This article was originally written by me for The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. It appeared there on May 26, 2023. For some people, the term “black box” brings to mind the recording devices in airplanes that are valuable for postmortem analyses if the unthinkable happens. For others it evokes small, minimally […]
ChatGPT Helps or Hurts our Cyber Security?
From the coverage that ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, has been receiving since its launch in November 2022, you would be forgiven for thinking that is the only technology story around. And it deserves the spotlight. Few had expected the jaw-dropping rapid strides that this technology has made in the last few years, and it will […]
What Tech Stories to Expect in 2023
It is of course notoriously hard to make predictions in the field of technology and many wise men have been made to look silly through their failed tech predictions. Nevertheless, I sat down to look at my crystal ball to predict what stories are likely to dominate the news in 2023. The crystal ball is […]
The Caprice of Algorithms
When we design algorithms or implement them into computing systems, we rarely think about the policies that they instantiate. We rarely think beyond trite generalizations, of the countless users who may be at the receiving end of the vagaries of our algorithms. If our project becomes immensely successful, then we will count our users in […]
Is Computing Innovation Getting Harder?
The angst, or perhaps irritation, that we feel at times about the rate of innovation was captured pithily by Peter Thiel, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” I am going to confine my thoughts to the world I know best, innovations in the field of computing. Many of us, inside the ivory […]
The Cost and the Rate of Innovation
Most of my colleagues and PhD students have exclaimed at some point or the other — if only I had been a researcher in an earlier time, my innovations would have been so much more impactful. This sometime happens when we look at the seemingly small increments that we make in our chosen field (Computer […]
To Fuse Wisely in Serverless DAGs: A Sigmetrics Winner
This post gives a high-level view of our Sigmetrics 2022 paper, which was recently announced at the conference as the best paper winner. Ashraf Mahgoub, Edgardo Barsallo Yi (Purdue University), Karthick Shankar (CMU), Eshaan Minocha (Purdue University), Sameh Elnikety (Microsoft Research), Saurabh Bagchi, and Somali Chaterji (Purdue University). WISEFUSE: Workload Characterization and DAG Transformation for […]
LiteReconfig at Eurosys 2022: Cost and Content-Aware Video Object Detection for Mobile GPUs
Object detection is arguably one of central problems in computer vision. Much progress has been made over the past few years in deep learning based object detectors. Despite their impressive accuracy results on standard benchmarks, these models come at a price of their complexity and computational cost. This imposes a major barrier to deploy these […]
Back in the Saddle Again, or Most French Stereotypes are True
I traveled recently to Rennes, France for an in-person conference, Eurosys, and had occasion to spend a wondrous week basking in the French sun, getting soaked in the French rain, interacting with people who are their entire selves, and remembering the joys and the tribulations of physical travel. I hope I will never have to […]
To The Migrant In Us
Citation Many of the graduate students in our universities have come from lands far and near, outside the borders of the US. They adapt to the ways of life here, which are different in ways small and large, and become the engine that keeps our research enterprise galloping along. This article reflects on some challenges […]
Distant Whispers from an Academic Engineer's World 