Bianca's homepage (original) (raw)

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About me

Bianca is a full professor and Canada Research Chair in the Computer Science Department at the University of Toronto and a member of the computer systems and networks group . She is also currently serving as associate department chair in the Computer and Mathematical Sciences Department at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Before joining UofT, she spent 2 years as a post-doc at Carnegie Mellon University working with Garth Gibson. She received her doctorate from the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University under the direction of Mor Harchol-Balter. She is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, the recipient of the Outstanding Young Canadian Computer Science Prize of the Canadian Association for Computer Science, an Ontario Early Researcher Award, an NSERC Accelerator Award, a two-time winner of the IBM PhD fellowship and her work has won five best paper awards, one best presentation award and two Test of Time Awards. She has served on numerous program committees and has co-chaired the TPCs of Systor 2020, Usenix FAST'14, ACM Sigmetrics'14 and IEEE NAS'11. Her work on the reliability of hard drives, solid state drives and DRAM have been featured in articles at a number of news sites, including Computerworld, Wired, Slashdot, PCWorld, StorageMojo and eWEEK.

Bianca's research focuses on the design, implementation and analysis of computer systems, especially large-scale systems, storage systems and data centers. Her current interests mostly evolve around system reliability and resource allocation, with a focus on applying techniques from data mining, statistics and machine learning to better understand and improve computer systems. Much of her work is done in collaboration with industry partners, currently including Microsoft, Google and NetApp.

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Prospective students

I am recruiting exceptional students interested in joining my group. My group's current projects are in the general areas of resource allocation and scheduling in data centers and reliability of large-scale systems and storage systems. The ideal student is interested in applying analytical techniques from areas like machine learning, data mining, queuing theory, game theory, coding theory, etc., to real-world problems in computer systems and/or also has a keen interest in computer system design and implementation.

If you decide to contact me about available positions, please include information on the type of projects you are interested in and why you are considering joining my group. Faculty are receiving a large number of emails from prospective students and if your email does not contain any personalized information it will likely be deleted as spam.

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News

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Current Research

In my current work, I am particularly interested in system reliability and resource allocation and scheduling in data centres. A common thread connecting much of my work is that I like to start with measurements in real production systems to characterize the underlying problems in detail. During this process I often make unexpected discoveries, where systems behave/fail differently from what researchers or operators commonly assume. I then use these insights to derive better solutions to problems. In my past work, I have for example measured and analyzed systems at Google, Microsoft, Network Appliances and national laboratories, such as Los Alamos National Lab.

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Publications

The list below is unfortunately very much out of date. For a more up-to-date list of publications see Google Scholar.

Conferences and journals (out of date)

Book chapters

Patents

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