Guest Speaker
Speaker: Keith Winstein, Stanford
Date: Tuesday, Feb 22, 2022
Time: 12:00pm EST
Host: Prof. Amit Levy
Location: CS 105

Title: What we talk about when we talk about networking

Abstract: Networks, and the applications they support, sometimes treat
each other as strangers. By shaking things up a bit—expressing networked
systems as compositions of small, pure functions and making their dataflow
a first-class consideration—we can often achieve friendlier couplings
across the stack, to the benefit of performance, robustness, and
understandability. This approach has proved helpful in several contexts:
networking algorithms learned "in situ," feeding data from deployment back
into training; real-time video conferencing, especially for musicians and
actors during the pandemic; image compression in a distributed network
filesystem; and a serverless computing framework that lets software burst
briefly to 10,000 cores. In ongoing work, we're building a "functional"
operating system that enforces a separation between IO (declared to the OS)
and computation (reproducible by default). If this system can support a
broad range of computational tasks with visibility into their dataflow, we
envision a new service model for cloud computing: "computation as a
service."

Bio: Keith Winstein is an assistant professor of computer science and, by
courtesy, of electrical engineering at Stanford University. His research
group creates new kinds of networked systems by rethinking abstractions
around communication, compression, and computing. Some of his group’s
research has found broader use, including the Mosh tool, the Puffer
video-streaming site, the Lepton compression tool, and the Mahimahi network
emulators. Winstein previously served as a staff reporter at The Wall
Street Journal and worked at Ksplice, a startup company (now part of
Oracle) where he was the vice president of product management and business
development and also cleaned the bathroom. He did his undergraduate and
graduate work at MIT. (https://cs.stanford.edu/~keithw)