About

This site exists to preserve artifacts from my academic career. I am currently employed as a software engineer developing cloud computing services.

Education

I received my PhD from Harvard University in 2015 under the advisement of the wonderful Eddie Kohler.

I received my BS in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and worked as an Associate Staff researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory prior to graduate school.

Research

Distributed Data Storage

Pequod is a distributed web application cache. Like other caches (e.g. memcached, Redis), Pequod exposes a key/value interface to the application developer. However, Pequod also provides range scan semantics and introduces a useful primitive for server-side computation; the cache join. Cache joins allow an application developer to designate an output data range that is derived from a set of input ranges using a simple computation (e.g. filter, join, aggregate). When data from an output range is first requested, it is generated de novo. Once generated, it is automatically maintained through incremental computation so that subsequent reads are fast. Cache joins are a good match for applications based around update streams, such as Twitter and Facebook.

• The source is available on Github.

RoboBees

I have conducted research for the RoboBees project, an effort to produce insect-scale autonomous micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs). Insect-scale MAVs can be used in applications that require covert operation, maneuvers in confined spaces, or micro-manipulation, such as crop pollination, urban surveillance, and disaster recovery. My work on the Colony team was focused on coordinating the efforts of MAV swarms to accomplish application objectives in spite of the resource limitations and high failure rates of individual MAVs. To this end, we have constructed Karma, a resource management system for MAV swarms. The programming abstraction in Karma allows for the composition of swarm applications from low-level MAV behaviors.

• Check out a short video demonstrating Karma coordinating a swarm of virtual MAVs and toy helicopters. [youtube]
• Our simulator, Simbeeotic, is available as open source on Github.

Publications