Benjamin Fried

I am a member of the School of Engineering's Board of Visitors.

I graduated from Columbia College and worked for Columbia University for many years. While I was at Columbia, I did some early work on the original web software by NCSA and CERN.

While on a leave of absence from Columbia, I helped design and develop the Decision-Theoretic Scheduler for Heuristicrats Research, under contract to NASA. It was used by NASA scientists to schedule missions for their orbital observatories.

In 1994 I joined Morgan Stanley's technology department, where I spent over 13 great years; in my last role there, as a managing director, I ran a group called Application Infrastructure, which was responsible for all technology for software development, electronic commerce and knowledge worker productivity: compilers, development environments, scm, build tools, vendor and in-house toolkits and frameworks for java, c++, and .net; in-house developed middleware, including real-time market data, soap messaging, high-speed pub-sub, and grid computing; testing; application hosting; configuration management, release management; application monitoring; all web and portal technologies and hosting, including the internet-facing infrastructure; document management, search, business intelligence, reporting systems, email, instant messaging, video conferencing, computer-telephony integration, web conferencing; and desktop productivity applications

In 2008 I left Morgan Stanley to join Google as its CIO.

I'm a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, and serve on the editorial advisory board of the ACM's Queue magazine, which also comprises the Practice section of Communications of the ACM.

Other trivia about me: I was a UI and a head UI, and the staff liaison for the UIs after that, and a unix systems programmer, too, if those things mean anything to you. I used to spend a lot of time playing Ultimate Frisbee. But I have bad knees now, and only play occasionally. I'm also a partner in Fra'Mani Handcrafted Salumi, makers of the world's finest cured meats.