Brian Coan

Brian Coan is the Director of the High Availability and Distributed Computing Research Group at Telcordia Technologies. He has been affiliated with Telcordia Technologies and previously with Bell Laboratories continuously since 1978, working on systems engineering distributed computing, fault tolerance, Internet telephony, and algorithm design for distributed systems. He has degrees in Computer Science from Princeton (BSE in 1977), Stanford (MS in 1979), and MIT (PhD 1987).

His PhD research was in the theory of distributed computing. This is the problem of designing algorithms to coordinate the actions of a loosely-coupled collection of computers. The main difficulties that such algorithms need to cope with are: failures of components, acting with limited information, and timing uncertainties. He has published extensively in this area.

More recently he has been working on the application of distributed algorithms to reliable telecommunications systems. He was one of the chief architects for the Touring Machine/BSC system for the control of broadband networks. This project defined a layered architecture for telephone switching machines. The project goals were to bring to telephone switching systems some of the system structuring principles that are in common use in computer operating systems. The approach was to define a kernel of functionality that must be executed with a high level of privilege and to define above that layers for writing significant telephony applications that can be executed with strictly limited privilege.

Currently he is the project manager for Telcordia's work on a prototype of the continuous data delivery subsystem which is a part of the software system to monitor compliance with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (work is being done under a contract awarded to SAIC).

He has been an influential member of the research community in the area of distributed computing, networks, and fault tolerance. He has published twenty research papers in these areas in journals and refereed conference proceedings. He has been a member of the program committee of the Annual ACM Symposium on the Principles of Distributed Computing (twice) and of the IEEE Conference on Communications Software: Communications for Distributed Applications and Systems (TriComm91). Also he has twice served as general chair for the ACM Symposium on the Principles of Distributed Computing. He has served as guest editor for a special issue of the International Journal of Reliability, Quality, and Safety Engineering on the topic of reliability of wireless communications systems.