My research focus is Databases and Distributed Systems. My thesis is still undecided. One thing I have figure out though are my courses.
CS848: Large Scale Data Management
Firstly, I’m taking CS848: Large Scale Data Management and it fits well in my interest of Distributed Systems and Database. As part of this class we read three papers a week; write 5 paper reviews; give one presentation on a paper and lastly put together a course project.
The papers we will be reading for the course are available below. The topics range from batch systems like HDFS/GFS and MapReduce to datastores that provide weak isolation levels like Dynamo and Big Table to ACID databases that scale (Spanner) to graph databases. https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~kdaudjee/courses/cs848/schedule.shtml
The paper I have chosen to present is Jan Schaffner, Tim Januschowski, Megan Kercher, Tim Kraska, Hasso Plattner, Michael J. Franklin, Dean Jacobs RTP: Robust Tenant Placement for Elastic In-Memory Database Clusters SIGMOD, New York, USA, 2013
Stay tuned for some reviews, presentation slides, and anything else I’ve done related to the class.
STAT841: Classification
Secondly, I’m taking STAT841: Classification. Here we learn the derivations of common Machine Learning classification techniques like Fisher’s Discriminant Analysis, Logistic Regression, Neural Networks, and Support Vector Machines. I’ll be posting any results from lectures that I find interesting. I’m taking this course even though my focus is in Distributed Systems and Databases because having a strong foundation in Machine Learning will hopefully allow me to apply Machine Learning techniques to Distributed System problems. Additionally, I have a strong interest in Machine Learning.