SIS-External Research Statement

My research philosophy revolves around the belief that successful systems research has to demonstrate two things: 1) a novel and interesting approach to an important research problem, and 2) usability. I strongly believe that for a system to be successful, it has to be usable by the target audience. On the other hand, a highly usable system that doesn’t advance the state of the art in any way is not particularly interesting from a research perspective either. My research style is strongly systems-oriented with a large emphasis on hands-on system implementation. A real implementation is crucial, in my opinion, for testing complicated distributed systems as the complexity inherent in these systems is incredibly hard to capture by simulation studies alone. A real implementation is also vital in validating the usability of the system. In addition, the software artifacts from such implementations are important contributions that drive future research and even product development in the area. I am also a strong proponent of collaborative research. Modern systems are so complicated that it is impossible for one person to have all the answers to every problem encountered. As such, I tend to work with about 2-4 other people, each with slightly different skills and backgrounds, to tackle a large systems problem. This multi-disciplinary approach is very apparent in all my research undertakings. I describe some of these undertakings along with avenues of future research in the next few sections. My research revolves around the theme of mobility. Around this theme, I have built clusters of research. In particular, I have research thrusts in the areas of Applications for Mobility, Understanding Mobility in Organizations, and Infrastructure for Mobility.