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 […]
Reflections on a Foray into MOOC
I had dipped my toe into MOOC (Massive Open Online Courseware) teaching years back but had not plunged in till this past semester. Circumstances forced me (as many of us) to plunge into remote teaching with full gusto. I launched my graduate level class called “Big Data for Reliability and Security” into the ether via […]
Short Take: Continuous Computer Vision on Mobiles
The area of continuous computer vision algorithms that can run on mobile or embedded or edge or take your pick of resource-constrained platform, has seen a great outpouring of work. This post is a look at how this field has been marching along, seen from the eyes of a computer systems person, as opposed to […]
Computer Systems Research: The Joys, the Perils, and How to Count Beans Well
This post was first written for the ACM SIGARCH blog and appeared there on Nov 30, 2020. Thanks to Rajeev (Balasubramonian, University of Utah) for instigating this post and then guiding with helpful prods and suggestions. Citation This post is broadly meant for computer systems researchers, and that is a big tent, including members of […]
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 […]
Short Take: Review Paper or Next New Idea?
Should you concentrate on writing a review article on an area of study that you know well or move on to the next new idea of yours, perhaps even a small new idea? The allure of going on to the next new shiny toy … errrr idea, is strong. To me there is a valued […]
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 