Michael J. Franklin is an authority on databases, data analytics, data management and distributed systems. Prior to joining the University of Chicago he served as the Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Computer Science and chair of the Computer Science Division of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He co-founded and directs Berkeley’s Algorithms, Machines and People Laboratory (AMPLab), a leading academic big data analytics research center. AMPLab has created industry-changing open-source big data software, including the Berkeley Data Analytics Stack. An energetic entrepreneur in addition to his academic work, Franklin founded and became chief technology officer of Truviso, a data analytics company later purchased by Cisco Systems. He currently serves on the technical advisory boards of various data-driven technology companies, including Databricks, an AMPLab spinout based on the popular Apache Spark analytics framework that was developed at the lab.