Amr El Abbadi is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B. Eng. in Computer Science from Alexandria University, Egypt, and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University. Prof. El Abbadi is an ACM Fellow, AAAS Fellow, IEEE Fellow and was Chair of the Computer Science Department at UCSB from 2007 to 2011. He has served as a journal editor for several database journals, including, currently, The VLDB Journal, IEEE Transactions on Computers and The Computer Journal. He has been Program Chair for multiple database and distributed systems conferences, most recently SIGSPATIAL GIS 2010, ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC) 2011, COMAD (India) 2012 and the first ACM Conference on Social Networks (COSN). He currently serves of the executive committee of the IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering (TCDE) and wass a board member of the VLDB Endowment from 2002—2008. In 2007, Prof. El Abbadi received the UCSB Senate Outstanding Mentorship Award for his excellence in mentoring graduate students. In 2013, his student, Sudipto Das received the SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award. He has published over 300 articles in databases and distributed systems and has supervised over 30 PhD students.