Ramón Cáceres     Email: ramon@kiskeya.net

Biography

I am a computer science researcher and software engineer. My areas of focus have included systems and networks, mobile and edge computing, mobility modeling, security, and privacy. Most recently I worked at Google, where I built large-scale privacy infrastructure. I was previously a researcher at Bell Labs, AT&T Labs, and IBM Research. I have also held leadership positions in several startup companies.

I have been named an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. I served on the board of the CRA Committee on Widening Participation in Computing Research. I hold PhD and MS degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and a BEng from McGill University. I was born and raised in the Dominican Republic.

My CV contains a more complete career history.

Recent projects

At Google I was on the team that developed and operated Zanzibar, a global authorization system that guarantees external consistency. During my seven years on the project I improved the system's scalability, reliability, and security. I also served on the production system's on-call rotation.

Zanzibar stores and evaluates permissions to access data objects managed by Google products used by more than 1 billion people every day, including Calendar, Drive, Maps, Photos, and YouTube. It stores trillions of permissions and serves millions of authorization requests per second. It has maintained 95th-percentile latency of less than 10 milliseconds and availability of greater than 99.999% over years of production use.

I also led the publication of a Zanzibar experience paper that has inspired numerous authorization systems outside of Google. They include the Ory Keto, OpenFGA, and SpiceDB open-source projects; the Authzed and Oso commercial services; and the AuthZ and Himeji systems inside Carta and Airbnb, respectively.

My CV outlines other previous work.

Awards and honors

• ACM Fellow, 2023.
• ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award, 2022.
• IEEE Fellow, 2013.
• Carol Morgan School Distinguished Alumnus Award, 2013.
• CRA-W/CDC Distinguished Lecturer, 2009.
• ACM Recognition of Service Award, 2000, 2007, 2008.
• ACM Distinguished Scientist, 2006.
• ACM MobiSys Best Paper Award, 2005.
• IBM Pat Goldberg Memorial Best Paper Award, 2005.
• McGill University Faculty Scholar, 1982.

Publications

• All papers by topic
• Citations to all papers

• Selected papers
  • "Zanzibar: Google's Consistent, Global Authorization System", R. Pang, R. Cáceres, M. Burrows, Z. Chen, P. Dave, N. Germer, A. Golynski, K. Graney, N. Kang, L. Kissner, J. L. Korn, A. Parmar, C. D. Richards, and M. Wang, 2019 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC), July 2019.
  • "DP-WHERE: Differentially Private Modeling of Human Mobility", D. J. Mir, S. Isaacman, R. Cáceres, M. Martonosi, and R. N. Wright, IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData), October 2013.
  • "Human Mobility Characterization from Cellular Network Data", R. Becker, R. Cáceres, K. Hanson, S. Isaacman, J. M. Loh, M. Martonosi, J. Rowland, S. Urbanek, A. Varshavsky, and C. Volinsky, Communications of the ACM (CACM), Vol. 56, No. 1, January 2013.
  • "The Case for VM-based Cloudlets in Mobile Computing", M. Satyanarayanan, P. Bahl, R. Cáceres, and N. Davies, IEEE Pervasive Computing, special issue on Virtual Machines, Vol. 8, No. 4, October-December 2009. (2022 ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award. 4,500 citations.)
  • "vTPM: Virtualizing the Trusted Platform Module", S. Berger, R. Cáceres, K. Goldman, R. Perez, R. Sailer and L. van Doorn, 15th USENIX Security Symposium, July 2006.
  • "Reincarnating PCs with Portable SoulPads", R. Cáceres, C. Carter, C. Narayanaswami and M. Raghunath, 3rd ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), June 2005. (2005 ACM MobiSys Best Paper Award.)
  • "Eat, Shop, and Play: Mobile Computing Technology at Vindigo", R. Cáceres, J. Donham, B. Fitterman, D. Joerg, M. Smith and T. Vetter, IEEE Wireless Communications, Vol. 9, No. 1, February 2002.
  • "Multicast-Based Inference of Network-Internal Loss Characteristics", R. Cáceres, N. G. Duffield, J. Horowitz and D. Towsley, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 45, No. 7, November 1999.
  • "Improving the Performance of Reliable Transport Protocols in Mobile Computing Environments", R. Cáceres and L. Iftode, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. 13, No. 5, June 1995.
  • "Characteristics of Wide-Area TCP/IP Conversations", R. Cáceres, P. Danzig, S. Jamin and D. Mitzel, ACM Conference on Computer Communications (SIGCOMM), September 1991.

Selected media coverage

• Personal
  • "Ramón Cáceres, un dominicano que deja su marca en el mundo de la tecnología" ("Ramón Cáceres, a Dominican who leaves his mark on the world of technology"), Diario Libre, April 8, 2024.
  • "Ramon Caceres receives prestigious computing award – 2023 ACM Fellow", DR1.com, April 9, 2024.
• Zanzibar
  • "Zanzibar Implementation SpiceDB Is Open Source", The New Stack, October 5, 2021.
  • "Zanzibar: Google's Consistent, Global Authorization System", Y Combinator Hacker News, April 19, 2021.
  • "Ory Keto, open source authorization server based on Google Zanzibar", Y Combinator Hacker News, April 8, 2021.
  • "Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System", Y Combinator Hacker News, June 8, 2019.
• Human mobility
  • "How to Mine Cell-Phone Data Without Invading Your Privacy", MIT Technology Review, May 13, 2013.
  • "The Really Smart Phone", Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2011.
  • "Telcos Waking Up To the Value of Your Location", Slashdot, May 28, 2010.
  • "Mobile Data: A Gold Mine for Telcos", MIT Technology Review, May 27, 2010.
• SoulPad
  • "IBM Dreams Up an Out of Body Software Experience", Financial Times, November 23, 2005.
  • "Booting an x86 Virtual Machine from an iPod", Slashdot, August 17, 2005.
  • "Pocket-Sized Computer 'Soul' Developed", New Scientist, August 10, 2005.
• Vindigo
  • "The Top 100 Products of 2000", ZDNet, November 20, 2000.
  • "Best of What's New 2000: Suggestive Software", Popular Science, November 13, 2000.
  • "Personal-Navigation Tools Can Answer Some of Life's Key Questions", Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2000.
  • "Shopping in Palm of the Hand Is Making Its Holiday Debut", New York Times, November 11, 2000.
  • "Virtual City Guides Help Navigate The Real World", San Francisco Gate, October 29, 2000.
  • "Vindigo Makes the Palm an Essential Leisure Tool", Los Angeles Times, October 19, 2000.
  • "CNet Editors' Top 5 Palm Apps", CNet, August 25, 2000.
  • "Ten Things You Didn't Know Your Palm Pilot Could Do: Find a Nearby Bar", Rolling Stone, June 8, 2000.

Last updated 9 April 2024 by Ramón Cáceres