Note for PhD Program Applicants: If you are interested in distributed systems, PL, or their intersection I encourage you to also consider Mae Milano, who will be joining the Princeton Computer Science Department in Spring 2024.
I co-lead the S* Network Systems (SNS) group with Mike Freedman and Amit Levy in the CS department at Princeton. I also co-advise two students with Ethan Katz-Bassett in an initiative to specialize distributed systems and networking for large applications deployed in datacenters.
I am interested in the theory, design, implementation, evaluation, and deployment of large-scale distributed systems. Keywords like big data, storage, consistency, geo-replication, consensus, concurrency control, and fault tolerance pique my interest.
One of my research directions looks at the tradeoffs between the guarantees and performance properties of distributed systems. Guarantees like consistency and transactional abilities make systems easier to reason about and program against. Performance properties like latency and throughput affect end user experience and the capital cost of systems. We're exploring what combinations of guarantees and performance are and aren't possible. RSS, PORT, and Gryff are our most recent work in this area, which also includes SNOW, Janus, Occult, Existential Consistency, Consistency Challenges, Rococo, Eiger, and COPS.
Another of my research directions looks at content delivery systems get photos, videos, and other content to the users of large-scale applications. LRB and TectonicFS are our most recent work in this area, which also includes the Streaming Video Engine, Chess, RIPQ and extensions from deploying it in practice at Facebook described in this blog post, f4 and a study of the Facebook photo caching stack.
All of this research is made possible by my fantastic students: