George Candea

George Candea heads the Dependable Systems Lab, where he develops techniques and abstractions for building efficient and trustworthy computer systems. His current work focuses on making performance and energy programmable, i.e., providing first-class abstractions to capture a system’s performance and energy behavior (as interfaces do for functionality) and to use them dependably to design, code, and operate efficient systems.In the recent past, George also served as CEO and later Chief Scientist of Cyberhaven, a cybersecurity company he co-founded in 2016 with four of his PhD students. Earlier, he was CTO and then Chief Scientist of Aster Data Systems (now Teradata Vantage), a big-data company he co-founded in 2005 with two Stanford colleagues. Before that, he held positions at Oracle, Microsoft Research, and IBM Research. George is an ACM Fellow (2025) and recipient of the Mark Weiser Award (2024), the inaugural Eurosys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award (2014), the MIT TR35 Young Innovators award (2005), and several Best Paper awards. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science (2005) from Stanford University and a B.S. (1997) and M.Eng. (1998) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Teaching & PhD PhD Students Lucas Lopes Cendes, Can Cebeci, Jiacheng Ma, Fan Chung Past EPFL PhD Students Horatiu Jula, Cristian Zamfir, Vitaly Chipounov, Silviu Andrica, Stefan Bucur, Baris Can Cengiz Kasikci, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, Jonas Wagner, Rishabh Iyer, Solal Pirelli, Yan Lei Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector Radu Banabic, Arseniy Zaostrovnykh Courses Principles of computer systems CS-522 This advanced graduate course teaches the key design principles underlying successful computer and communication systems, and shows how to solve real problems with ideas, techniques, and algorithms from operating systems, networks, databases, programming languages, and computer architecture. The software enterprise - from ideas to products CS-311 This course teaches the journey taken by software engineering teams from incipient ideas to software products that solve real problems for real people.