Bio Erik Riedel, Ph.D. is Director of Interfaces & Architecture at Seagate Research in Pittsburgh, PA. His group focusses on novel storage devices and systems with increased intelligence to optimize performance, improve security, improve reliability, automate management, and enable smarter organization of data. The group's work targets all Seagate product families from those in large-scale enterprise storage clusters to ad-hoc collections of consumer and mobile storage devices working together. Erik is a member of the SNIA Technical Council, helping to lead industry-wide education, technology promotion and standardization efforts. He also serves on the technical advisory board for The Technology Collaborative supporting technology startups in the state of Pennsylvania. Before joining Seagate, Erik was a researcher in the storage program at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, CA working on networked storage, distributed storage and security. He has authored and co-authored eleven granted patents and a number of pending patent applications, as well as numerous technical publications on a range of storage-related topics. Erik holds B.S., M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University. His thesis work was on Active Disks as an extension to Network-Attached Secure Disks (NASD). Erik was born in Wuerzburg, Germany and - even after 30 years in the United States - is still occasionally puzzled by strange American customs like peanut butter. References http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~riedel http://www.seagate.com http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/Active