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)