Emil Koutanov received his B.E. degree summa cum laude from the University of Technology Sydney (Australia) in 2007. He is a consulting software architect and part-time researcher. His professional career has spanned several diverse industries including wagering, telecommunications, construction and finance, focusing on the design and implementation of reliable and scalable distributed systems. He has authored several articles on open-source middleware, application design and architecture, as well as a reference book on the subject of event streaming (Effective Kafka, ISBN 979-8628558515). His research interests include the analysis and design of distributed algorithms and models of computation, fault-tolerance and continuous availability, formal methods, concurrent and parallel computing, consistency models and consensus.
