Michael Piatek

piatek@google.com

I’m a software engineer at Google. In 2009, I received the Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Computer Networking. I spent most of the following year working on infrastructure systems at Google, and I joined full time in 2011.

Prior to Google, I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, where I was advised by Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy. My thesis work focused on how to build Internet-scale services without relying on expensive, trusted infrastructure. I enjoy building and improving real, actively used systems.

At Google

Previous projects

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

Papers

Networking, distributed systems

Flywheel: Google’s Data Compression Proxy for the Mobile Web
Victor Agababov, Michael Buettner, Victor Chudnovsky, Mark Cogan, Ben Greenstein, Shane McDaniel Michael Piatek, Colin Scott, Matt Welsh, Bolian Yin
NSDI 2015.
Thialfi: A Client Notification Service for Internet-Scale Applications
Atul Adya, Greg Cooper, Daniel Myers, Michael Piatek
SOSP 2011.
Privacy-preserving P2P data sharing with OneSwarm
Tomas Isdal, Michael Piatek, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson
SIGCOMM 2010.
Contracts: Practical contribution incentives for P2P live streaming
Michael Piatek, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Arun Venkataramani, Richard Yang, David Zhang, Alexander Jaffe
NSDI 2010. (An article describing this work also appeared in USENIX ;login:, August 2010.)
Pitfalls for ISP-friendly P2P design
Michael Piatek, Harsha V. Madhyastha, John P. John, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson
HotNets 2009.
Challenges and Directions for Monitoring P2P File Sharing Networks –or– Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice
Michael Piatek, Tadayoshi Kohno, Arvind Krishnamurthy
HotSec 2008. (Previously TR#08-6-01)
One hop Reputations for Peer to Peer File Sharing Workloads
Michael Piatek, Tomas Isdal, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson
NSDI 2008.
Profiling a million user DHT
Jarret Falkner, Michael Piatek, John P. John, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson
IMC 2007.
A case for holistic incentive design
Michael Piatek, Thomas Anderson, Arvind Krishnamurthy
Workshop on Future Directions in Distributed Computing (FuDiCo III), 2007.
Do incentives build robustness in BitTorrent?
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
Tomas Isdal, Michael Piatek, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson
PAM 2007.
iPlane: An Information Plane for Distributed Services
Harsha V. Madhyastha, Tomas Isdal, Michael Piatek, Colin Dixon, Thomas Anderson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Arun Venkataramani.
OSDI 2006.
LiveSwarms: Adapting BitTorrent for end host multicast
Michael Piatek, Colin Dixon, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson
Technical report: UW-CSE-06-11-01

Computational mathematics

Knot Tightening by Constrained Gradient Descent
Ted Ashton, Jason Cantarella, Michael Piatek, Eric Rawdon
Experimental Mathematics 20(1): 57-90, 2011.
Scaling behavior and equilibrium lengths of knotted polymers
Eric J. Rawdon, Akos Dobay, John C. Kern, Kenneth C. Millett, Michael Piatek, Patrick Plunkett, Andrzej Stasiak
Macromolecules, 41(12): 4444-4451, 2008.
Polygonal knot space near ropelength-minimized knots
Kenneth Millett, Michael Piatek, Eric Rawdon
J. Knot Theory Ramifications, 17(5): 601-631, 2008.
Total Curvature and Total Torsion of Knotted Polymers
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
Visualizing the tightening of knots
Jason Cantarella, Michael Piatek, Eric Rawdon
IEEE Visualization, 2005.
Self-contact Sets for 50 Tightly Knotted and Linked Tubes
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 [ Project page ]
Jason Cantarella, Michael Piatek
arXiv: cs.MS/0408029