Roxana Geambasu

Graduate Student
Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
Office: 618 Paul Allen Center
Contact: my-first-name at cs dot washington dot edu.

Current Research

Broadly speaking, I am interested in distributed systems and databases. More specifically, my current and recent work focuses on the challenges, as well as the opportunities, created by today's rapid move to cloud computing. I am currently working on several projects on this topic, in close collaboration with three UW professors: Steve Gribble, Yoshi Kohno, and Hank Levy. In the past, I also worked with UW professor Magda Balazinska. During my summer internships, I worked with several researchers and developers from Microsoft Research (2007) and Google (2008): Andrew Birrell and John MacCormick (MSR); Barry Brumitt and Alex Mohr (Google).

I am the happy recipient of the 2009 Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Cloud Computing.

Below is a list of my current and past research projects:

• CloudViews. In CloudViews (with Steve and Hank), we are looking at the new, exciting, yet still untapped opportunities created by the migration of Web services onto public clouds, such as Amazon AWS, Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure, etc. We believe that the consolidation of many independent web services into a few public clouds creates an auspicious environment for fine-grained, tightly-coupled Web service composition and mashups. In support of such compositions, we are currently designing a new set of scalable, efficient, and performance-guaranteed inter-Web-service communication abstractions.
  A part of the CloudViews vision will be presented in the first HotCloud workshop (see publications).
• Vanish. In Vanish (with Yoshi and Hank), we are looking at the personal data privacy challenges raised by the technological shift onto Web and software-as-a-service, coupled with drastic changes in our legal environment. On the technology side, our increasing reliance on Web services causes personal data to be cached, copied, and archived by third parties, often without our knowledge or control. On the legal side, disclosure of private data has become commonplace due to carelessness, theft, or legal actions. In Vanish, we seek to protect the privacy of past, archived data --- such as copies of emails maintained by an email provider --- against accidental, malicious, and legal attacks.
  A paper describing Vanish will appear at USENIX Security 2009.
• Menagerie. In Menagerie (with Steve and Hank), we looked at the challenges posed by the dispersal of personal data all across the Web. The radical shift from the PC desktop to Web-based services is scattering personal data across a myriad of Web sites, such as Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Google Docs, Flickr, YouTube, and Amazon S3, etc. This dispersal poses significant data management challenges for the users. Tasks that used to be simple on the desktop -- such as data organization, search, or archiving -- have now become extremely difficult. To address these challenges, we designed a system, called Menagerie, which provides uniform naming, protection, and accessing to all objects that a user has on the Web.
  A paper presenting Menagerie appeared in WWW 2008.
• HomeViews. In HomeViews with Magda, Steve and Hank, we designed a system (HomeViews) to help home users organize and share their huge amounts of personal data. HomeViews enables users to create dynamic collections (or views) of their data and share them securely with other users in a P2P environment.
  A paper describing the HomeViews system appeared in SIGMOD 2007 and I also gave a few talks on this topic (publications).
• Fault-tolerant System Specification. During my summer internship with Microsoft Research (Silicon Valley) in 2007, I worked on a project ("Fault-tolerant System Specification") with Andrew Birrell and John MacCormick, where we created and analyzed formal specifications for several fault-tolerant file systems (Niobe, GFS, and Chain Replication). Our goal was to explore the extent to which formal methods could help in fault-tolerant file system analysis, design, and comparison.
  A paper describing our experience appear in DSN 2008.
• FlowDB. In the FlowDB project (with Magda, Tanya Bragin, and Jaeyeon Jung from Intel), we investigated whether out-of-the-box relational databases are amenable for use as backends for network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs). To cope with high input rates, these systems typically come with their own custom storage backends. These custom solutions, however, impose severe limitations on query processing at forensic analysis time.
  A short paper presenting our results and techniques for making RDBMSs amenable for use under NIDSs appeared at NetDB 2007.
• I also worked on a virtual machine performance over network file systems study, with John P. John and Brian Bershad. Our goal was to establish whether virtual machines can be run over network file systems (specifically NFS and AFS). A report shows our findings.

Ph.D. Progress

Quals

I passed my Quals as of spring 2007. On Aug 30 2006, I gave my Quals talk on the HomeViews system (the system was called SharedViews back then). See publications for the report and talk.

Graduate Coursework

• Systems Applications of Machine Learning (CSE599n): Autumn 2007, instructors Sumit Basu and Emre Kiciman.
• Special Topics on Security and Privacy (CSE599g): Autumn 2007, instructor Yoshi Kohno.
• Distributed Systems (CSE552): Spring 2007, instructor Tom Anderson.
• Computer Networks (CSE561): Winter 2007, instructor Tom Anderson.
• Database Systems (CSE 544): Autumn 2006, instructor Magdalena Balazinska.
• Operating Systems (CSE 551): Spring 2006, instructor Brian Bershad.
• Design and Analysis of Algorithms (CSE 521): Winter 2006, instructor Venkatesan Guruswami.
• Computability and Complexity (CSE 531): Autumn 2005, instructor Paul Beame.