Venkatraman Ramakrishna
Phone # -- Cell : (310) 916-7326 ; Office : (310) 267-5645
Email : vrama_AT_cs_DOT_ucla_DOT_edu, vrama_AT_lever_DOT_cs_DOT_ucla_DOT_edu, vramaiitkgp_AT_yahoo_DOT_co_DOT_in
Web Page : http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~vrama
(To see the latest version of my resume, click
here)
Educational Qualifications
·
Currently enrolled in the PhD program at the Computer Science Department in UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles)
– Current GPA - 3.85
·
Completed MS (Master of Science) in Computer Science at UCLA in March
2003
·
Obtained B.Tech. (Bachelor of Technology) with Hons. in Computer
Science and Engineering from IIT (Indian
Institute of Technology), Kharagpur in
Research Interests
Distributed Computing, Ubiquitous
Computing, Security, Operating Systems, Networking and
Publications
[1]
Vincent
Ferreria, Alexey Rudenko, Kevin Eustice, Richard Guy, V. Ramakrishna, and Peter
Reiher, "Panda: Middleware to Provide the Benefits of Active Networks to
Legacy Applications," DANCE 02 , May 2002. [pdf]
[2] V.
Ramakrishna,
Max Robinson, Kevin Eustice and Peter Reiher. “An Active Self-Optimizing
Multiplayer Gaming Architecture”. In the proceedings of the
Fifth Annual International Workshop on
Active Middleware Services (AMS 2003),
[3]
V. Ramakrishna, Rakesh Kumar and Anupam
Basu. "Switching Activity Minimization by Efficient Instruction Set
Architecture Design". In the proceedings of the 45th IEEE International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS2002),
[4]
Kevin Eustice, Leonard
Kleinrock, Shane Markstrum, Gerald Popek, Venkatraman
Ramakrishna, Peter Reiher . “Enabling Secure Ubiquitous Interactions ”. In
the proceedings of the 1st International
Workshop on Middleware for Pervasive and Ad-Hoc Computing (Co-located with
Middleware 2003),
[5]
Kevin Eustice, Leonard
Kleinrock, Shane Markstrum, Gerald Popek, Venkatraman
Ramakrishna, Peter Reiher . “Wi-Fi Nomads: The Case for Quarantine,
Examination and Decontamination ”. In the proceedings of the New Security Paradigms Workshop 2003, August 2003 in
[6] V. Ramakrishna, Max Robinson, Kevin Eustice and Peter Reiher, “An Active Self-Optimizing Multiplayer Gaming Architecture”. In the Cluster Computing Journal, Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Issue: Volume 9, Number 2, "Special Issue: Autonomic Computing," Guest Editor: Manish Parashar, pp. 201-215. [pdf]
[7] V. Ramakrishna, Kevin Eustice and Matthew Schnaider, "Approaches for Ensuring Security and Privacy in Unplanned Ubiquitous Computing Interactions," Proceedings of the International Workshop on Research Challenges in Security and Privacy for Mobile and Wireless Networks (WSPWN06), March 15-16, 2006, Miami, FL. [pdf]
[8] V. Ramakrishna, Kevin Eustice, and Peter Reiher, "Negotiating Agreements Using Policies in Ubiquitous Computing Scenarios," In the Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA'07), June 19-20, 2007, Newport Beach, California. [pdf]
[9] Kevin Eustice, V. Ramakrishna, Alison Walker, Matthew Schnaider, Nam Nguyen and Peter Reiher, "nan0sphere: Location-Driven Fiction for Groups of Users," In the Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCII 2007), 22-27 July 2007, Beijing, P.R.China. [pdf]
[10] V. Ramakrishna, Kevin Eustice and Matthew Schnaider, "Chapter 8: Approaches for Ensuring Security and Privacy in Unplanned Ubiquitous Computing Interactions," To appear in Mobile and Wireless Networks Security and Privacy," Edited Volume by Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, Ed: Makki et. al. 2007.
[1] # 41118:
“Stateful Packet Content Matching Mechanisms in IXP Network Processors”
[2] # 41258: “Tagged Content Matching Mechanisms
in IXP Network Processors”.
Research and Work Experience
I
am currently working as a Research Assistant in the LASR (Laboratory for Advanced Systems Research)
research group at the Computer Science Department in UCLA.
Current Research
o
Panoply Ubiquitous Computing Project (2003 - present) – This is an ongoing work in
the LASR group. Panoply [4] is a framework for
pervasive and ubiquitous computing that ensures that devices can seamlessly interoperate
anywhere, and at any time, security being a primary concern. Devices can be
grouped, based on our spheres of
influence model, each sphere being able to scope policy and context.
Panoply handles policy management and session mediation to ensure secure
interaction within spheres. My research goals are in the area of policy
management, specifically policy
negotiation between mutually unknown devices, backed by a fine-grained
trust model, synthesis of policies and presenting an understandable
context-based view of system policy to a user.
We currently
have a basic Panoply prototype built in our lab, with the ability to create
spheres and associate with them. My contribution to this is a policy manager
that can perform simple negotiation using requests, offers and
counter-requests, all guided by local, private policy rules.
Early Panoply
research involved the QED (Quarantine, Examination and Decontamination)
paradigm [5], which ensures that security is built
from the grassroots, and is a big step towards realizing a strong trust model.
QED is a framework that is useful in the general networking context, and not
restricted to pervasive environments; we have designed a fully functional
prototype at LASR that can ensure safety of mobile devices entering the local
network and the network itself.
Internship at
Intel Corporation,
o
Content Inspection Framework for an Intel IXP-based firewall
(June-September 2004) – My project over the summer
involved designing and implementing a packet content inspection framework for
use in an IXP 2400 and 2800 based stateful firewall. Packet inspection involves looking at packet payload to detect
certain patterns that could indicate viruses, worms or intrusion attempts, with
suitable action taken based on firewall rules. Our performance target was to be
able to inspect packet content at line rates. My work in this project involved
research in string searching algorithms, design, implementation and testing of
multi-pattern searching algorithms on the IXP Developers Workbench v3.51. Our
design allowed for patterns spanning multiple packets, and associated tags,
such as case dependence, offset and depth) was tagged with the input patterns.
This work
resulted in multiple IDFs (Invention
Disclosures), two of which have been patented, indicated above in the “Patents” section.
Prior Research at LASR (September
2001-2003), towards Master of Science degree
o
Panda Active Networks project
(2001 - 2002) – Panda is a middleware
support system for active networks that allows both aware and unaware
applications to benefit from the superior adaptability and performance of
active networks. It performs planning and negotiation of active network agent
deployment, adapts to failures and other major changes in network
characteristics, and handles automatic deployment of agent code to active
network nodes.
My work with Panda involved investigating how Panda could provide
application-aware adaptation features. This involved designing an API for Panda
through which users and applications could interact with the middleware, obtain
system and network information and control the adaptation process. Details
about the Panda project can be obtained from [1].
o
Multiplayer Games in Active Networks (2002 - 2003) – This work investigated
possible uses that a wide-scale deployed active network could provide to real
world distributed applications. Multiplayer games are one such class of
applications; a multicast tree-based packet distribution framework was
designed, using active networks, to adapt legacy games like DOOM; the tree
could self-adjust in response to change in network conditions. Benefits were
observed over traditional peer-to-peer and client-server models. Details can be
obtained from [2] and [6].
Course projects in UCLA
o
Fault-Tolerance in Multicast Trees (2001) – Designed and implemented a
simulation framework for comparing three fault tolerance schemes for
bidirectional multicast trees.
o
Routing Security in MANETs (2002) – Investigated the efficacy of
reputation-based frameworks to provide secure routing in ad-hoc networks.
Implemented and tested such a framework for DSR in NS-2.
Senior Year Research
Project (2000-2001), towards Bachelor of Technology degree
o
Minimizing switching activity in embedded systems
using intelligent instruction coding mechanisms –We designed an instruction
coding mechanism for embedded processors that combined Huffman coding and bit
padding, and compared its performance against Gray encoding and simple binary
encoding. The experimentation procedure and results are described in more
detail in [3].
Summer
Internship at Aditi Technologies,
o
Designed and implemented a
trainee evaluation system for the company using SQL and ASP; the system collected feedback over
the web, collated it in a database and selected relevant information for
further processing in an automated fashion.
Skills
Languages
known : General Purpose (C, C++, Java) ; Functional and Logic Programming (Scheme,
Prolog) ; Query Languages (MS-SQL); HTML, JavaScript; Intel IXP microcode.
Development
tools :
ANTS active networks package, NS-2 simulation environment, MPI package for
parallel programming on a multicomputer, MS-VC++, Language Development Tools
like Lex and Yacc, Intel IXP Developers Workbench.
Operating
Systems/Platforms worked on : Linux, UNIX (Solaris, Digital UNIX), Windows(98,NT,2000,XP).
General skills
: Practical
experience in network (socket and client-server) programming, Linux kernel
programming.
Non-Technical
Skills
: ability to work in a team and
cooperate with others as demonstrated by publications in conferences and
journals with others; ability to grasp new concepts and learn new subjects very
quickly; good communication skills; have the ability to articulate views in
front of audience, experience gained from giving multiple presentations and
demonstrations during the course of my academic career; also gained experience
of working in an industry environment at Intel Corporation.
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