Robert Shostak

In collaboration with CSL's Richard L. Schwartz and P. Michael Melliar-Smith, Shostak implemented a semi-automatic theorem prover incorporating some of these decision procedures. The prover was used to verify correctness properties of an abstract specification of the SIFT (for Software Implemented Fault Tolerance) operating system and was later incorporated into SRIís Prototype Verification System. The work was published in the paper, SIFT: Design and analysis of a fault-tolerant computer for aircraft control This paper was awarded the 2014 Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing established by the IFIP Subgroup 10.4 on Dependable Computing.

Shostak is also founder of Vocera Communications, which he started in March, 2000. The product, which facilitates hands-free communication among members of teams in hospitals and other enterprises, features wearable, speech-enabled badges much like Star Trek Communication Badges. The company went public in 2012 (NYSE:VCRA) and has a market capitalization of close to $1B as of this writing. Shostak served as CTO and chief architect until he retired in 2013, and was a board member until the company IPO.

In 1984, Shostak and his colleague Richard Schwartz founded a Silicon Valley start-up company called Ansa Software. The company was financed by Ben Rosen of Sevin Rosen. Its product, a PC database called Paradox, was launched in 1985, and was among the first database products to run on IBM personal computers. Its user interface was based on Query by Example, a graphical method of formulating queries that had been conceived by Moshe Zloof at the IBM Watson Research Center. In September, 1987, Ansa Software was purchased by Borland International, which subsequently launched multiple Windows versions. A community of users still exists after more than thirty years. As of this writing, a third-party DOS version is still available for 64-bit Windows.

The same authors helped to popularize the interactive consistency problem in their 1982 paper, The Byzantine Generals Problem, which presents it in the form of a colorful allegory proposed by Lamport. In the allegory, the computers are replaced by Byzantine generals who needed to coordinate the timing of an attack on an enemy by exchanging messages borne by couriers. (The original formulation incorporated Albanian rather than Byzantine generals, but Jack Goldberg, the head of CSL, suggested that this might be interpreted as what might now be called cultural appropriation, hence the name was changed to Byzantine on the theory that this might be less likely to cause offense.)

The collective results were published in 1979 in the seminal paper, Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults, which was awarded the 2005 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing, as well as the 2013 Jean-Claude Laprie Award

Robert Shostak was born in a Jewish family in Arlington, Virginia, the son of Arthur and Bertha Shostak (née Gortenburg); his father was an electrical engineer. He studied mathematics and computer science at Harvard College, graduating in 1970 with high honors. As part of his senior dissertation work, he designed and built one of the earliest personal computers using discrete RTL logic (microprocessors were not yet available) and a magnetic core memory. He continued at Harvard to earn his A.M. degree and Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1974. While at Harvard he was awarded the Detur Book Priz', and fellowships from IBM and the National Science Foundation.

Robert Eliot Shostak (born July 26, 1948, in Arlington, Virginia) is an American computer scientist and Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He is most noted academically for his seminal work in the branch of distributed computing known as Byzantine Fault Tolerance. He is also known for co-authoring the Paradox Database, and most recently, the founding of Vocera Communications, a company that makes wearable, Star Trek-like communication badges.