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Events for March 28, 2022

  • CS Colloquium: Aishwarya Ganesan (VMware Research) - Consistency and Performance in Distributed Storage Systems

    Mon, Mar 28, 2022 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Aishwarya Ganesan , VMware Research

    Talk Title: Consistency and Performance in Distributed Storage Systems

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: Talk abstract: Computer systems underpin every modern application that we interact with today. When designing systems, one must often tradeoff strong guarantees for performance or vice-versa. The same tradeoff exists in distributed storage systems as well; designers must often choose consistency or performance. In this talk, I will show how we can build distributed storage systems that provide strong consistency yet also perform well. My key insight to achieving this goal is to defer enforcing consistency until state is externally visible. Based on this insight, I design two novel distributed storage systems.

    First, I present Skyros, a new replication protocol that exploits storage-interface properties to defer expensive coordination. Skyros realizes that many update interfaces are nil-externalizing: they do not expose system state immediately. By taking advantage of nil-externality, Skyros offers significantly lower latencies than traditional replication protocols while still providing strong consistency.

    Second, I present consistency-aware durability (CAD), a new durability primitive that enables stronger consistency. CAD shifts the point of durability from writes to reads. By delaying writes, CAD enables high performance; however, by ensuring durability before serving reads, CAD enables the construction of stronger consistency models.

    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium

    Biography: Aishwarya Ganesan is a postdoctoral researcher at VMware Research. She completed her PhD from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in Computer Sciences, advised by Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. She is broadly interested in distributed systems and storage systems. Her work has been recognized with best-paper awards at FAST 20 and FAST 18 and a best paper award nomination at FAST 17. She was selected for the Rising Stars in EECS workshop and a recipient of Facebook 2019 PhD Fellowship. She also received the graduate student instructor award for teaching graduate-level distributed systems at UW Madison.

    Host: Ramesh Govindan

    Location: online only

    Audiences: By invitation only.

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • CS Colloquium: Souti Chattopadhyay (Oregon State University) - When cognition works against us! Transforming Software to reduce the cost of cognitive processes.

    Mon, Mar 28, 2022 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Souti Chattopadhyay, Oregon State University

    Talk Title: When cognition works against us! Transforming Software to reduce the cost of cognitive processes.

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: 86 billion neurons make up our brains! Naturally, these 100 trillion neural connections give rise to a complex process of making decisions, interpreting information, and taking intended actions. This is especially true when programming, whether to build software systems or analyze data. Cognitive processes like selective interpretation and biases affect these programming decisions and actions frequently and significantly. In a recent study, we found that biases are associated with 45.7% of actions that developers take (like editing a line or navigating to a part of code). Eventually, developers reversed or undid 70% of the actions associated with biases which made up 25% of their entire worktime [1]. Similarly, data scientists report spending a lot of time in a "tortuous, multi-step adventure" for getting the data set up for analysis based on familiarity and preferences [2]. Programmers pay the necessary price of being human when working with tools without support for the negative impacts of cognitive processes. In this talk, I will present findings on how some cognitive processes affect programming. To reduce the friction between software and cognition, we will discuss how to design tools to be vigilant and provide desired support using automated and empirical approaches.


    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium


    Biography: Souti Chattopadhyay (Rini) is a Ph.D. candidate at Oregon State University in the Department of EECS. She works at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Software Engineering, and Cognitive Science, focusing on assisting software engineers and data scientists.

    Her research is on human-centered tools and interfaces that align with the human cognitive processes when solving problems. Her work is focused on understanding how humans make decisions when interacting with interfaces, specifically programming interfaces. She studies developers, data scientists, and end-user programmers to identify the process behind their technical decisions and social interactions.

    During her internship at Microsoft Research, she worked on a project related to the next generation of developers, specifically how they express their identity on social media platforms like YouTube. Some of her works were awarded best papers and honorable mentions by ACM and IEEE, including understanding cognitive biases in programmers and exploring a plethora of challenges data scientists face. Her work on cognitive biases was also recognized as research highlights by CACM and that on data scientists was featured on Nature articles.


    Host: Chao Wang

    Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 105

    Audiences: By invitation only.

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

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  • GRIDS Alumni Industry Panel

    Mon, Mar 28, 2022 @ 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Student Activity


    Join us on Monday, March 28 at 7PM for the GRIDS Alumni Industry Panel! Hear from Haripriya Dharmsala (Software Engineer at Boeing), Seun Deleawe (Senior Data Engineer at MyDataProduct), and Iris Liu (System Devops Engineer at NVIDIA), and get an inside peek at the recruitment process, the first couple years on the job, and shifting jobs post-grad.

    Date: Monday, March 28
    Time: 7PM
    Location: SLH 100 (Stauffer Science Lecture Hall)

    Sign up here, so we can get an estimated headcount!
    https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScY2rasv-sGDReJt16FJWSBC_ejpyh3ajzhPKXWQc2LyXOaqw/viewform

    More Information: gridsevent.png

    Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 100

    Audiences: Graduate

    Contact: GRIDS

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