Mark Corner is an expert in the areas of mobile and pervasive computing, mobile advertising technology, real-time bidding (RTB), large-scale systems, networking, file systems, and security.  He is a tenured Associate Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has been there since 2003.   After tenure Mark put his research career on hold to be an early-stage founder and CTO at Fiksu Inc., a Boston-based mobile advertising technology company (wikipedia).  After that he returned to academia at UMass. Mark Corner is the co-founder and Chief Scientist of PetCareNow a VC-backed startup in Boston. He also consults with federal government agencies and aids technology companies and law firms on intellectual property matters.

As a professor he has authored dozens of publications on mobile systems, holds two patents, and has been awarded millions of dollars in federal and industrial research grants. He was selected for DARPA’s prestigious Computer Science Study Panel in 2009. He was the recipient of an NSF CAREER award in 2005, Best Paper awards at USENIX FAST 2007, ACM Multimedia 2005, and ACM Mobicom 2002. Prof. Corner has served on the editorial board of IEEE Pervasive and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Mark holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and BS and MS degrees from the University of Virginia.  At UMass he teaches courses on Operating Systems, Usability, and Data Structures.

While at Fiksu, the 50+ person team that Mark built enabled revenue growth from 0 to more than $100 million / year.  He oversaw the development of a massively scalable infrastructure on Ruby on Rails, Postgresql, and AWS that processes thousands of events per second from Real Time Bidding and in-app telemetry.  The SDK that the team built touched more than half of all mobile devices, the RTB platform bid in excess of 500k times per second using proprietary optimization techniques, and Fiksu’s large-scale analytics system summarized data from hundreds of billions of in-app events.

Ph.D. (2003) Electrical Engineering: Systems, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
M.S. (1998), B.S. (1998),  University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
HS (1993), Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Alexandria, VA