Professor Ravi Netravali, who recently joined UCLA’s Computer Science department after completing his PhD at MIT, had 3 papers appear in this year’s ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC), including a paper awarded best paper. Cloud computing is very popular, with systems like Amazon’s EC2, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Compute, being the platforms of choice for many new and traditional software companies. SoCC is the leading new research conference on this topic.
Professor Netravali’s papers (two with his UCLA PhD students Lana Ramjit and Pradeep Dogga and one with James Mickens, a colleague from Harvard) cover topics that vary from efficient distributed data processing to web systems to systems debugging using natural language processing. Netravali’s award paper, titled “Reverb: Speculative Debugging for Web Applications”, solves two very challenging problems – value provenance and speculative replay – in a tractable and practical way so that the tool he developed can be immediately used to help millions of web developers debug their distributed applications.
Out of 157 submissions, SoCC’s program committee selected 39 papers to include in this year’s program. Four of those papers were from UCLA. Netravali’s Reverb paper is the only award-winning paper in SoCC 2019. In addition to Professor Netravali’s three papers, the fourth UCLA paper came from Professors Miryung Kim and Harry Xu.