Bio

Ankush Desai is a Senior Applied Scientist in the Database Services (DBS) group at AWS. The goal of Ankush’s work at AWS is to integrate formal methods techniques in all the phases of development process from system design, to implementation, to unit and integration testing, and even in production. These techniques range from lightweight approaches like model checking, to systematic testing, to property-based fuzzing, to more rigorous deductive verification that provides mathematical proofs. He is currently exploring how these tools and techniques can help developers deliver complex distributed database services (DBS) with high assurance of correctness! Before joining the DBS group, Ankush was part of the S3 team and worked on the Amazon S3's Strong Consistency project. Ankush is one of the creators and the lead developer for the P programming framework (https://p-org.github.io/P/) Ankush graduated with a PhD in computer science from UC, Berkeley (2019). His PhD. research had an impact both in Industry and Academia for which he was awarded the Sevin Rosen Funds Award for Innovation. Before joining graduate school, Ankush spent 2+ years working at Microsoft Research, India working on formal verification of device drivers and distributed systems. Webpage: https://ankushdesai.github.io/ At IIT Kanpur, he was part of the team that built the first Indian Nano-Satellite JUGNU (launched on 12 October 2011).