Michal Kapalka (Polish spelling: Michał Kapałka) PhD in Computer Science from EPFL MSc in Computer Science from AGH Contact: firstname at lastname.eu

Who am I?

Software Engineer

• Programming since early childhood (starting on this machine), and always fascinated by computers & technology
• Gained engineering experience at Cross Grid, DESY, CERN, Swissquote, and SICPA (mostly in Java and C/C++)
• Curious about software at all levels: from large-scale distributed systems, databases and high-level programming languages, through corporate bread and butter (e.g., Java and its ecosystem), down to network protocols, operating systems, and processor instructions

Researcher

Main areas of interest (see also the list of publications below):

• Distributed, reliable, fault-tolerant systems and algorithms
• Concurrent programming (e.g., synchronization techniques, lock-free algorithms, transactional memory)

Also interested in: computer simulations & numerical analysis, human-computer interaction, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and other fields.

Leader and Scrum Master

• Leading agile software teams since 2012
• Advocate for agile methodologies, continuous delivery, build & test automation, etc.
• Former board member of the local BEST group in Krakow (Poland)

Book

Rachid Guerraoui and Michał Kapałka. Principles of Transactional Memory. Morgan&Claypool, 2010.
[Buy at Morgan&Claypool] [Buy at Amazon]

Publications

Journal Papers

1. Rachid Guerraoui, Michał Kapałka, and Petr Kouznetsov. The Weakest Failure Detectors to Boost Obstruction-Freedom. In Distributed Computing, 20(6), pp. 415–433, Springer-Verlag, 2008.
   [Preprint] [BibTeX] [Full text at SpringerLink]
2. Marian Bubak, Tomasz Gubała, Michał Kapałka, Maciej Malawski, and Katarzyna Rycerz. Workflow Composer and Service Registry for Grid Applications. In Future Generation Computer Systems, 21 (1), pp. 79–86. Elsevier, 2005.
   [Preprint] [BibTeX] [Full text at ScienceDirect]

Conference Papers

1. Victor Bushkov, Rachid Guerraoui, and Michał Kapałka. On the liveness of transactional memory. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), ACM, 2012.
   [Preprint] [BibTeX] [Full text at ACM Portal]
2. Rachid Guerraoui, Thomas A. Henzinger, Michał Kapałka, and Vasu Singh. Transactions in the Jungle. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), ACM, 2010.
   [Preprint] [BibTeX] [Full text at ACM Portal]
3. Joao Barreto, Aleksandar Dragojević, Paulo Ferreira, Rachid Guerraoui, and Michał Kapałka. Leveraging Parallel Nesting in Transactional Memory. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP), ACM, 2010.
   [Preprint] [BibTeX] [Full text at ACM Portal]
4. Aleksandar Dragojević, Rachid Guerraoui, and Michał Kapałka. Stretching Transactional Memory. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), ACM, 2009.
   [Preprint] [BibTeX] [Full text at ACM Portal]
5. Rachid Guerraoui and Michał Kapałka. The Semantics of Progress in Lock-Based Transactional Memory. In Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL), ACM, 2009.
   [Preprint] [BibTeX] [Presentation]
6. Rachid Guerraoui and Michał Kapałka. On Obstruction-Free Transactions. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), ACM, 2008.
   [Preprint] [BibTeX] [Presentation] [Full text at ACM Portal]
7. Rachid Guerraoui and Michał Kapałka. On the Correctness of Transactional Memory. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP), ACM, 2008.
   [Preprint] [BibTeX] [Presentation] [Full text at ACM Portal]
8. Rachid Guerraoui, Michał Kapałka, and Jan Vitek. STMBench7: A Benchmark for Software Transactional Memory. In Proceedings of the Second European Systems Conference EuroSys 2007, ACM, 2007.
   [Preprint] [BibTeX] [Presentation] [Full text at ACM Portal]
9. Rachid Guerraoui, Michał Kapałka, and Petr Kouznetsov. The Weakest Failure Detectors to Boost Obstruction-Freedom. In Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), pp. 399–412. LNCS 4167, Springer-Verlag, 2006.
   [Preprint] [BibTeX] [Presentation] [Full text at SpringerLink]
10. Marian Bubak, Tomasz Gubała, Michał Kapałka, Maciej Malawski, and Katarzyna Rycerz. Grid Service Registry for Workflow Composition Framework. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS), Part III, pp. 34–41. LNCS 3038, Springer-Verlag, 2004.
    [Preprint] [BibTeX] [Full text at SpringerLink]

Workshop Papers

1. Rachid Guerraoui, Thomas A. Henzinger, Michał Kapałka, and Vasu Singh. Generalizing the Correctness of Transactional Memory. In CAV'09 Workshop on Exploiting Concurrency Efficiently and Correctly (EC2), 2009.
   [Full text] [BibTeX] [Presentation]
2. Aleksandar Dragojević, Rachid Guerraoui, and Michał Kapałka. Dividing Transactional Memories by Zero. In 3rd ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Transactional Computing (TRANSACT).
   [Full text] [BibTeX] [Presentation]
3. Rachid Guerraoui, Maurice Herlihy, Michał Kapałka, and Bastian Pochon. Robust Contention Management in Software Transactional Memory. In OOPSLA'05 Workshop on Synchronization and Concurrency in Object-Oriented Languages (SCOOL).
   [Full text] [BibTeX]

Invited Papers

1. Rachid Guerraoui, and Michał Kapałka. Transactional Memory: Glimmer of a Theory. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV), LNCS, Springer-Verlag, 2009. (to appear)
   [Preprint] [BibTeX] [Full text at SpringerLink]
2. Rachid Guerraoui and Michał Kapałka. The Theory of Transactional Memory. In Bulletin of the EATCS, 97, February 2009.
   [Preprint] [BibTeX] [Full text of the Bulletin]

Technical Reports

1. Rachid Guerraoui and Michał Kapałka. How Live Can a Transactional Memory Be? EPFL Technical Report LPD-REPORT-2009-001, February 2009 (revised: October 2009).
   [Full text] [BibTeX]
2. Rachid Guerraoui and Michał Kapałka. The Semantics of Progress in Lock-Based Transactional Memory. EPFL Technical Report LPD-REPORT-2008-015, July 2008 (revised: October 2008).
   [Full text] [BibTeX]
3. Rachid Guerraoui and Michał Kapałka. On Obstruction-Free Transactions. EPFL Technical Report LPD-REPORT-2008-012, April 2008.
   [Full text] [BibTeX]
4. Rachid Guerraoui and Michał Kapałka. Opacity: A Correctness Condition for Transactional Memory. EPFL Technical Report LPD-REPORT-2007-004, August 2007 (first version: February 2007).
   [Full text] [BibTeX]
5. Rachid Guerraoui, Michał Kapałka, and Jan Vitek. STMBench7: A Benchmark for Software Transactional Memory. EPFL Technical Report LPD-REPORT-2006-011, September 2006.
   [Full text] [BibTeX]
6. Rachid Guerraoui, Michał Kapałka, and Petr Kouznetsov. Boosting Obstruction-Freedom with Low Overhead. EPFL Technical Report LPD-REPORT-2006-009, July 2006.
   [Full text] [BibTeX]
7. Rachid Guerraoui, Michał Kapałka, and Petr Kouznetsov. The Weakest Failure Detectors to Boost Obstruction-Freedom. EPFL Technical Report LPD-REPORT-2006-007, July 2006.
   [Full text] [BibTeX]

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