Rambling Me

Life is a Graph - a geek blog

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About Me

I'm a PhD student in the Faculty of Informatics at the University of Lugano in Italian, Switzerland. My advisor here is Antonio Carzaniga. Currently I'm living in Amsterdam to collaborate with Professor Maarten van Steen's distributed systems research group at the VU. Besides spending a lot of time working on Plasma, I like to run, bike, read, play, listen and dance to music.

Research

My current research interests are in peer to peer networking, data mining, information retrieval and emergent complexity. I am currently working on a P2P system where the goal is to create an evolvable, networked ecosystem of peer-to-peer applications and data.

Software

Here is some software that I've worked on:

• GoSim
We have developed a nice discrete event simulator that is written mostly in Ruby with a bit of C for the CPU intensive parts. It makes writing P2P simulations a breeze, and it will be published open source shortly.
• Rubinius
Recently I've been getting into the coolest ruby implementation around, Rubinius. It's a ruby byte-code compiler and all the base libraries implemented in pure ruby with a small C byte-code processor and garbage collector. They have made some really smart decisions about both the design of the project and the management of the community, and I think it is the future of Ruby.
• iCalendar Library for Ruby
I've been working on an implementation of the iCalendar specification in Ruby. Its been a great exercise in implementing from an RFC, and I've learned lots and lots about meta-programming and the un-ending sweetness of ruby along the way. You can find documentation and download links at the current project website: http://icalendar.rubyforge.org
• MANTIS Operating System
I worked for a couple years under Professor Richard Han at the University of Colorado doing sensor networking. For my undergraduate thesis I started work on a multi-threaded operating system that we named the MANTIS OS, and the project has since taken off. There is a great team of guys developing like crazy, and the OS is now an ultra-low power, multi-platform and multi-threaded system that is lightyears more flexible and easier to program than its event based competition. Check out the documentation and source at the well done project wiki: http://mantis.cs.colorado.edu

Teaching:

I've assisted a few courses in intro programming with C++ for majors and taught two semesters of an undergraduate course on programming dynamic, database-backed web applications using the Ruby on Rails framework. I consider both semesters of the class a success, and I've learned lots about what it means to be a teacher in the process; however, it's clear that becoming a great teacher is a long, slow road that takes practice and hard work like everything else worth doing in life. People taking the course learn lots and get motivated to program, which is a huge part of the battle in teaching, but I'm convinced that school as it works today is the wrong way to do education. I think everything about school should be driven by the interests of the students, which is guided along and helped by mentors. Of course this won't benefit people who just want good grades, but I don't really care. They can go watch powerpoint presentations and take exams to prepare for working at MegaCorp Global, while the people who get motivated by understanding can come over to my house for book-club and beers :-) One day after I've put more time into thinking about education I'd like to get more serious about this, but for now I'm too selfish and I'd rather follow my own interests...

Publications

Peer Reviewed Articles:

• J. Rose, A. Carzaniga, "Plasma: a graph based distributed computing model," Submitted to WOSN, (Workshop at SIGCOMM), 2008.

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• J. Rose, C. Hall, A. Carzaniga, "Spinneret: A Log Random Substrate for P2P Networks," IEEE HotP2P, 2007.

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• S. Bhatti, J. Carlson, H. Dai, J. Deng, J. Rose, A. Sheth, B. Shucker, C. Gruenwald, A. Torgerson, R. Han, "MANTIS OS: An Embedded Multithreaded Operating System for Wireless Micro Sensor Platforms, " ACM/Kluwer Mobile Networks & Applications (MONET), Special Issue on Wireless Sensor Networks, vol. 10, no. 4, August 2005, guest co-editors P. Ramanathan, R. Govindan and K. Sivalingam, pp. 563-579.

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• H. Abrach, S. Bhatti, J. Carlson, H. Dai, J. Rose, A. Sheth, B. Shucker, J. Deng, R. Han, " MANTIS: System Support For MultimodAl NeTworks of In-situ Sensors," 2nd ACM International Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications (WSNA) 2003, pp. 50-59.

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Book Chapters:

• M. Jazayeri, C. Mesnage, J. Rose, "Modern Web Application Development," Wiley, 2007.
• B. Shucker, J. Rose, A. Sheth, J. Carlson, S. Bhatti, H. Dai, J. Deng, and R. Han, Book chapter 6 on "Embedded Operating Systems for Wireless Microsensor Nodes", in Handbook of Sensor Networks: Algorithms and Architectures, Wiley, 2005, editor Ivan Stojmenovic, pp. 173-197.