Professor Shyam Gollakota demonstrating ambient backscatterThe Allen School is exploring new frontiers in systems and networking research, which encompasses the fundamental aspects of operating systems, distributed systems, networks, and security. This is a high-impact, collaborative area that reflects a variety of faculty interests and expertise, including: operating systems structure; network and systems reliability; robust protocol design; Internet security and privacy; peer-to-peer systems; mobile and wireless systems; high-performance, scalable cluster-based systems; the measurement of deployed, wide-area systems, such as the web and content distribution networks; pervasive computing; cloud computing; and virtual machine technology.

Noteworthy projects from our labs include: Arrakis, the award-winning operating system that removes barriers between increasingly sophisticated apps and the hardware on which they run for unprecedented customizability, reliability, and performance; Ambient Backscatter, a novel technique for transforming existing wireless signals into both a source of power and a communication medium, eliminating the need for batteries; and Sapphire, a distributed programming platform that simplifies the design and deployment of mobile and cloud applications in today’s heterogeneous environment of smartphones, tablets, personal devices, and variable network connectivity, reducing complexity while providing developers with fine-grained control in building widely distributed, massively multi-user, and eternally persistent mobile and cloud applications.

Our record has earned us recognition as one of the best departments for systems and networking research worldwide, and our faculty and students have earned more than 25 best paper awards at major conferences. Visit the Computer Systems Lab and Mobile Intelligence Lab to learn more about our work, and explore related research at the Allen School in wireless and sensor systems, computer architecture, programming languages and software engineering, and ubiquitous computing.