Michael Piatek

I’m currently a fifth year Ph.D. student working with Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy. My thesis work focuses on how to build Internet-scale services without relying on expensive, trusted infrastructure. I enjoy building and improving real, actively used systems. To that end, I’ve incorporated my research into a number of widely deployed software releases, listed below.

I’m supported by the 2009 Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Computer Networking.

Current research

• Contracts: Practical contribution incentives for P2P live video streaming (project page forthcoming)
• OneSwarm: Privacy preserving P2P data sharing
• Tracking the trackers: Exposing weaknesses in copyright monitoring and enforcement on the Internet
• 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

Prior to graduate school, I worked on topics in computational mathematics, focusing on geometry.

• RidgeRunner: Curve tightening with thickness and curvature constraints
• tsnnls: A sparse least squares solver with non-negativity constraints

Students

I’ve worked with the following set of talented undergraduates. Send me a note if you’re interested in research opportunities.

• Peter Lipay
• Patrick Williams (now at ZoneAlarm)
• Jarret Falkner (now at Zillow.com)

Papers

Networking, distributed systems

Computational mathematics