We are actively seeking undergraduate research assistants and senior thesis students in areas related to sensor networks and Internet-scale services. If you are interested please contact Matt Welsh.

Matt Welsh's research interests encompass distributed systems, operating systems, and networking. Recent advances in networking, operating systems, and device technology have led to the emergence of a new class of complex, large-scale distributed systems composed of thousands or millions of individual nodes. These systems are characterized by massive scale, unreliable nodes and communication channels, and decentralized, self-organizing designs. Professor Welsh's research group focuses on two major areas of distributed computing: scalable Internet services and networked embedded systems.

The Internet hosts a diverse range of applications, including banking, electronic commerce, content delivery, and search. Each of these services is subject to enormous variations in demand, and in extreme cases may be subject to massive overload, where a "flash crowd" of many thousands of times the average population suddenly visits a site. We are designing system architectures to handle the massive load and concurrency demands of Internet services, based on efficient, event-driven execution models and dynamic resource control. In addition, we are investigating network architectures to support the next generation of Internet services that will be built from vast numbers of geographically diverse resources.

Wireless sensor networks are an emerging computing platform consisting of large numbers of small, low-powered, wireless "motes" each with limited computation, sensing, and communication abilities. Sensor networks have a number of exciting applications such as environmental and structural monitoring, object tracking, and emergency medical care. Sensor network programming is incredibly difficult, due to the limited capabilities and energy resources of each node as well as the unreliability of the radio channel. We are investigating operating system and programming language support for sensor networks. Our goal is to simplify application development by providing a high-level programmatic view of the sensor network as a whole, rather than programming the behavior of individual nodes. We are also collaborating with researchers at Boston Medical Center on a sensor network for emergency medical care, providing real-time, continuous monitoring of patient vital signs both for pre-hospital treatment and in-hospital settings.

Opportunities

We are actively seeking undergraduate research assistants with interests in distributed and embedded systems. Ideal candidates will have taken undergraduate courses in operating systems and networking, and have strong programming skills in C and Java. Potential research projects include developing novel sensor network applications, investigating secure wireless communication protocols, and integration of sensor networks with handheld and server-based systems. Students with interests in Internet service design and peer-to-peer systems are also sought for projects in archiving and querying geographically diverse sensor data.

If you are interested in an undergraduate research assistant position or doing a senior thesis project in any of these areas, please e-mail Matt Welsh at . For more information please see Matt's web page.