A brief discussion at a conference more than 15 years ago led to a collaborative research agenda that has been incredibly fun, intellectually challenging, and impactful. Internet protocols like BGP and DNS underlie everything that we do online, but they routinely break network security and reliability due to their complexity and fragility. While there are many moving parts and underlying causes, time and again the programming languages perspective has proven to be a powerful way to make progress. In short, everything is a program (even if it’s not), and once something is a program we can give it a precise semantics and bring to bear a host of techniques to reason about its behavior. I’ll illustrate this approach through examples from my work, but the ideas are applicable beyond computer networks. I’ll also distill some general lessons that I’ve learned about doing collaborative research and making an impact.
Wed 23 OctDisplayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change
09:00 - 10:10 | |||
09:00 70mKeynote | Everything is a Program (even if it's not) Keynotes Todd Millstein University of California, Los Angeles | ||
Bio - Todd Millstein is a Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles and an Amazon Scholar. Todd received his Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of Washington and his A.B. from Brown University, all in Computer Science. Todd’s honors and awards include an NSF CAREER Award, an ACM SIGPLAN Most Influential PLDI Paper Award, an IEEE Micro Top Picks selection, best paper awards from PLDI, OOPSLA, and SIGCOMM, a Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award, and both the junior faculty and senior faculty versions of the UCLA Engineering Excellence in Teaching Award. Todd co-developed the open-source Batfish network configuration analysis software, which is now managed by AWS and is used by major technology companies to ensure the security and reliability of their computer networks.
