Systems Research:
The Practical Side of Computer Science
Who: Doctor Shaya Potter
Where: Furst Hall Room 535
When: Thursday, December 23, 2010. 8:30 PM
In his own words: "Many students go through an undergraduate computer science
curriculum thinking that all their courses aren't teaching them anything practical. In fact, the
base one builds through courses like data structures and algorithms, discrete math, databases,
operating systems enables you to understand, attack and solve a large range of
practical problems. In this talk, I'll discuss a number of problems that I attacked in the course
of my pursuing my PhD. These problems include: improving the ability of users to be mobile,
while not forcing them to carry a heavy laptop, improving the ability of system
administrators to manage large numbers of machines, and improving the ability of users to
maintain a more secure desktop. While these 3 problems seem very disparate, I'll use them
to demonstrate how a PhD student goes from one project to the next, building on previous
work that opens up new avenues to do research in."