Garth Gibson

Garth Gibson is President and CEO of the Vector Institute for AI, a new research institute in Toronto, Canada, specializing in machine learning and deep learning. Created in 2017 with a five-year commitment of $135M (CDN), Vector comprises a growing community of 20 faculty, 20 staff, 100 students, and 35 sponsor companies.

Garth holds an academic appointment as professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and courtesy appointments in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at CMU and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He holds a PhD (1991) and MS from University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo. In 1988, with David Patterson and Randy Katz, Garth published “A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID),” which became the core of his dissertation and has been cited almost 4000 times according to Google Scholar.

Garth founded CMU’s Parallel Data Laboratory in 1992, whose consortium now includes 19 companies, and a community of more than 25 faculty, 10 staff, and 50 students, under the leadership of Professor Greg Ganger. He was a founding member of the steering committees for the USENIX File and Storage Technologies Conference (FAST) and the ACM SIGHPC Parallel Data Storage Workshop (PDSW), having recently resigned to focus on machine learning at Vector. Garth also founded and acted as Chief Technology Officer, then Chief Scientist, for a scalable storage and file system company, Panasas, whose technology was described in FAST ’08. In the last decade Garth co-created CMU’s Master’s of Computational Data Science, led a Systems major within that degree, and served as the School of Computer Science’s Associate Dean for Master’s Programs, a population of about 1000 students in 20 programs.

Garth Gibson is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, and a holder of research awards including SIGOPS Hall of Fame, Jean-Claude Laprie Dependable Computing award, SIGMOD Test of Time award, IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage award, J. Wesley Graham Medal in Computing and Innovation, and a Los Alamos National Laboratory Outstanding Innovation award.