Research Statement

My research is in the broad area of distributed systems. In distributed systems, nodes execute concurrently with limited information about what the other nodes are doing. A fundamental prob-lem in distributed systems is to coordinate the behavior of these independent nodes effectively. For safety reasons concurrency needs to be tamed to prevent unintentional nondeterministic executions, on the other hand, for performance reasons, concurrency needs to be boosted to achieve timeliness. My research focus is on designing efficient and resilient algorithms and services for coordination in distributed systems. Distributed coordination faces many challenges. A major challenge is the scalability of coordination. While communication and synchronization is needed for coordination, they should be minimized to achieve scalability. Another major challenge is the unreliability of nodes and communication links between nodes. Several impossibility results haunt the distributed coordination problem. More-over, large-scale distributed systems introduce complex unanticipated failure modes and cascading failures that complicate distributed coordination. Motivated by these challenges, my research is focused on designing efficient and resilient algorithms and services for coordination in distributed systems. I have been investigating distributed coor-dination in the context of different application domains, including wireless sensor/actor networks, crowdsourced smartphone-based sensing and collaboration, and most recently in the context of large scale coordination in cloud computing. I have been successful in attracting steady funding for my research projects. I am the Principal Investigator on all of the research projects listed be