Hi there. I’m currently a third year Ph.D. student working with Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy. My research interests are broad, spanning problems involving networking, distributed systems, and operating systems. In the somewhat disparate area of computational knot theory, I’ve worked on topics in physics, biology, visualization, and numerical analysis.
I’d like to acknowledge the generous support of the Seattle chapter of the ARCS Foundation.
Current research
- BitTyrant: A selfish BitTorrent client that exploits altruism to improve performance
- BitProbes: Measuring the Internet’s edge opportunistically by piggybacking on peer-to-peer traffic
- iPlane: Using coordinated, intelligent measurement to predict path properties between arbitrary Internet endpoints
Previous projects
These projects were completed during my undergraduate years.
- RidgeRunner: Curve tightening with thickness and curvature constraints (Additional movie)
- tsnnls: A sparse least squares solver with non-negativity constraints
- Confounding socket: Protocol obfuscation that inhibits traffic shaping
Students
I’m currently working with the following set of talented undergraduates. Send me a note if you’re interested in research opportunities.
- Patrick Williams
- Jarret Falkner (now at Zillow.com)
Papers
Networking, distributed systems
One hop Reputations for Peer to Peer File Sharing Workloads [ pdf ]
Michael Piatek, Tomas Isdal, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson
NSDI 2008.
Profiling a million user DHT [ pdf ]
Jarret Falkner, Michael Piatek, John P. John, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson
IMC 2007.
A case for holistic incentive design [ pdf ]
Michael Piatek, Thomas Anderson, Arvind Krishnamurthy
Workshop on Future Directions in Distributed Computing (FuDiCo III), 2007.
Do incentives build robustness in BitTorrent? [ pdf ]
Michael Piatek, Tomas Isdal, Thomas Anderson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Arun Venkataramani
NSDI 2007. Awarded best student paper
An article describing this work also appeared in USENIX ;login:, August 2007.
Leveraging BitTorrent for End Host Measurements [ pdf ]
Tomas Isdal, Michael Piatek, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson
PAM 2007.
iPlane: An Information Plane for Distributed Services [ pdf | html | bibtex ]
Harsha V. Madhyastha, Tomas Isdal, Michael Piatek, Colin Dixon, Thomas Anderson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Arun Venkataramani.
OSDI 2006.
LiveSwarms: Adapting BitTorrent for end host multicast [ pdf | bibtex ]
Michael Piatek, Colin Dixon, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson
Technical report: UW-CSE-06-11-01
Computational mathematics
Scaling behavior and equilibrium lengths of knotted polymers
Eric J. Rawdon, Akos Dobay, John C. Kern, Kenneth C. Millett, Michael Piatek, Patrick Plunkett, and Andrzej Stasiak
Macromolecules, to appear, 2008.
Total Curvature and Total Torsion of Knotted Polymers [ pdf | bibtex ]
Patrick Plunkett, Michael Piatek, Akos Dobay, John C. Kern, Kenneth C. Millett, Andrzej Stasiak, and Eric J. Rawdon
Macromolecules, 40, 10, 3860–3867, 2007. DOI: 10.1021/ma0627673
Polygonal knot space near ropelength-minimized knots [ Preprint: pdf ]
Kenneth Millett, Michael Piatek, Eric Rawdon
To appear in Journal of Knot Theory and Its Ramifications. Preprint:
arXiv: math.GT/0508293
Visualizing the tightening of knots [ pdf | bibtex ]
Jason Cantarella, Michael Piatek, Eric Rawdon
IEEE Visualization, 2005.
Self-contact Sets for 50 Tightly Knotted and Linked Tubes [ pdf ]
Ted Ashton, Jason Cantarella, Michael Piatek, Eric Rawdon
arXiv: math.DG/0508248
tsnnls: A solver for large sparse least squares problems with non-negative variables [ pdf | www ]
Jason Cantarella, Michael Piatek
arXiv: cs.MS/0408029
