Ken received a BSEE degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Davis in 1979. From 1985 till 1998, he served at the University of California, Berkeley as technical staff leader on the SPUR, RAID, NOW, and Infopad projects. In 1998 Ken left the university to become Director of Technical Operations, and later Director of Information Technology, at Inktomi where he was in charge of the architecture, design and operation of the worldwide search engine infrastructure.
Ken is also currently the Executive Director for the Ubiquitous Swarm Lab at UC Berkeley. Prior to this he was Executive Director of the Multiscale Systems Research Center, a nationwide, multi-university research effort sponsored by the Focus Center Research Program (FCRP). Before the start of the MuSyC Center in 2009, he was the Executive Director of the Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC), also under the FCRP umbrella.
His current interests include the design and implementation of energy responsive computing systems and the realization of the systems that enable the UnPad vision.