With Ghazal Sadeghian at her graduation ceremony. Ghazal, my first master's student, wrote her thesis on a task offloading system (UnFaaSener) that migrates serverless functions to non-serverless hosts. Ghazal is job hunting. You should reach out to her: ca.linkedin.com/in/ghazal-sade…

I often wish systems papers had titles like biology papers: clear, descriptive sentences that highlight the core novelty. It's frustrating when a paper title has broad promises (e.g., sustainable cloud systems) but turns out to focus on a specific service when you get to page 3.

Indeed, a great program with an exciting lineup of papers! My lab's first sustainability paper is here too, and we have multiple ongoing sustainability projects. Cannot wait to learn from others active in the sustainable computing area and share ideas.

Join the artifact evaluation committee for IISWC'24! Experiencing the AE process behind the scenes is very valuable for your own submissions! The review period is July 24 - Aug 6. Interested? Email Sagar: [email protected]

So proud of my team for an accepted SOSP paper. Special thanks to our champion reviewer, and those two open-minded reviewers who increased their grade post rebuttal. (contrary to popular belief, rebuttal is not always futile.)

The tentative program for the 2024 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC) is out: iiswc.org/iiswc2024/prog… Excited to welcome you all to UBC soon (Sep 15-17). Remember to register by the 8/31 early deadline: iiswc.org/iiswc2024/reg.…

IISWC 2024 is at the Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre, UBC Vancouver, 15-17 Sept. Learn from experts on workload characterization and its role in future tech. Register here: bit.ly/4g9XjY3 #IISWC2024 #TechInnovation #Computing #Networking

Proud of Arshia (Arshia Moghimi). He led building a serverless autoconfiguration tool (Parrotfish, SoCC '23, github.com/ubc-cirrus-lab…), and significantly contributed to a serverless compliance tool (IEEE S&P '25). He was also with UBC’s Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC) doing notable work with Amazon Web Services on campus.

Now that things have settled, I can share more. This system (Caribou) pushes the boundaries of geospatial shifting for cloud systems for greenhouse gas reduction. 💚🌎 Paper available here: cirrus.ece.ubc.ca/papers/sosp24_… And the system is open sourced: github.com/ubc-cirrus-lab…

SoCC'24 promises to be great. It will be held at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, *Nov 20-22*, and has an amazing program with 63 papers (most ever!), single track over 3 days. Did I mention it is also the cheapest ever? $150 registration for students! Hope to see you there!

ASPLOS Steering Committee solicits community input on the multi-deadline review model first implemented in 2023. As our community continues to grow, we seek guidance on how to scale conference review. Please read the SIGARCH blog post for more info: sigarch.org/evaluating-the…

This year, ACM SoCC had a record high submitted and accepted paper count. Great job to PC chairs, Neeraja Yadwadkar and Peter Alvaro, and the entire PC for the hard work.

Don’t choose PhD programs by rankings—they may not be a good fit for you (& everyone applies there!) Instead, focus on potential advisors. How to find them? 1. Pick your top 20-40 favorite papers 2. Find the authors in academic positions 3. Apply to their schools Good luck!🍀

I'm on the faculty market and at #NeurIPS!👩‍🏫 homes.cs.washington.edu/~niloofar/ I work on privacy, memorization, and emerging challenges in data use for AI. Privacy isn't about PII removal but about controlling the flow of information contextually, & LLMs are still really bad at this!

Thanks dear reviewer for: - praising our paper - saying "this is a strong paper" - providing no weakness except for small font sizes in some figures ... then giving an overall merit of "weak" accept (3/5)!!! 😑 IMHO, lukewarm reviews are worse than well-founded negatives.

Many in my field have migrated to other platforms, including Bluesky, for good reasons. While I'll continue limited use of X for now, I'm also joining Bluesky to better connect with my community. If you're there, let's reconnect: bsky.app/profile/mshahr…

We have opened the call for application to UIUC+ Summer Research Program for undergrads: go.illinois.edu/UIUCPlus-SRP. Please apply or spread the words. The mentors are 12 UIUC PLSE professors/alumni. The (soft) deadline is February 28th, where we start reviewing the applications.

RT appreciated! We're assembling the Artifact Evaluation Committee (AEC) for USENIX Association OSDI+ATC 2025. JOIN US! It'll be fun, useful (help understand research artifacts of accepted papers), with a manageable load (1-2 papers per AEC member based on research interests).

It's exciting to witness the evolution of serverless! What was just running simple code a few years ago (FaaS), is now a lot broader. The addition of GPUs to serverless infrastructure over the past year or two makes a lot of sense and has enabled more diverse applications.