Princeton University
Department of Computer Science
35 Olden Street
Princeton, NJ 08540

Email: sssix AT cs ...

My CV (Updated: 12/31/2012)

I recently graduated with my PhD from the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. I am thrilled to be joining Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley lab in fall 2013! I'll be sitting in the MSR NYC lab this year.

During my PhD, I worked with Robert Tarjan in the Theory group and Michael Freedman in the Scalable Network Systems group. This past year, I was a junior research scientist jointly between Princeton and New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, where I worked with Jinyang Li. Prior to all this, I worked for three years in the Network Load Balancing group of Windows Server at Microsoft. I received my S.B. and M.Eng. in Computer Science from MIT, where my M. Eng thesis advisor was Charles Leiserson.

From 2009-2012 I was supported by the first Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Fault Tolerant Computing.

I like to design and build distributed systems that are provably fast, reliable, and scalable. My research synergizes systems and theory with the goal of finding a solution that is both practical and provably good. This typically involves the design of new data structures, algorithms, and protocols for problems that arise at different points in a system's life, from initial specification to final deployment. Many of these problems were only exposed because the systems in question were actually built.

Publications & Talks

Author list of theory papers is alphabetical. Talks given by me are indicated by .

Scalable, Reliable Distributed Systems:

• Scalable, Optimal Flow Routing in Datacenters via Local Link Balancing
  with David Shue, Sunghwan Ihm, and Michael J. Freedman
  To appear in Proc. 9th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), 2013
  
  • Brief announcement in Proc. 25th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), 2011
• Making Every Bit Count in Wide-Area Analytics
  with Ariel Rabkin, Matvey Arye, Vivek Pai, and Michael J. Freedman
  In Proc. 14th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS), 2013
  
  • Invited abstract in Proc. 6th Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware (LADIS), 2012
• On the Price of Equivocation in Byzantine Agreement
  with Alexander Jaffe and Thomas Moscibroda
  In Proc. 31st ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), 2012
  Best Student Paper Award
  Invited to Journal of the ACM (one of 2 invitations)
  • My Review of PODC 2012 appears in Idit Keidar's SIGACT News Distributed Computing Column
• Don't Lose Sleep Over Availability: The GreenUp Decentralized Wakeup Service
  with Jacob R. Lorch, Richard Hughes, Carlos G. J. Suarez, Brian Zill, Weverton Cordeiro, and Jitendra Padhye
  In Proc. 9th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), 2012
  
• Commensal Cuckoo: Secure Group Partitioning for Large-Scale Services
  with Michael J. Freedman
  In Best papers from LADIS 2011 issue of ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review (OSR), 2012
  
  • In Proc. 5th Workshop on Large Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware (LADIS), 2011
  • Work In Progress, 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), 2011
• Prophecy: Using History for High-Throughput Fault Tolerance
  with Wyatt Lloyd and Michael J. Freedman
  In Proc. 7th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), 2010
  • Work In Progress, 22nd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), 2009
• Virtual Ring Routing Trends
  with Dahlia Malkhi, Kunal Talwar, Renato F. Werneck, and Udi Wieder
  In Proc. 23rd International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), 2009
  

Data Structures & Graph Algorithms:

• Deletion Without Rebalancing in Multiway Search Trees
  with Robert E. Tarjan
  To appear in ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), 2013
  • Conference version in Proc. 20th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC), 2009
    Invited to Special Issue for ISAAC 2009 of Theoretical Computer Science (declined)
• Rank-Pairing Heaps
  with Bernhard Haeupler and Robert E. Tarjan
  In SIAM Journal on Computing (SICOMP), 2011
  • Conference version in Proc. 17th European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), 2009
    Invited to Special Issue for ESA 2009 of Algorithmica (declined)
• Incremental Cycle Detection, Topological Ordering, and Strong Component Maintenance
  with Bernhard Haeupler, Telikepalli Kavitha, Rogers Mathew, and Robert E. Tarjan
  In ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG), 2012
  • Conference version in Proc. 35th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP), 2008
• Deletion Without Rebalancing in Balanced Binary Trees
  with Robert E. Tarjan
  In Proc. 20th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), 2010.
  
• Rank-Balanced Trees
  with Bernhard Haeupler and Robert E. Tarjan
  In submission.
  • Conference version in Proc. 11th International Symposium on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS), 2009

Other/Invited Talks

• LocalFlow: Scalable, Optimal Flow Routing in Data Centers
  
  • DIMACS Workshop on Systems and Networking Advances in Cloud Computing, December 2011
• On the Price of Equivocation in Byzantine Agreement
  
  • Bertinoro Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures, June 2011
• New Balanced Search Trees
  
  • Microsoft Research Redmond Colloquium, August 2010
  • China Theory Week, September 2010
  • University of Vienna, May 2010
  • NYU Polytechnic, April 2010
  • Dagstuhl Seminar on Data Structures, March 2010
  • Princeton Theory Lunch, February 2010

Patents

• Client affinity in distributed load balancing systems
  with Vladimir Petter and Andrea D'Amato.
  United States Patent #8176495. Issued May 8, 2012.
  
• Maintaining client affinity in network load balancing systems
  with Vladimir Petter, Andrea D'Amato, and Jimmy C. Yu.
  United States Patent #8046467. Issued Oct. 25, 2011.
  
• Software testing techniques for stack-based environments
  with Amit Date.
  United States Patent #7827531. Issued Nov. 2, 2010.
  
• Diagnosing problems in distributed systems
  with Joseph M. Joy, Nikolai Tillman, Colin L. Campbell, and Margus Veanes.
  United States Patent #7548911. Issued June 16, 2009.
  

Professional Activities

• Program committees: SIROCCO '13
• Reviews: NSDI '13, SODA '13, NSDI '12, CATS '12, SODA '12, SODA '11, ICALP '10, LATIN '10, STACS '10, Inf. Proc. Letters (IPL)

Teaching

• Theory of Algorithms (COS 423), Spring 2009
• General Computer Science (COS 126), Fall 2008

Students

I've had the privilege of working with these talented undergraduates:

• Jarett Schwartz (now at UC Berkeley)
• Kay Ousterhout (now at UC Berkeley)
• Hong Kyun Kim (now at U. Chicago)