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 […]
Category: Technically Speaking
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 […]
Big Data and Security: Oxymoron?
Citation Big data technologies have dramatically changed the world we live in, and in double quick time. And you know that unless you have been living under a Martian rock. We take it for granted in many of our daily interactions — in our personal lives as well as at work. Big data technologies fuel […]
SONIC: The Serverless Data Corraller
This is a high-level view of our work on serverless computing that has just been accepted to Usenix ATC 2021, plus some historical context for why we are where we are. And a look ahead at the rich problems that we still have to tame. Ashraf Mahgoub (Purdue University), Karthick Shankar (Carnegie Mellon University), Subrata […]
Available & Reconfigurable: Oxymoron for Distributed Systems?
Distributed systems are all around us, providing the backbone of the computing infrastructure that we rely upon — think of the mesh of computing nodes connected by wireless and wireline networks of various kinds that help us get our financial transactions done in the blink of an eyelid, or those that get our web orders […]
Does Computer Systems have a Reproducibility Problem?
And Should you Care? This is about the reproducibility of results in Computer Systems. The papers that we shed blood, sweat, and tears for getting into our hyper-competitive conferences (definitely the latter two, the first is not widely documented). Are they helping us progress as fast and as efficiently as they could? Are our software […]
Technology in the Time of Cataclysms
What is the period we are going through now if not a global cataclysm? There is no way around it — this has caused untold hardship around the world and has changed the way we work and play. The destructive power of biology at its worst, a virus that is a true reflection of the […]
Big Tech, Big Brother, and the Virus: A Toast
This is the second of a two part series. One form of information that can help us with the CV quarantine is data about crowding at the grocery stores. There are many companies that provide video surveillance at retail stores and if only they would aggregate and anonymize such information and share publicly. We can […]
Big Tech, Big Brother, and the Virus: The Cautionary Tale
This is part one of a two-part series. Big tech can provide surveillance, we know that by now. It can provide the surveillance at as fine a level as you want — at our individual level and at minute-level precision. The cell phone and the credit card, the two indispensable parts of our daily lives, […]
Distant Whispers from an Academic Engineer's World 