Chris Elford is a principal engineer at Intel Corporation and concentrates primarily on analysis and optimization of emerging technology applications. Chris joined Intel Corporation in 1998 after receiving his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign (concentrating on automatic optimization of parallel file system policies). Chris started at Intel analyzing how database applications intersect the underlying platform before transitioning to a team that works to ensure that Java applications work well on Intel processor based platforms. Chris and his wife spend their free time spoiling their pet bird.