Dr. Farivar received his PhD in 2012 in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His PhD research focused on Cloud Computing, Big Data platforms, and iterative Big Data algorithms. His other research interests include customized algorithms for computational accelerators such as GPUs. In conjunction with his postdoctoral research, he co-founded a startup company, Accelerated Genomics, working on GPU-accelerated Big Data algorithms in the field of bioinformatics. He joined Yahoo as a senior software development engineer in 2014, where he is involved with the development of Yahoo’s Big Data platforms. He currently works on Apache Storm and Spark frameworks.