitted the research of Newcastle staff, but have also been used to give credibility to claims about the impact and global reach of research in many funding bids, for example, to strengthen the successful Digital Economy Hub bid (with which Microsoft is a collaborator).
Prof. Parastatidis has an international reputation for his work on Distributed Computing. He has recently, (with two colleagues), written a book on distributed systems architecture (published in September 2010 - "REST in Practice", Webber, Parastatidis & Robinson, Pub. O'Reilly) which has received wide attention.
His profile includes:
Architecture, development, and technical leadership in Bing.
Architecture, program management, and prototyping work in Microsoft Research's External Research (previously part of Technical Computing) group and Microsoft's Connected System Division architecture team.
Architecture, research, and prototyping work for one of UK's regional e-Science centres. Responsible for the technical vision, technology adoption, and design work for bio-informatics, neuro-informatics, astronomy, etc. related applications. Interactions with scientists and analysis of their application and infrastructure requirements. Built prototypes demonstrating ideas for composing Internet-scale scientific applications.
PhD and post-doctoral research in the area of software-based support for high-performance, distributed memory, parallel architectures.
Management of research and Grid-related infrastructure teams.
Extensive knowledge of Web Services standards and specifications. Author of suite of specifications for describing the messaging behaviour of services (SOAP Service Description Language, SSDL, http://ssdl.org). Owned and co-edited the WS-Metadata-Exchange and WS-Transfer on behalf of Connected System Division's architecture team. Worked on the OASIS WS-Business Transaction Protocol (the first Web Services-based protocol for transactions).
Technical writer/blogger and author of many publications. Able presenter and communicator of new ideas and research work.