Harsha Madhyastha selected for Facebook Faculty Award

Prof. Harsha V. Madhyastha has been selected as the recipient of a Facebook Faculty Award for his work in distributed systems and computer networking.

Prof. Madhyastha’s recent research has focused on enabling latency-sensitive web services to optimize user experience.

The Klotski web proxy, developed by Madhyastha and his students, tackles the adverse impact of increasing complexity of web pages. Klotski improves user-perceived speed of web page loads, especially on mobile devices, by reordering the delivery of content on a page so that content that is more important to the user is prioritized.

Madhyastha and his students have also developed SPANStore and CosTLO, systems that help geo-distributed web services deployed in the cloud minimize the latencies incurred in their back-end infrastructure. By combining the use of multiple cloud service providers, SPANStore presents better cost versus latency tradeoffs for web services to meet their consistency and fault-tolerance requirements. CosTLO enables applications to cost-effectively mitigate the impact of high latency variance which is common in shared cloud infrastructure.

Prof. Madhyastha’s research has received support from the Army Research Office (ARO), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) agency, Amazon, VMware, multiple Google Faculty Research awards, a NetApp Faculty Fellowship, and an NSF CAREER award. His work has also resulted in award papers at the USENIX NSDI, ACM SIGCOMM IMC, and IEEE CNS conferences.