About me
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech where
I am a member of the Rigorous System Research Group (RSRG, pronounced "resurge").
I also participate actively in two centers: the Center for the Mathematics of Information (CMI), which focuses on the intersection of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, and the Social and Information Sciences Laboratory (SISL, pronounced "sizzle"), which focuses on the intersection of Economics and Computer Science.
My research
My research focuses on using mathematical models to provide insight into the design of computer systems. I have two main halves to my work: one which focuses on scheduling and resource allocation in computer systems and one which focuses on network economics.
Broadly, my particular research focus can be described as: "Better design through modeling and measurement." More specifically, some examples of topics that I'm focusing on these days are:
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Algorithms for Sustainable IT
These days, everyone has heard the statistics about how much of an energy hog ICT has become: The emissions of a server are nearly that of a car! The electricity usage of data centers is growing 12 times faster than that of the US as a whole! While the last decade has led to significant improvements in energy-efficiency across IT, there is still a long ways to go to be truly sustainable. Our work in this area... -
Markets for the Smart Grid
Over the coming decade, the electricity network will undergo a complete architectural transformation, similar to what has happened to the communication network over the last decades. However, there are huge engineering and economic challenges in making this transformation possible. In fact, unlike in the case of communication networks, the economic market structure and engineering architecture are inherently intertwined in the electricity grid, which necessitates a new architectural theory for guiding this transformation. Our work in this area... -
Network economics
These days it is almost impossible to study networking without considering economic incentives. From net neutrality, to the design of P2P systems, to hot potato routing, understanding the economic incentives in networks has become crucial. However, our understanding the interaction of economics and computer systems is still in its infancy. Our work in this area... -
Social networks
Our understanding of the structure of social networks (and other complex networks) has grown dramatically over the last decade and from this understanding has emerged nearly `universal' properties such as small world properties, heavy-tailed degree distributions, etc. Our research looks at how these properties can be exploited to solve problems that, without such structure, would be intractable. Our work in this area... -
Heavy tails
``Bad'' events in heavy-tailed workloads are most often the result of ``catastrophes'', e.g., one enormous job. In contrast, ``bad'' events in light-tailed workloads are most often the result of ``conspiracies'', e.g., the combination of many small jobs. These "catastrophe" and "conspiracy" principles guide the design of schedulers and controllers in each setting. However, ideally one would like to be able to design schedulers/controllers to be robust, i.e., optimal in both heavy and light tailed settings. So, the question becomes: "Is it possible for schedulers/controllers to avoid both catastrophes and conspiracies? Our work in this area... -
Fairness and scheduling
Modern designs often improve user response times by giving priority to small job sizes. But, this leads to worries about whether large job sizes receive fair performance. So, we need to ask: How much starvation/unfairness is caused to large jobs by prioritizing small jobs? Our work in this area...
For more information about these and other current projects see my publications.