Distinguished Lecture at 11:00 am on April 12 in EBII, 3211

Abstract: Consumers want their PCs to be safe, hassle-free, accessible everywhere, and fun. This talk presents a new system architecture where users can pick from a variety of managed virtual computers and run them on their laptops and desktops, or carry them on a portable drive or a cell phone. The talk will describe how her Collective research group started with ideas in thin-client computing, developed the notion of a livePC, formerly known as a virtual appliance, and spun out of the university to productize the research results in 2005. The software is freely available at www.moka5.com.

Abstract: On-line data analysis has become increasingly important as many emerging applications call for sophisticated real-time processing over data streams, such as stock trading surveillance, sensor data analysis, network traffic monitoring, and video surveillance. One major challenge for large-scale on-line data analysis is to provide a scalable and resilient system infrastructure that can support computation-intensive continuous queries over high-volume and time-varying data streams. In this talk, I will present several new system management techniques to address the challenge. First, I will present an adaptive load diffusion system for multi-way windowed stream join (MWSJ), a core operator in continuous query systems. The MWSJ operator can be used to discover correlations across different streaming sources, which has many important applications in video surveillance, network intrusion detection, and sensor monitoring. The load diffusion system can adaptively scale-up stream join processing based on stream rate changes while preserving the accuracy of stream join results. Second, I will present a distributed stream processing overlay system that can achieve quality-aware, load balanced, and self-healing stream processing application composition over wide-area networks in a fully distributed and self-organizing fashion. Our experiment results via real prototype implementation and extensive simulations show the feasibility and efficiency of our systems. Finally, I will also briefly mention my other research work in large-scale networked systems and mobile systems including adaptive multi-source stream dissemination, multi-attribute range query in overlay networks, software failure predictions for cluster systems, and adaptive application offloading for resource-constrained mobile devices.

Short Bio: Monica Lam is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. Her research passion is to make computers easier to use and to program. She has published numerous papers on compilers, operating systems, security, computer architecture, and high-performance computing, and has won various awards for her research contributions. She is the founding CEO of moka5 and a co-author of the third edition of the Dragon book.

Tzvetelina ( Lina )  Battestilli was born in Sofia, Bulgaria but moved to the United States of America at the age of 16.  She completed her high school education at Grand Blanc High School, MI in 1994.  For her undergraduate studies she attended  GMI Engineering and Management Institute (later renamed Kettering University), a private engineering school in Flint, MI.  In 1999, she received a BS in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Applied Mathematics.  At Kettering, Lina was part of a very unique co-op program of alternating three-month work semesters with three-month school semesters.  During her work semesters, she worked as a co-op student at Electronic Data Systems (EDS), Troy, MI. Upon graduation, she spent a year working as a full-time network engineer also at EDS.

Lina first came to North Carolina State University in the Fall of 2000 for an MS in Computer Networking, which she received in 2002.  Later, she successfully defended her Ph.D work in August, 2005. While at the CSC Department, she was named to be an IBM PhD Fellow, GE-Faculty for Future Teaching Fellow and AT&T Solutions Fellow. She also served for a year as the president of the CSC Graduate Student Association and was a co-founding member of the Women in Computer Science organization.  In 2006, Lina received the NCSU university-wide 2006 Nancy G. Pollock Dissertation Award.

She is now working as a Scientist at MCNC in the Research Triangle Park. Her latest research focus is the role, control and design of optical networks within the context of Grid computing.

Xenia Mountrouidou is a 4th year Ph.D. Candidate at NC State University, Department of Computer Science. She has received Master's of Science from the Department of Computer Engineering at the University of Patras. She has worked as an undergraduate student research assistant at the Computer Architecture and VLSI Systems Lab, Institute of Computer Science, Foundation of Research and Technology Hellas (ICS-FORTH). She has also worked for Ellemedia Technologies, as a member of Technical Staff of Broadband Components Group. She has authored ten scholarly papers in the areas of performance modeling, computer networks, and embedded computer architectures. Currently, she is working on her Ph.D. dissertation in the performance modeling of optical networks. Xenia is the Treasurer of the Women in Computer Science student organization.