My research interests include distributed information systems, in particular publish/subscribe systems, databases, and operating systems. My thesis research focuses on extending traditional publish/subscribe systems in several dimensions. The abstract of my thesis is as follows:
A publish/subscribe system filters and routes events from their sources to multiple recipients according to each individual user's interests. As a communication paradigm, publish/subscribe has unique and powerful features such as anonymity, asynchrony, multicast, and adaptability. As such, it has been a target of both scientific research and commercial implementation in the past. However, traditional publish/subscribe systems suffer from several limitations, which we identify and address in this thesis. After a brief taxonomy of current publish/subscribe technologies, we present three types of enhancements. First, we extend system architectures to include replication and partitioning. Replication increases system robustness, but introduces consistency issues which have to be dealt with. Workload partitioning allows the system to handle complicated monitoring tasks, and to scale to high volume of input data. We propose a method of partitioning that is universally applicable and facilitates load balancing. Second, we introduce a systematic way to allocate and maintain state information in publish/subscribe servers, in order to efficiently handle a large class of stateful subscriptions. Specifically, we extend the subscription language with parameters, which are refreshed automatically by the servers. Finally, we extend the publish/subscribe scheme to mobile operating environments. We look at the challenge of mobile users connecting and disconnecting frequently from the core system. We also modify existing publish/subscribe protocols to adapt to the ad-hoc mobile environment, whose unique characteristics demand a fresh look at even the fundamental premises of current systems.
Prior to joining the database group, I did research on operating systems with Professor Mendel Rosenblum. I worked on writing firmware and system software for the Stanford FLASH multiprocessor prototype. I also worked on the Cellular Disco virtual machine monitor.
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