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

Email: sssix AT cs ...

My Resume (Updated: 12/7/2010)

I am a 5th year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. I work with Robert Tarjan in the Theory group and Michael Freedman in the Scalable Network Systems (SNS) group. Prior to 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. My M. Eng thesis advisor was Charles Leiserson.

I am supported by the 2009-12 Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Fault Tolerant Computing.

My research interests lie at the boundary of systems and theory, with the goal of allowing ideas and techniques to flow freely in either direction. On the theory side, I am interested in the design and analysis of data structures and algorithms for combinatorial problems that are efficient in practice. On the systems side, I am interested in building scalable and reliable distributed systems. Ultimately, I am interested in the algorithms and designs needed to build provably scalable and reliable distributed systems.

Publications & Talks

(Talks given by me are indicated by )

Scalable, Reliable Distributed Systems:

• LocalFlow: Simple, Local Multi-commodity Flow Routing in Data Centers
  with Sunghwan Ihm, Kay Ousterhout, and Michael J. Freedman
  In submission, 2012
  
  • Brief announcement in Proc. 25th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), 2011
• On the Price of Equivocation in Byzantine Agreement
  with Alexander Jaffe and Thomas Moscibroda
  To appear in Proc. 31st ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), 2012
  
• 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
• 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:

• Rank-Pairing Heaps
  with Bernhard Haeupler and Robert E. Tarjan
  In SIAM Journal on Computing, Volume 40(6), 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, Volume 8(1), 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.
  
• Deletion Without Rebalancing in Multiway Search Trees
  with Robert E. Tarjan
  In Proc. 20th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC), 2009
  Invited to Special Issue for ISAAC 2009 of Theoretical Computer Science (declined)
  
• Rank-Balanced Trees
  with Bernhard Haeupler and Robert E. Tarjan
  In Proc. 11th International Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS), 2009
  

Other/Invited Talks

• LocalFlow: Simple, Local Multi-commodity Flow Routing in Data Centers
  
  • DIMACS Workshop on Systems and Networking Advances in Cloud Computing, December 2011
• The Price of Equivocation: Characterizing Byzantine Agreement via Hypergraph Coloring
  
  • 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

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
• Kay Ousterhout