Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Nitin Agrawal (NEC Labs Princeton ) - Rethinking Data Abstractions for Mobile Apps

Speaker: Nitin Agrawal, NEC Labs Princeton

Talk Title: Rethinking Data Abstractions for Mobile Apps

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: Mobile apps have radically changed the ways in which users store, interact, and share data. A crucial component, for building high-quality mobile apps, nowadays is the infrastructure for managing data — both locally on mobile devices and remotely through cloud-based services. In building such “data-centric” mobile apps, developers benefit from several abstractions available for local and remote I/O. In this talk, I will present evidence as to why existing data abstractions, for local storage, are counter-productive for performance, and for cloud sync, are insufficient for consistency, efficiency, and programmability. As part of our work we are rethinking the data abstractions that will empower app developers to write and deploy such apps with ease. I will present a novel data-management platform, Simba, which provides a powerful yet easy-to-use API for mobile data storage and sync. Using Simba, apps take significantly less effort to write, compared to commercially-available sync services like Dropbox, while being more efficient.

Biography: Nitin Agrawal works as a Researcher in the Storage Systems group at NEC Labs Princeton after graduating with a PhD from Wisconsin in 2009. His interests lie in distributed and mobile systems, operating systems, applied machine learning, and storage systems, and his recent research focuses on cloud infrastructure for data-centric mobile services. He has received Best Paper Awards at FAST 2009, FAST 2011, FAST 2012, and a top paper selection at FAST 2007. More details can be found at http://www.nec-labs.com/~nitin/

Host: Ramesh Govindan

Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 322

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair