Ion Stoica is the Executive Chairman and co–founder of Databricks. Ion also serves as a professor in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley, and as a co-director of the AMPLab. At AMPLab Ion has been leading the software systems effort, which included the development of the Spark research project, as well as two other high profile open source projects: Apache Mesos and Tachyon. In 2006, he co-founded Conviva, a startup to commercialize technologies for large scale video distribution, where he is serving as a CTO. Ion is an ACM Fellow and has received numerous awards, including the SIGCOMM Test of Time Award (2011), and the ACM doctoral dissertation award (2001). Ion holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.S. in Computer Science and Control Engineering from Polytechnic University Bucharest.