My research interests are in distributed systems and datacenter applications. I am advised by Prof. Ion Stoica, and am part of the Algorithms, Machines and People (AMP) Lab, one of the larger collaborative multi-area labs here at Berkeley.

Current Projects

My primary project at this time is Memento, an in-memory caching infrastructure for Hadoop and HDFS which is tuned for large datacenter workloads. We have developed novel cache management policies that perform significantly better than theoretically "optimal" cache-eviction algorithms (such as farthest-in-the-future) by exploiting characteristics of workload traces from large internet companies. This work is not yet published, but should be forthcoming in 2012.

CrowdDB is a relational database that has been extended with crowdsourcing operators, allowing it to incorporate human computation and knowledge as part of query execution. This means CrowdDB can be used to solve AI-hard problems that are difficult to tackle with traditional databases by crowdsourcing small tasks to human workers. I contributed to a demo of CrowdDB shown at VLDB 2011 in Seattle, which won the inaugural Best Demo award.

Past Projects

During the fall of 2010, I worked on a CS262A class project with Prof. John Kubiatowicz within the domain of Tessellation, a multicore operating system being developed here at Berkeley. Tessellation focuses on providing strong application performance guarantees through hardware and software isolation mechanisms. For our project, my partners and I developed a version of the Qt Embedded GUI application framework based on the isolation mechanisms of Tessellation. This resulted in a demo web browser and text editor that showed orders of magnitude better latency and responsiveness under heavy load, running purely in userspace on Linux.

Papers

Try looking on DBLP as well.

Rajkumar, R., Wang, A., Hiser, J., Nguyen-Tuong, A., Davidson, J., and J. Knight. "Component Oriented Monitoring of Binaries for Security", HICSS 2011: 1-10

Nguyen-Tuong, A., Wang, A., Hiser, J., Knight, J., and J.W. Davidson. "On the Effectiveness of the Metamorphic Shield", ECSA Companion Volume 2010: 170-174