Muneeb Ali - Blog

Fire near Office

2008-05-14T08:26:49Z

The building next to my office burnt down!

Cover story on Protothreads

2008-05-08T13:49:08Z

In my previous post on Protothreads, I gave an overview of Protothreads and talked about how working in Sweden was fun - thanks to Adam Dunkels and Thiemo Voigt. Protothreads got featured on the cover of this month's Embedded Systems Magazine (May 2008 Vol. 21 No. 5). The cover story is by Michael Dorin and is titled "Building "instant-up" real-time operating systems". Check it out!

Koen Featured in ICT Mag

2008-02-06T19:13:01Z

Our group leader Koen Langendoen, recently got featured on the cover of a dutch ICT magazine. So apparently the sensornets research works of our group (like the infamous potato deployment) are not going unnoticed.

Lectures at Abdus Salam Center

2008-01-27T00:07:16Z

I will be at the Abdus Salam Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), in Trieste, Italy next month talking about wireless meshes. Abdus Salam is the first Muslim and the first (and only) Pakistani Nobel Laureate. He unified two (electromagnetism and weak interaction) of the four fundamental forces of nature, which is still the latest step towards the unified description of all four physical forces. ICTP was founded by Salam in 1964.

Salam wanted to bridge the scientific and economic gap between the rich and poor populations of the world - something that we are trying to do through Dritte. ICTP, following on its founder's vision, is organizing a School on Wireless Networking for Development, where i will be giving lectures on Feb 24th and 25th. I am excited about this trip, as I think that Abdus Salam's vision will inspire me to focus on fundamental problems in scientific research and to try and bring the benefits of science to the poor.

NSDI 2008

2008-01-15T14:04:14Z

Its almost NSDI time of the year again. Please consider attending NSDI 2008 and help spread the word. This year's program is quite interesting, as always!

TinyPC talk in Japan

2007-09-28T23:12:15Z

SIGCOMM 2007 workshop and main conference sessions were broadcasted live from Japan and are also archived here. Below is my TinyPC talk, you can also have a look at the paper and the presentation slides.

SIGCOMM in Kyoto

2007-08-27T19:55:32Z

We are having a lot of fun in Kyoto at Sigcomm. Thats me in the picture talking to David Clark. This post needs serious updating :)

The Original Google Storage

2007-07-09T20:07:28Z

I am spending the summer at Stanford working with Phil Levis. On my first day at the Gates Hall phil pointed me to something interesting in the basement of the building - the original Google storage (picture on right). Its fascinating to think that the multi-billion dollar search giant came out of THIS machine.

WSNblog.com

2007-06-14T15:47:44Z

In case you were wondering why I was quiet for a while, most of my entries related to sensor networks were posted on WSNblog.com instead. Our wsnblog.com recently got featured on M2M magazine (although they got some information wrong about us). Joe Polastre has a decent summary of this issue of M2M magazine on Moteiv's blog. Some comments about this issue of M2M magazine would be:

I am keeping an eye out for ArchRock's IPv6 solutions - lets see how the industry responds to the idea of running IPv6 on sensornets, from a research point of view I have my reservations with that approach.
I recently attended a talk by Bob Metcalf at Cambridge, MA and it seems to me that Bob and Ember think that they have found the "killer app" in energy management - wonder how Metcalf's law would scale in that market.

Eric Brewer and Inktomi

2007-02-13T22:39:27Z

Computer History Museum has this talk by Eric Brewer (UC Berkeley) where he goes over the rise and fall of Inktomi. For anyone remotely interested in the history of the Internet, case studies of startup companies, insight into the Internet bubble, or technology research in general; I would highly recommend watching this talk.

Inktomi was founded in 1996, by Eric and a Berkeley grad student, and went onto the Nasdaq 100 before it was bought by Yahoo! in March 2003. Yahoo search and MSN search are still powered by the Inktomi engine. Eric actually got quite emotional at times talking about Intkomi and I can clearly relate to why.

At the end he talks about the time when his 10% shares in Inktomi were worth a billion USD and he got interested in doing something for the "third world countries". Eric is the program co-chair for the ACM SIGCOMM NSDR workshop, Japan, Aug 2007 that I am organizing (along with Umar Saif). NSDR'07 is specifically aimed at bringing the benefits of networking technologies to the third world.

Below is the GoogleVideo embedded video of the talk:

NSDI 2007

2007-02-11T23:34:29Z

ACM/USENIX NSDI 2007 program is online, and the deadline for posters is still open (March 9, 2007). Do consider attending this event and help spread the call for participation.

Moteiv on Discovery Channel

2006-10-10T10:02:10Z

Joe Polastre, CEO of Moteiv (one of the co-authors of my recent MAC paper) recently got featured on Discovery Channel and Science Channel. Below is a YouTube embedded video of the Discovery Channel broadcast.

The story was later picked up by CNN as well. You can read the Moteiv news entry about these broadcasts here.

ACM SIGCOMM 2007

2006-10-02T15:49:04Z

Only 365 days left untill the SIGCOMM deadline. Only 364 days left untill the SIGCOMM deadline. Only 363 days left untill the SIGCOMM deadline. Only 362 days left untill the SIGCOMM deadline......... Only 121 days (3 months, 29 days) left untill the SIGCOMM deadline!!

Protothreads and ACM SenSys 2006

2006-08-25T06:35:21Z

I was a visiting researcher at SICS (Sweden) last fall where I had an amazing time working with Thiemo Voigt and Adam Dunkels. Adam's work on Protothreads recently got accepted at ACM SenSys 2006 and I am listed as a co-author on the paper.

If you don't know what SenSys is then you can try reading the Wikipedia article on SenSys. In short SenSys is the SIGCOMM of sensor networks, so I am more than glad about the Protothreads work being accepted at SenSys. :-)

"Threads vs. Event-Driven Programming" is an age-old debate in computer systems research. The late Roger Needham (Cambridge) tried to settle this debate with the "duality argument" in 1979 (essentially saying that threads and events are inter-convertible and are the same thing), but the Threads vs. Events remained a hot debatable topic e.g. Ousterhout (creator of the Tcl scripting language) made strong arguments against Threads in his "Why Threads Are A Bad Idea" invited talk at 1996 USENIX Technical Conference. An example of arguments in favour of Threads could be Eric Brewer's (UC Berkeley) "Why Events Are A Bad Idea" HotOS IX (2003) paper.

Protothreads are extremely lightweight stackless threads designed for severely memory constrained systems. One way to think about Protothreads is that they are a proof-of-concept of the 1979 Roger Needham "duality" argument. They are "something in-between" threads and event-driven programming. Maintaining state-machines makes event driven programming hard, but threads take too much memory to make them feasible on memory-constrained systems (e.g. sensor networks). Protothreads reduce/eliminate the need for maintaining explicit state-machines (the main argument against event-driven programming) while keeping the memory overhead very low (the main argument against threads). Protothreads (unlike traditional threads) are stack-less and their memory overhead is very small (only two bytes per protothread).

For more details, you can read the Protothreads SenSys 2006 paper ..... here

You can download and use the protothreads library ... here

Protothreads are already gaining some popularity, Google lists some 13,300 results for Protothreads; here are a few interesting links:

Slashdot | Protothreads and Other Wicked C Tricks
The venerable Jack Ganssle talks about Protothreads in his Embedded Musings
Framework Lab ported Protothreads to Objective-C
Protothreads Library 1.3 Released (OSNews)

Erdős Number

2006-08-03T23:40:50Z

I found out about Erdos Numbers from my alma mater faculty Arif Zaman - the father of Random Number Generation (Rand() in programming languages). After seeing the list of famous people with finite Erdos numbers I got curious about my own Erdos number (if it was not infinite). Let me explain Erdos numbers a bit;

Paul Erdős is the only person with an Erdos number 0
Anyone who has published a paper with Paul Erdős has Erdos number 1
So, Arif Zaman has an Erdos number 4 because he published a paper with George Marsaglia who published a paper with George P. H. Styan who published a paper with Paul Erdős.

The Erdos number is basically a measure of research collaborations taking Paul Erdős as the center. The Erdos Number project found that all winners of the prestigious Mathematics Awards (e.g. the Fields Medal) have finite Erdos numbers and also most Nobel laureates have finite Erdos numbers as well. In other words this shows that the research circles are smaller than what we imagine them to be e.g.

Albert Einstein (Physics) has Erdos 2,
John Nash (Economics) has Erdos 4,
Stephen Hawking (Cosmology) has Erdos 4

The online collaborative distance search page was not so useful in calculating my Erdos number primarily because I am not a Mathematician or a Theoretical Computer Scientist. So I had to manually calculate my Erdos paths and find the limit on the Erdos number (I had to find manual paths to someone recognized by the Erdos project database and reduce the overall path length as much as possible). Here are some paths I found (listing only one example path for each Erdos number):

Erdos 7 Path: Muneeb Ali ------ Joseph Polastre ------ David Culler [Culler is recognized as Erdos 5, result here]
Erdos 6 Path: Muneeb Ali ------ Koen Langendoen ------ Frans Kaashoek [Kaashoek is recognized as Erdos 4, result here]
Erdos 5 Path: Muneeb Ali ------ Kay Römer ------ Friedemann Mattern [Mattern is recognized as Erdos 3, result here]

So my Erdos number is 5, which means that from my co-author index on the DBLP Bibliography Server after 5 clicks you should be able to see Paul Erdös.