SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Karin Strauss is a Senior Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Corporation and an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington. She co-leads the Molecular Information System Laboratory, working on using molecules, currently DNA, to benefit the IT industry. Her background is in computer architecture, systems, and molecular biology. Her research interests include emerging storage technologies, scaling of computation and storage, and environmental sustainability. Selected as one of the "100 Most Creative People in Business in 2016" by Fast Company Magazine and for the 2020 ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award, she got her PhD from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2007.
Today, information is being digitized on a massive scale, by servers in datacenters, by mobile devices, and by networks of sensors everywhere around us. Artificial intelligence techniques and ubiquitous processing power are making it possible to mine this massive ocean of data; however, integral to harnessing this data as knowledge is the ability to store it for long periods of time.
Abstract: DNA data storage is an attractive option for digital data storage because of its extreme density, durability and eternal relevance. This is especially attractive when contrasted with the exponential growth in world-wide digital data production. In this talk we will present our efforts in building an end-to-end system, from the computational component of encoding and decoding to the molecular biology component of random access, sequencing and fluidics automation.
