Yair Amir is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, and director of the Distributed Systems and Networks lab (www.dsn.jhu.edu) at Johns Hopkins University. His goal is to invent resilient, performant and secure distributed systems that make a difference, collecting friends along the way.

Dr. Amir served as Professor (1995-2023) and Department Chair (2015-2018) of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins, as program co-chair (2015) and general co-chair (2022) of the IEEE/IFIP Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) conference, and as a Vice Chair of the IFIP 10.4 Working Group on Dependable Computing (2016-2018).

His awards include the Best Paper award in the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), the 2014 Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award, the highest teaching award in the School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, and the DARPA Dynamic Coalitions program Bytes-for-Buck trophy in 2002. He was nominated to the DARPA agency-wide "Performer with Significant Technical Achievement" award in 2004.

He is a creator of the Spread toolkit (www.spread.org), the first scalable group communication system with strong semantics, the Spines overlay network platform (www.spines.org), and the Spire intrusion-tolerant SCADA for the power grid (www.dsn.jhu.edu/spire), the first to protect against both system-level and network-level attacks and compromises. Some of these technologies are deployed in mission critical systems and are used for research and teaching in universities around the world.

Dr. Amir is a co-founder of Spread Concepts LLC (www.spreadconcepts.com) and a co-founder of LTN Global Communications (www.ltnglobal.com). LTN offers global video transport and processing services that are used by major media companies including Disney, YouTube TV, Fox, CNN, ABC, Bloomberg, CBS, Deutsche Welle, ESPN, NBC, PBS, and Turner.

Dr. Amir holds BSc (Summa Cum Laude) and MSc from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.