# Research Projects @ Grad School (2008-2013)

### Xorbas (XORing Elephants: Novel Erasure Codes for Big Data)

• Regenerating codes specially designed for data centers are being implemented over Hadoop HDFS
• Based on Facebook's implementation of HDFS-RAID
• About 2x reduction in network utilization and disk I/O during file repairs.
• Advised by Prof. Alex Dimakis.
• Appeared in VLDB 2013.
• Visit the project page.

### Network Coding for Vehicular Networks

• Network Coding applied to Vehicular Networks to minimize the delay in content retrieval.
• Obtained theoretical upper bounds on delay and showed regions where Network Coding performs better than naive distribution strategy.
• Simulated on real taxi traces to show the improvement.
• Continued the work at General Motors to test on real vehicles.
• Advised by Prof. Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Prof. Alex Dimakis and Dr. Fan Bai.
• Appeared in Infocom-Mini 2012 and journal submission under progress.

### VANETSim: A Vehicular Network SimulatorJan 2012 -- Present

• A Java based simulator primarily designed to study coded and uncoded content distribution strategies in vehicular networks.
• The goal is to simulate a city-wide network of vehicles exchanging content with one another.
• Advised by Prof. Bhaskar Krishnamachari in collaboration with General Motors R&D

### Twitter Retweet Dynamics Apr 2010 -- Aug 2011

• Using data collected from Twitter, we showed an interesting trend between the number of retweets received and the probability of retweeting by Twitter users.
• Work was presented at the 2nd Annual Annenberg Symposium and was invited to present again at the 3rd Annual Annenberg Reception.
• Future work involves characterization of Tweets based on their space-time properties, spam detection in Twitter etc.
• Advised by Prof. Antonio Ortega.

### Implementation of MapReduce Feb 2010 -- Apr 2010

• Implemented MapReduce (a framework for distributed processing) on USC's High-Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) cluster consisting of thousands of nodes, as part of a course.
• Used it to study huge network datasets.
• Course (Computer Communications, CS551) advised by Prof. John Heidemann.

### Other Projects

• Implementation of Nachos, a software that simulates a small OS, involving process management, memory management, interprocess communication, fault tolerance etc. for a course on Operating Systems.
• Flash Scheduling - proposed and analyzed a new scheduling algorithm in a multi-user communication system with varying number of users (term project for Computer Communications course).

We don't beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well - Randy Pausch