Hussam Abu-Libdeh

About

I am a second-year PhD student in the department of Computer Science at Cornell University. I work in the distrubted systems group and my advisor is Robbert van Renesse. I also collaborate with professors Ken Birman and Hakim Weatherspoon. Last summer I interned at Microsoft Research Labs with researchers Antony Rowstron and Paolo Costa.

I am interested in cloud computing and distributed systems in data center settings. My research so far has focused on examining how data center applications are built, and on creating primitives/building-blocks to allow us to easily build next generation data center services.

I believe that we are building data center applications with tools and principles that are more appropriate for other environments such as medium-size private networks or the Internet at large. I argue that there is benefit to be gained from redesigning our toolkit to reflect today's operating environments in data center settings and cloud computing applications.

I am also broadly intersted in other research areas such as mechanisms to provide trust guarantees in web applications users, and providing cloud-computing services on edge machines.

Papers & Posters

Teaching

I like to teach. Luckily our department allows graduate students to teach some short courses.

• In fall 2009, I taught CS 2022; Introduction to C.
• In spring 2009, I taught CS 2026; Introduction to C#.

Miscellaneous

• Co-founded Kindisoft Co. in 2005 where we created obfuscation solutions for Rich Internet Applications (RIA).
  Our company won first place in the First Arab Universities Technology Business Plan Competition organized by ASTF, and second place in the Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition (QRNEC), as well as being a top finalist in the Intel+UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition of 2006.
• In Fall 2009 I assumed the czarship of the brownbag talks at Cornell's CS department in a bloodless coup :-p. Here is the brownbag talks schedule.
• In Spring 2009 I maintained the schedule for the distributed systems group talks here.
• eSheet.net is a small web app I built to track shared expenses between roommates and co-workers.
• I blog on computer science topics with my colleague Renato Paes Leme here.