Spread Concepts LLC was founded in April 2000, to enable the development of high performance, highly available distributed systems. Our team combines in-depth commercial development and management experience with years of cutting-edge academic research.

The principal partners in Spread Concepts are:

Yair Amir is a Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, and one of the initiators and principal investigators in the Center for Networking and Distributed Systems (CNDS) at Hopkins.

Yair is the author of numerous publications in the field of distributed systems and is the original creator of the Spread toolkit. He was one of the initiators and main developers of the Transis system, an advanced toolkit for building fault tolerant distributed applications, and one of the developers of the Totem protocol, a fast group multicast transport layer.

Yair has always emphasized the practical aspects of his research and protocols, and has worked extensively with industry. He served on various program committees for technical conferences in the areas of distributed computing and fault tolerance.

Yair Amir holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an M.Sc. and B.Sc. from the Technion in Israel.

Jonathan Stanton is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at George Washington University and the current chief architect of the Spread toolkit. He also holds an appointment as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University and is a member of the Center for Networking and Distributed Systems. His research interests include distributed systems, network protocols and distributed security.

Jonathan has designed and implemented optimized network protocols to support high-performance distributed applications and a scalable architecture for reliable multicast over wide-area networks. Jonathan has published papers in several academic research conferences and journals and has served as a referee for conferences and journals.

Jonathan holds a Ph.D. and an M.S.Eng in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. in Mathematics from Cornell University.

Michal Miskin-Amir has over 10 years of experience in software design and development and in management of complex software projects.

Prior to Spread Concepts, Michal was Director of Software Development for Kinkos.com, an online business solutions provider, where she managed the full development lifecycle of highly innovative and scalable internet technologies.

Prior to Kinkos.com, Michal worked at Radview Software, where she played a key role in defining future product development based on market requirements and industry trends and was responsible for consulting activities, supporting clients in performance evaluation and analysis of their internet architectures and for technical alliances with industry partners. Michal also worked as a product manager at Platinum Technology, and as a software development project leader for client-server and Internet applications.

Michal holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science and a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

John Schultz has extensive programming and systems design experience in the field of distributed systems. John is a Major Contributor author of the Spread toolkit. He is the author of the Flush Layer which provides view synchrony group communication semantics over a extended virtual synchrony semantics system.

Prior to Spread Concepts, John was the CTO and co-founder for D-Fusion Inc., a privately held web monitoring and intelligence firm. John co-designed D-Fusion's extreme performance web crawling platform and its current business class intelligence tools.

John has authored publications in the field of distributed systems; both on the theoretical aspects and system implementation.

John is an alumni researcher of the Center for Networking and Distributed Systems at Johns Hopkins. He holds an M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science, as well as a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Jacob Green focuses on applying distributed system theory and tools to real world applications. His experience encompasses both the technical design as well as the business issues involved with scaling and distributing applications.

Jacob has extensive experience in high capacity web crawling and information processing systems. As the COO and co-founder for D-Fusion Inc., a privately held web monitoring and intelligence firm, Jacob guided D-Fusion's business development and sales efforts. Jacob co-designed and implemented D-Fusion's AlertWire intelligence tool as well as its extreme performance web crawling platform.

Jacob is an alumni researcher of the Center for Networking and Distributed Systems at Johns Hopkins where he focused on early peer-to-peer and grid system design and application development. He holds both an M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science along with a B.A. in Physics from Johns Hopkins University.