Urs Hölzle

Who is Urs Hölzle?

Urs Hölzle served as the company's first vice president

of engineering and led the development of Google's technical

infrastructure. His current responsibilities include the design and

operation of the servers, networks and datacenters that power Google.

He is also renowned for both his red socks and his free-range

Leonberger, Yoshka (Google's top dog). Urs joined Google from the

University of California, Santa Barbara where he was an associate

professor of computer science. He received a master's degree in

computer science from ETH Zurich in 1988 and was awarded a Fulbright

scholarship that same year. In 1994, he earned a Ph.D. from Stanford

University, where his research focused on programming languages and

their efficient implementation.

As one of the pioneers of dynamic compilation, also known as

"just-in-time compilation," Urs invented fundamental techniques used in

most of today's leading Java compilers. Before joining Google, Urs was

a co-founder of Animorphic Systems, which developed compilers for

Smalltalk and Java. After Sun Microsystems acquired Animorphic Systems

in 1997, he helped build Javasoft's high-performance Hotspot Java

compiler.

In 1996, Urs received a CAREER award from the National Science

Foundation for his work on high-performance implementations of

object-oriented languages. He was also a leading contributor to DARPA's

National Compiler Infrastructure project. Urs has served on program

committees for major conferences in the field of programming language

implementation, and is the author of numerous scientific papers and

U.S. patents.