Research and Teaching Statements

My research interests lie in the broad area of networked systems, which ties together operating systems, dis-tributed systems, and networking. The core of my research involves developing operating system, network, and language support for complex distributed systems. The central theme of my research is that in order to harness the power of distributed systems, we must have better tools for programming and managing those systems. My work seeks to bridge the gap between the complexity of large-scale distributed systems and the needs of application programmers. Networked systems are pervasive. Both wired and wireless networks link together millions of devices across scales ranging from a single room to across the globe. Tiny, low-power devices now make it possible to embed computation, communication, sensing, and actuation almost anywhere, imbuing the physical world with programmable capabilities. Massive data centers host tens of thousands of machines and are federated across the globe to support services ranging from Web search to global-scale scientific simulations. The vision of large-scale programmable systems raises tremendous challenges in terms of software complexity, resource efficiency, and robustness. My research attempts to tackle these problems through a combination of operating system, networking, and language techniques. Much of my current research deals with wireless sensor networks, an emerging technology consisting of small, low-power devices integrating limited computation, sensing, and wireless communications. Sensor networks have vast potential to impact science, medicine, and industry by making it possible to embed intel-ligent sensing at scales not previously possible. In turn this enables a new kind of science where sensing and computation are deeply engrained into the environment, yielding high-resolution data in real time. I have worked closely with domain scientists to develop sensor networks for a diverse range of applications, in