Computer Science professor and long-time Linux hacker
Areas of Expertise:
- Operating systems
- distributed systems
- networks
- Linux
- sensor networks
- speaking
Biography
Books
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Blog
Matt's blog posts are hosted at:
http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/
http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/
June 23 2009
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a great article on the importance of writing skills for graduate students. (Thanks to Jitu Padhye for the pointer.) Though nothing in the article surprises me, the article highlights a widespread concern about the lack of formal writing training for grad students. Learning to… read moreJune 04 2009
I've been fortunate to have several productive collaborations with domain scientists in fields such as seismology, emergency medicine, rehabilitation medicine, and public health. One of the exciting things about sensor networks is that they open up avenues for this kind of cross-disciplinary work, but there are always challenges in getting… read moreMay 29 2009
Microsoft is getting ready to release a new "decision engine" to go head-to-head with Google. Named Bing, it promises to do much more than simply show you the most popular results for a given text search -- it pulls together information from many sources and provides a much richer interface… read moreMay 27 2009
I am looking for postdocs to work in my group on projects related on sensor networks, wireless networking, and distributed systems. Funding will come through the NSF Computing Innovation Fellows program, which has an application deadline of June 9. If you are U.S.-based Ph.D. student who is about to graduate,… read moreMay 21 2009
HotOS wrapped up yesterday. (I'm now in Trento, giving a talk at the University of Trento tomorrow, meeting with colleagues at ArsLogica, and driving back to Milan on Saturday before heading home.) A few highlights...Maysam Yabandeh from EPFL talked about Simplifying Distributed System Development, by using a dynamic controller that… read moreMay 20 2009
Some highlights from Day Two of HotOS 2009...Michael Kozuch from Intel Research Pittsburgh described an approach to load-balancing computation within a datacenter that involves migrating the running operating system (and the applications running on top of it) from one physical machine to another. One approach is to shut down the… read moreMay 19 2009
The Eleventh Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS) is under way this week in Ascona, Switzerland, at a former nudist colony called Monte Verità. (Sadly, this aspect of the locale has not had much influence on the attendees.) HotOS is about pushing the boundaries of our field and… read moreMay 15 2009
The NY Times is running a piece on the difficulty of counting the number of unique visitors to streaming video sites, like Hulu. Apparently, Nielsen's estimates of the total viewership for Hulu are far lower than that of other measurement firms.Nielsen seems to be extending the model they use for… read morePeloton: Coordinated Resource Management for Sensor Networks
May 13 2009
I have posted the camera-ready PDF of our forthcoming paper to be presented at HotOS 2009, entitled Peloton: Coordinated Resource Management for Sensor Networks. This paper describes a distributed operating system for sensor nets that is intended to provide the right abstractions to permit coordinated resource-management decisions to be made… read moreMay 07 2009
The Computer Security Group at UCSB recently released a report, "Your Botnet is My Botnet: Analysis of a Botnet Takeover", in which the authors hijacked the Torpig botnet for 10 days (basically by registering a fake command and control server that the infected machines contacted). This is a fascinating read… read moreApril 30 2009
As a follow-up to my earlier post on scaling up the number of papers that conferences accept, I wanted to comment on the reviewing load imposed on program committees. Ken Birman and Fred Shneider have a thought-provoking article on this topic in May's issue of CACM (thanks to Yuiry Brun… read moreApril 29 2009
Many prestigious conferences in systems and networking -- such as SOSP, SenSys, and SIGCOMM -- constrain themselves to a single track over two and a half days. This limits the number of papers that can be presented at the conference to around 25-30 at most, assuming 30-minute talk slots.The problem… read moreAbolish universities? Not so fast
April 28 2009
The NY Times is carrying an editorial today from Mark C. Taylor, the chair of the Religion department at Columbia, saying that we need to rethink the structure of graduate education, and universities as a whole, to make them more relevant in today's world. The article is generally thought-provoking, but… read moreApril 25 2009
Today is the last day of NSDI 2009 here in Boston. The conference was great this year, and the community is clearly going strong. My only regret is that, the conference being in Boston, there was no excuse for me to go out cavorting with my colleagues until the wee… read moreApril 24 2009
NSDI marches on. A couple of my favorite talks from today:Tolerating Latency in Replicated State Machines Through Client Speculation Benjamin Wester, University of Michigan; James Cowling, MIT CSAIL; Edmund B. Nightingale, Microsoft Research; Peter M. Chen and Jason Flinn, University of Michigan; Barbara Liskov, MIT CSAILIn this paper, the authors… read more
