M. Dale Skeen (born c. 1953) is an American computer scientist. He specializes in designing and implementing large-scale computing systems,

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

and

database management system In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and an ...

Life

Skeen earned a B.S. in computer science from

North Carolina State University North Carolina State University (NC State, North Carolina State, NC State University, or NCSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina, United States. Founded in 1887 and p ...

in 1978 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1982 from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

in distributed database systems. He began his career in 1982 at the Computer Corporation of America in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, ...

, before working as an assistant professor at

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

’s Computer Science department, during which he also worked as a technical consultant for

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several lab ...

. Skeen then held a research staff member position at the

IBM Almaden Research Center IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company. IBM Research is headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, near IBM headquarters ...

in San Jose, California. In 1986, Skeen worked at

TIBCO Software TIBCO Software Inc. is a business unit of Cloud Software Group that provides business intelligence, enterprise software. It has headquarters in Palo Alto and offices in North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America. H ...

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

, becoming the vice president of research and principal inventor of “The Information Bus” data integration backplane. Skeen co-founded Vitria Technology in October 1994 with his wife, JoMei Chang, and served as chief technology officer. Vitria started as a

business process management Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to Business process discovery, discover, Business process modeling, model, Business analysis, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and Business process auto ...

company and then developed

operational intelligence An operational definition specifies concrete, replicable procedures designed to represent a construct. In the words of American psychologist S.S. Stevens (1935), "An operation is the performance which we execute in order to make known a concept." F ...

products. Skeen was interviewed in the press. He has patents on the distributed publish/subscribe communication mechanism and

three-phase commit protocol In computer networking and distributed databases, the three-phase commit protocol (3PC) is a distributed algorithm that ensures all nodes in a system agree to commit or abort a transaction. It improves upon the two-phase commit protocol (2PC) by ...

. Skeen received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2001 for “fundamental contributions in publish-subscribe communications.” In April 2004 he became chief executive officer of Vitria.

Publications

* "Business Vocabulary Management,” Business Integration Journal, July 2003. * “Real-Time Queries in the Enterprise,” Byte Magazine, Volume 23, Number 2, February 1998. * “Enabling the Real-Time Enterprise,” Byte Magazine, Volume 23, Number 1, January 1998. * “The Information Bus – An Architecture for Extensible Distributed Systems,” Proceedings of the 14th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, ACM Press, Asheville, North Carolina, December 1993. With M. Pfluegl, B. Oki, A. Siegel. * “An Efficient, Fault-Tolerant Protocol for Replication Management,” Fault-Tolerant Distributed Computing, B. Simmons and A. Spector, editors, Springer-Verlag, 1990. With A. El Abbadi and F. Cristian. * “Nonblocking Commit Protocols,” The INGRES Papers, M. Stonebreaker, editor, Addison-Wesley, 1986. * “A Formal Model for Crash Recovery in a Distributed System,” Concurrency and Reliability in Distributed Systems, B. Bhargava, ed., Van Nostrand-Reingold, Inc., 1987. With M. Stonebraker. * “Consistency in a Partitioned Network: A Survey,” ACM Computing Surveys 17, No. 3, September 1985, pp. 341–370. With S. Davidson and H. Garcia-Molina. * “Determining the Last Process to Fail,” ACM Transactions on Computing Systems 2, No. 1, February 1985. * “Increasing Availability in Partitioned Database Systems,” Advances in Computing Research 3: The Theory of Databases, Franco Preparato and Paris Kanellakis, editors, JAI Press, Inc., 1986. With D. Wright. * “Achieving High Availability in Partitioned Database Systems,” IEEE Database Engineering 8, June 1985. * “Crash Recovery in a Distributed System,” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-9, 3 (May 1983), 219–228. With M. Stonebraker. * “Increasing Availability in a Partitioned Network,” Proceedings of the Third ACM Symposium on the Principles of Database Systems, Waterloo, Canada, March 1984. With D. Wright. * “A Recovery Algorithm for a Distributed Database System,” Proceedings of the Second ACM Symposium on the Principles of Database Systems, Atlanta, Georgia, March 1983, 8-15. With N. Goodman, et al. * “Quorum-Based Commit Protocols,” Proceedings of the 6th Berkeley Workshop on Distributed Data Management and Networking, Pacific Grove, California, February 1982. (Reprinted in Distributed Database Management, J. Larson and S.K. Rahimi (eds.), IEEE Computer Society Press.) * “A Decentralized Termination Protocol,” Proceedings of the Symposium on Reliability in Distributed Software and Database System, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 1981, 27–32.

References

External links

VITRIA Executive Team Member Page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Skeen, Dale American chief executives North Carolina State University alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni Cornell University faculty Living people Year of birth missing (living people)