Leonid Barenboim is a computer scientist and a senior faculty member of the Open University of Israel.

Leonid’s research interests lie in the fields of distributed algorithms, communication networks and big data analysis. In recent years, development in these fields has brought about a revolution in computer science. Computer programs no longer have to reside on a single machine. Instead, they are distributed within a complicated system that consists of an enormous, rapidly growing number of processors. Typical examples of this phenomenon are the various applications in social networks that are used by millions of users, applications that analyze environmental changes using sensor networks, systems that perform computations on extremely large data sets requiring large-scale networks both for storing the data and for processing it efficiently, and so on. Moreover, even very basic tasks are now implemented with cloud computing, enabling users to access their data from any place, using any device. These advances in computer technologies also require new approaches for the design and analysis of algorithms. Leonid is investigating and developing such approaches in various settings, such as distributed computing, dynamic computing and stream computing.

Leonid completed his PhD in 2013. His dissertation, “Efficient Network Utilization in Locality-Sensitive Distributed Algorithms,” written under the supervision of Prof. Michael Elkin, was awarded the Rector’s Prize for outstanding achievements in research. In this study, Leonid researched distributed algorithms for large-scale networks and dealt with problems that arise in communication networks, such as symmetry breaking, scheduling and resource allocation. He concentrated on improving the performance of distributed algorithms using new techniques for utilizing the parallelism potential of networks. Specifically, these techniques make it possible to partition the network into smaller subnetworks with helpful properties. Computations can be performed in parallel in these subnetworks without interference. After completing his PhD Laonid was a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science.