Biography of Gregory B. Prokopski

Gregory B. Prokopski, MBA, PhD, is a specialized technology developer and adviser since the year 1999. He is most interested in the fields of concurrency, programming languages, compilers, virtual machines, systems performance, server applica­tions, IP networking, and security. He has served as a project leader of an Open Source Java virtual machine project involving half a dozen of on-site contributors. He has created and published innovative solutions for the industry-standard GNU C Compiler (GCC). He is an experienced public speaker and the author of a number of research and industry publications in 5 languages. He is an avid learner, persistent problem-solver, and a challenge-seeker.

Leadership

Gregory worked as a project leader for SableVM Project where he was responsible for team members mentoring, quality assurance of contributions from 5 on-site developers, integration of external contributions, Project's technical infrastructure, and Project's public image. He was hired as the lead editor for Linux+ Extra! Magazine to prepare Debian Woody press release where he assembled and led a team of 12 people, most first-time authors, producing nearly 100 pages of articles. He has worked in the elite technical community of a 1000 worldwide official developers of Debian GNU/Linux distribution where he maintained and contributed to the development of nearly 20 software suites (e.g. Firebird / Interbase RDBMS, Free Java SDK packages), and where he also mentored 2 aspiring Debian developers.

Awards

He was singled out by a Canadian university professor, Etienne M. Gagnon, PhD, (whom Gregory met and cooperated with over the Internet) and offered an Excellence Scholarship covering life expenses and international student tuition fees for the duration of 3 years in the PhD program. Twice was he awarded international student tution fee waiver due to his academic record. He was also awarded a Graduate Fellowship while at McGill University, School of Computer Science. His talk on Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) at the Open Source Security Conference 2003 was voted the “most practically useful talk of the conference”.

Communication

Gregory has successfully interacted with various audiences via multiple media. He was hired by McGill University as a course lecturer in computer science for 4 semesters. He created Open Source community awareness of SableVM Project and attracted several new contributors with Internet Public Relations activity. For over 3 years he worked as a columnist for a nationwide monthly technical magazine Linux+. As a journalist he also collaborated with the international Hakin9 magazine and Linux Weekly News. His works were published in 5 languages (English, German, Spanish, Czech, and Polish). He is the author of several research conference papers, technical reports, and industry publications. He actively participates in both academic and industry conferences (e.g. Open Source Security Conference 2003, FOSDEM 2004, GCC Summit 2007).

Education

Gregory holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from McGill University. He also holds an Master's degree in Business Administration. His PhD research was in the domain of optimizing hardware-software interplay, concurrency, virtual machines and compilers (supervisor: Clark Verbrugge, PhD). In his Master's thesis he researched the critical factors of entrepreneurial success in North American companies. This dual view allows him to be more effective in finding best technical solutions and maximizing their positive impact on his client's company operations.