Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. -Zora Neale Hurston
Life is never boring when working in research. Constantly challenging the status quo, looking for ways to better our lives, exploring and developing solutions to the biggest challenges of our time and making them a reality – can it get any better? Together with my teams, I have worked on the invention, development and deployment of a broad spectrum of exciting technologies.
My work covers the design, specification, implementation and evaluation of communication and data analytic systems, and of applications that build on top of them. The combination of performing original research and affecting the real world is very important to me. I very much enjoy taking projects from their initial ideation, through product development, to full deployment in the field.
During the early years of my career, I created a novel solution for reliably transmitting information over the Internet to very large user groups around the world. The system was deployed across 65 sites worldwide. When joining Bell Labs, my work extended to develop caching techniques and next generation content distribution products for the Internet. This work resulted in the creation of a new product division inside the company, and I was lucky enough to work embedded in this startup-style internal venture for over two years. The products we developed have powered the Web sites of some of the world’s biggest companies.
More recently, I have broadened my work area to multi-sensory systems and data-driven solutions, investigating how they can better our understanding, collaborations, and interactions. Sensory earables, for example, are increasingly becoming a mainstream compute platform with a promise to transform personal-scale human sensing. In order to catalyze advancements in sensory earable technology, my team has built the Open Earable Platform, eSense. It brings together researchers, practitioners, and design experts from academia and industry to discuss, share, and shape this exciting new area of earable computing. Devices like these, and the emerging Internet of Things, are transforming the world into a giant source of live data streams. . My team’s World Wide Streams (WWS) platform is the world’s first global-scale hub for sharing, transforming and publishing live data streams generated by these billions of devices and sensors. It provides infrastructure-agnostic, easily programmable stream processing across edge and core clouds for data streams, as well as media streams. The platform is complemented by our highly scalable cognitive cloud controller, which utilizes AI/ML-based techniques to fully automate configuration, deployment, and scaling of cloud-native applications and services.