Assistant Professor
Boston University
Vasiliki (Vasia) Kalavri is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Boston University, where she co-leads the Complex Analytics and Scalable Processing (CASP) Systems lab. Vasia and her team enjoy doing research on multiple aspects of data-centric systems. Recently, they have been focusing on designing self-managed systems for data stream processing, scaling graph Machine Learning on modern storage, and developing practical solutions for private collaborative analytics with Multi-party Computation. Before joining BU, Vasia was a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich, where she was awarded the ETH Zurich Postdoctoral Fellowship. She received her PhD from KTH, Stockholm, and UCL, Belgium, after completing a joint doctoral program as an EMJD-DC fellow.
Vasia has been involved with Apache Flink (and its predecessor, Stratosphere) since its very early days, back in 2012! She worked on various components of the system during my PhD (2012-2016), became a committer in 2014, and subsequently a PMC member. She has given many talks on Flink at meetups, conferences, universities, and also co-authored the "Stream Processing with Apache Flink" O'Reilly book. Over the past few years, her research has focused on making stream processing systems capable of self-management and reconfiguration. Since 2019, she has been teaching a graduate-level course on stream processing systems (first at ETH Zurich and then at Boston University) with enrollment ranging from 40-70 students. In the context of this course, she closely supervises student research projects on Apache Flink and Kafka and also organizes guest lecturers, inviting speakers from Confluent, Materialize, NetApp, Cloudera, and others.