About

The research in our lab uses advanced data science techniques to understand how water, plants, geology and climate interact in a tightly coupled system – and how humans are changing this system.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Operating system
• Artificial Intelligence
• Embedded system
• Telecommunications
• Distributed computing
• Data science
• Business

Selected publications

• RIoTstore: Resilient Data Storage for Spatial IoT Applications

  2025-12-03

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• xGFabric: Coupling Sensor Networks and HPC Facilities with Private 5G Wireless Networks for Real-Time Digital Agriculture

  2025-11-07 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Advanced scientific applications require coupling distributed sensor networks with centralized high-performance computing facilities. Citrus Under Protective Screening (CUPS) exemplifies this need in digital agriculture, where citrus research facilities are instrumented with numerous sensors monitoring environmental conditions and detecting protective screening damage. CUPS demands access to computational fluid dynamics codes for modeling environmental conditions and guiding real-time interventions like water application or robotic repairs. These computing domains have contrasting properties: sensor networks provide low-performance, limited-capacity, unreliable data access, while high-performance facilities offer enormous computing power through high-latency batch processing. Private 5G networks present novel capabilities addressing this challenge by providing low latency, high throughput, and reliability necessary for near-real-time coupling of edge sensor networks with HPC simulations. This work presents xGFabric, an end-to-end system coupling sensor networks with HPC facilities through Private 5G networks. The prototype connects remote sensors via 5G network slicing to HPC systems, enabling real-time digital agriculture simulation.

  PublisherDOI

• Leveraging Dataflow as an Intermediate Representation for Portable Edge Deployments

  2025-05-19 · 1 citations

  article

  In this paper, we investigate how to leverage the dataflow programming model to facilitate the deployment of multi-scale (sensors-edge-cloud) IoT applications end-to-end. Today, IoT deployment management is error-prone, tedious, and manual - yet deployment configuration can have a significant effect on application energy consumption and performance. Our approach, called deployment-as-code, provides programming directives that distribute application components across heterogeneous devices (including microcontrollers), aid management of the application lifecycle, and facilitate optimization in ways not available from traditional programming systems. We implement our approach by extending an open-source dataflow programming system for IoT, which we use to evaluate the energy consumption of different deployment configurations and IoT applications.

  PublisherDOI

• Airflow Modeling for Citrus under Protective Screens

  Sensors · 2024-09-25 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  This study explores the development and validation of an airflow model to support climate prediction for Citrus Under Protective Screens (CUPS) in California. CUPS is a permeable screen structure designed to protect a field of citrus trees from large insects including the vector that causes the devastating citrus greening disease. Because screen structures modify the environmental conditions (e.g., temperature, relative humidity, airflow), farm management and treatment strategies (e.g., pesticide spraying events) must be modified to account for these differences. Toward this end, we develop a model for predicting wind speed and direction in a commercial-scale research CUPS, using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. We describe the model and validate it in two ways. In the first, we model a small-scale replica CUPS under controlled conditions and compare modeled and measured airflow in and around the replica structure. In the second, we model the full-scale CUPS and use historical measurements to "back test" the model's accuracy. In both settings, the modeled airflow values fall within statistical confidence intervals generated from the corresponding measurements of the conditions being modeled. These findings suggest that the model can aid decision support and smart agriculture solutions for farmers as they adapt their farm management practices for CUPS structures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Just the FACTS: Flexible and Energy Efficient Federated Access Control for the Edge

  2024-09-02

  article

  We present Federated Access ConTrol Support (FACTS) for flexible and energy efficient IoT edge deployments. FACTS is a hybrid approach to access control that couples capability support over MQTT with TLS based security to reduce the power consumption of IoT deployments. Capability systems are lightweight and enable fine-grained access control using cryptographically secure tokens. TLS provides number of security guarantees but is expensive in terms of both time and energy when employed by resource constrained devices at the edge. By combining the two, FACTS enables IoT deployment administrators to decide where and when to use encrypted communication for access control to achieve the best trade-off between data privacy, performance, and energy efficiency. We evaluate FACTS for different deployment scenarios and show that it improves both energy use and performance relative to existing approaches.

  PublisherDOI

• Distributed Dataflow Across the Edge-Cloud Continuum

  2024-07-07 · 2 citations

  article

  Internet of Things (IoT) applications span the edge-cloud continuum to form multiscale distributed systems. The heterogeneity that defines this architecture, coupled with the asynchronous, event-triggered and failure-prone nature of these deployments create significant programming and maintenance challenges for developers of IoT applications. To address this impediment to innovation, we present Lam-1nar’a dataflow programming model for IoT applications implemented using a novel log-based and concurrent runtime system that spans all resource scales. We describe the properties that underpin Laminar'sdesign and compare it to a lower-level event-based approach. We show that Laminar'sdataflow model hides many of the complexities of “lock-free” event-driven programming. Through an empirical evaluation of Laminar,we find its design and implementation are both more straightforward for developers and more performant.

  PublisherDOI

• Energy-Aware IoT Deployment Planning

  2024-05-07 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Increasingly, the Internet of Things (IoT) is evolving toward an architecture consisting of sensing and actuation devices communicating with edge computers and storage systems. These "edge deployments" localize communication, computation, and storage for security, increased efficiencies (e.g. lower latency response), and reliability. In settings where electrical power infrastructure is lacking, however, these deployments typically rely on renewable energy and battery storage for power.

  PublisherDOI

• Ambience: an operating system for IoT microservices

  Journal of Edge Computing · 2024-09-05 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Increasingly, the heterogeneity of devices and software that comprise the Internet of Things (IoT) is impeding innovation. IoT deployments amalgamate compute, storage, networking capabilities provisioned at multiple resource scales, from low-cost, resource constrained microcontrollers to resource rich public cloud servers. To support these different resource scales and capabilities, the operating systems (OSs) that manage them have also diverged significantly. Because the OS is the “API” for the hardware, this proliferation is causing a lack of portability across devices and systems, complicating development, deployment, management, and optimization of IoT applications. To address these impediments, we investigate a new, “clean slate” OS design and implementation that hides this heterogeneity via a new set of abstractions specifically for supporting microservices as a universal application programming model in IoT contexts. The operating system, called Ambience, supports IoT applications structured as microservices and facilitates their portability, isolation, and deployment time optimization. We discuss the design and implementation of Ambience, evaluate its performance, and demonstrate its portability using both microbenchmarks and end-to-end IoT deployments. Our results show that Ambience can scale down to 64MHz microcontrollers and up to modern x86_64 servers, while providing similar or better performance than comparable commodity operating systems on the same range of hardware platforms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• MSDBench: Understanding the Performance Impact of Isolation Domains on Microservice-Based IoT Deployments

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Building Resilience to Climate Driven Extreme Events with Computing Innovations: A Convergence Accelerator Report

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2023-01-24

  preprintOpen access

  In 2022, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computing Research Association (CRA) to conduct a workshop to frame and scope a potential Convergence Accelerator research track on the topic of "Building Resilience to Climate-Driven Extreme Events with Computing Innovations". The CRA's research visioning committee, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), took on this task, organizing a two-part community workshop series, beginning with a small, in-person brainstorming meeting in Denver, CO on 27-28 October 2022, followed by a virtual event on 10 November 2022. The overall objective was to develop ideas to facilitate convergence research on this critical topic and encourage collaboration among researchers across disciplines. Based on the CCC community white paper entitled Computing Research for the Climate Crisis, we initially focused on five impact areas (i.e. application domains that are both important to society and critically affected by climate change): Energy, Agriculture, Environmental Justice, Transportation, and Physical Infrastructure.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• CSR:Medium: Systems and Software Research for Compute-Intensive Cloud Computing

  NSF · $1.0M · 2010–2016

• CSR: Medium: Next-Generation Cloud Federation via a Geo-Distributed Datastore

  NSF · $1.2M · 2017–2023

• CSR: CC: Small: Collaborative Research: Language and Runtime Support for Large-Scale Data Analytics

  NSF · $247k · 2012–2016

• Automatic Linux Customization and Optimization for High-Performance Scientific Applications

  NSF · $550k · 2004–2008

• CNS Core: Medium: Detroit – A New End-to-end System for Practical and Accessible IoT

  NSF · $1.2M · 2021–2026

Frequent coauthors

• Rich Wolski

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  190 shared

• Wei-Tsung Lin

  National Cheng Kung University

  105 shared

• F Omer

  University of Messina

  100 shared

• Galinac Tihana

  University of Washington

  100 shared

• Ali M. Hayajneh

  Hashemite University

  100 shared

• Kirsty J. Park

  University of Stirling

  100 shared

• Issa Iot

  South African National Biodiversity Institute

  100 shared

• Judit Kumuthini

  100 shared

Labs

• Tague Team LabPI

Awards & honors

• Seattle Public Library 'Making Visible the Invisible' perman…
• John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Visual Arts (2016)
• Creative Capital Foundation support
• Daniel Langlois Foundation for the Arts, Science and Technol…
• Canada Council for the Arts support