Satya comes to town

You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I'm telling you why. Satyanarayanan is coming to town. Yes, that's right, Mahadev Satyanarayanan, the most prominent researcher in pervasive computing, and I would say the #2 man behind Mark Weiser, is coming to U of T this morning at 11 am for a talk. I've read lots of articles from Satya, especially his seminal paper on the issues with pervasive computing, his work with Coda, and Odyssey. He's also the founding editor of IEEE Pervasive Computing. It's finally great to have him hear him, I've always wanted to hear him and admire his work, and dedication to the pervasive computing field.

Here's his bio:

Satya is an experimental computer scientist who has pioneered research
in mobile and pervasive computing. One outcome is the open-source Coda
File System, which supports distributed file access in low-bandwidth and
intermittent wireless networks through disconnected and
bandwidth-adaptive operation. The Coda concepts of hoarding,
reintegration and application-specific conflict resolution can be found
in the hotsync capability of PDAs today. Key ideas from Coda have been
incorporated by Microsoft into the IntelliMirror component of Windows
2000 and the Cached Exchange Mode of Outlook 2003. Another outcome of
Satya's work is Odyssey, a set of open-source operating system
extensions that enable mobile applications to adapt to variation in
critical resources such as network bandwidth and energy. Coda and
Odyssey are building blocks in Project Aura, a research initiative at
Carnegie Mellon to explore distraction-free ubiquitous computing. His
most recent work in this space is Internet Suspend/Resume, a hands-free
approach to mobile computing that exploits virtual machine technology to
liberate personal computing state from hardware. Satya is a co-inventor
of many supporting technologies relevant to mobile and pervasive
computing, such as data staging, lookaside caching, translucent caching
and application-aware adaptation. He is also a co-inventor of the
Diamond approach to interactive, non-indexed search of complex and
loosely-organized data such as digital photographs and medical images.
Early in his career, Satya was a principal architect and implementor of
the Andrew File System (AFS) which pioneered the use of scalable file
caching, ACL-based security, and volume-based system administration for
enterprise-scale information sharing. AFS was commercialized by IBM, is
in widespread use today as OpenAFS, and has heavily influenced the NFS
v4 network file system protocol standard that was published in April
2003.

Satya is the Carnegie Group Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie
Mellon University. From May 2001 to May 2004 he served as the founding
director of Intel Research Pittsburgh, one of four university-affiliated
research labs established worldwide by Intel to create disruptive
information technologies through its Open Collaborative Research model.
Satya received the PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon, after
Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology,
Madras. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, and was the founding
Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Pervasive Computing.

A very distinguished and prolific fellow.

Here's his talk abstract:

Speaker: Mahadev Satyanarayanan, CMU
Title: "Towards Seamless Mobility on Pervasive Hardware"

Abstract
Preserving one's uniquely customized computing environment as one
moves to different locations is an enduring challenge in mobile
computing. In this talk, we will examine why this capability is
valued so highly, and what makes it so difficult to achieve for
personal computing applications. We describe a new mechanism called
Internet Suspend/Resume (ISR) that overcomes many of the limitations
of previous approaches to realizing this capability. ISR enables a
hands-free approach to mobile computing that appears well suited to
future pervasive computing environments in which commodity hardware
may be widely deployed for transient use. We show that ISR can be
implemented by layering virtual machine technology on distributed file
system technology. We also report on measurements from a prototype
that confirm that ISR is already usable today for some common usage
scenarios.

As always, I'll be blogging the talk.

On Technorati: satya, pervasive computing