Benjamin Atkin

PhD Candidate Department of Computer Science 5138 Upson Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14850 USA Telephone: (607) 255-9201 E-mail: batkin@cs.cornell.edu Quick links: research · publications · teaching · personal

NEW! I am now a researcher in the Robust and Secure Systems Group at NEC Labs.

Who am I? I'm a sixth (and final!) year PhD student studying computer science, working in mobile and distributed systems; I am planning to finish my PhD in May 2004. I graduated from Victoria University of Wellington in 1997 with a BSc (Honours) in computer science. I was born in Warsaw, Poland, and grew up in New Zealand.

Research

My research interests lie in distributed systems, with particular focus on applications in mobile computing. My supervisor is Ken Birman. I'm a member of the Spinglass group, which does research in reliable distributed systems and networking protocols.

The topic of my thesis is how applications running on mobile hosts can be structured in order to flexibly adapt to variations in bandwidth. This has led to an idea of "modeless adaptation", in which applications attach priorities to the messages they send in order to specify an adaptation policy in a bandwidth-independent way. The actual work of allocating bandwidth between concurrently active RPCs is delegated to an adaptive network protocol. More detail about modeless adaptation is available at the Modeless Adaptation project page.

In the summer of 2000, I worked at HP Labs on a research internship. I learnt a lot working with Tim Kindberg on designing and implementing a prototype of a capability-based access control manager for the Cooltown ubiquitous computing project.

• Spinglass home page
• Ensemble home page, the previous incarnation of the Spinglass group
• HP Labs

Publications

MFS: an Adaptive Distributed File System for Mobile Hosts [pdf] [ps]

Benjamin Atkin and Kenneth P. Birman. Cornell Computer Science Department Technical Report.

Network-aware Application Adaptation for Mobile Hosts [pdf] [ps]

Benjamin Atkin and Kenneth P. Birman. Extended abstract. Presented at the ICDCS 2003 Doctoral Symposium, Providence, Rhode Island, May 2003.

Evaluation of an Adaptive Transport Protocol [pdf] [ps]

Benjamin Atkin and Kenneth P. Birman. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (INFOCOM 2003), San Francisco, California, April 2003.

PortOS: An Educational Operating System for the Post-PC Environment [pdf] [ps]

Benjamin Atkin and Emin Gün Sirer. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, pages 116-120, Covington, Kentucky, February 2002.

Teaching

Courses I have taught or been a functionary for at Cornell:

• CS414 Introduction to operating systems (Summer 2003, co-instructor)
• CS414 Introduction to operating systems (Summer 2002, co-instructor)
• CS513 System security (Spring 2002, TA)
• CS414 Introduction to operating systems (Spring 2001, TA)
• CS514 Intermediate systems (Fall 2000, TA)
• CS513 System security (Spring 2000, TA)

Personal information

If you have nothing more important to do, feel free to click here and go to a page with some "non-professional" information about me. If you are really bored, you can also look at my lists of web links:

• General links
• Computer systems links. Not guaranteed to be useful to anyone else!