Magda and Michel

Magdalena Balazinska


Graduate Student

Networks and Mobile Systems Group

MIT Laboratory for Computer Science

mbalazin @ lcs.mit.edu

I graduated and moved to the University of Washington. Please visit my new page.

Netread

During the Fall 2002 semester, I was leading a reading group on sensor networks and databases. If you're interested, more information is available here


Current Research Project

Borealis and Medusa: Distributed Stream Processing

Borealis is a second-generation stream processing engine (SPE). SPEs are new database management systems geared toward applications that continuously process streams of data. Borealis builds on the Aurora and Medusa projects. Within Borealis, I focus on issues that relate to the distributed aspects of the system: communication between nodes, collaborative query resolution, high availability, and load management,

Medusa is a distributed infrastructure that provides service delivery among a collection of participants. The infrastructure is designed as an application-level overlay network. A Medusa participant is a financial and administrative entity that is capable of entering into Medusa contracts. Each participant owns and administers a collections of overlay-network nodes, sensors, and sensor proxies. Medusa is an agoric system, using economic principles to regulate participant collaborations and solve the hard problems concerning load management and sharing. In contrast to Borealis, Medusa focuses on wide-area distribution and site autonomy. It examines load management and high availability issues.

Aurora, Borealis, and Medusa share the same code base now.

Projects web sites: Medusa and Borealis

Medusa is also part of the Scalable Location Aware Monitoring (SLAM) project.


Previous Projects

Characterizing usage of a wireless local-area network

During my internship at IBM in the summer of 2002, I studied the usage of their wireless network, and published the results at MobiSys 2003.

More details about this project can be found here.

Twine

The decreasing cost of computing technology is speeding the deployment of abundant ubiquitous computation and communication. With increasingly large and dynamic computing environments comes the challenge of scalable resource discovery, where client applications search for resources (services, devices, etc.) on the network by describing some attributes of what they are looking for. INS/Twine is an approach to scalable intentional resource discovery, where resolvers collaborate as peers to distribute resource information and to resolve queries. Our system maps resources to resolvers by transforming descriptions into numeric keys in a manner that preserves their expressiveness, facilitates even data distribution and enables efficient query resolution. Additionally, INS/Twine handles resource and resolver dynamism by treating all data as soft-state.

Project web site: Twine

Infranet

An increasing number of countries and companies routinely block or monitor access to parts of the Internet. To counteract these measures, we develop Infranet, a system that enables clients to surreptitiously retrieve sensitive content via cooperating Web servers distributed across the global Internet.

Project web site: Infranet


Older Projects

I've already completed a S.M degree in software engineering at École Polytechnique de Montréal. I was working in the CASI group, on automatic redesign of software systems based on clone information.

The purpose of my research was to investigate the use of clones as a basis for those reengineering actions which are useful to the maintenance of systems.

Code duplication, plausibly caused by copying source code and slightly modifying it, is often observed in large systems. Nevertheless, it's not desirable as it increases the quantity of source code and makes maintenance more difficult.

I've developed a new redesign approach for Java software systems. The approach transformed clones into reusable components by replacing them with general, parameterizable methods. The new structures were based on well known design patterns namely strategy and template method.


Publications

Invited Papers


Refereed Papers


Technical Reports


Theses



Misc



Fun stuff

Pictures

Wedding (June 22nd 2002)

Some of my favorites quotes

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." (Niels Bohr)

"Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome." (Samuel Johnson, 1759)