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University of Wisconsin-Madison
tack@cs.wisc.edu
My name is Andres Jaan Tack, and I'm a first-year Ph.D graduate student in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I've chosen to focus my studies on operating systems, and am a lucky student of Mike Swift (perhaps best-known for his work in driver isolation). Previous to my time in Madison, I was an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois, where I was deeply involved with their ACM student chapter and worked on several successful projects. Most notably, I was one of the creators of Scheedule.com, and I was an integral part of Reflections|Projections, a computing conference which I eventually chaired in the fall of 2007.
As a systems researcher, my work thus far has been connected with emerging transactional memory implementations, assisting Haris Volos. Specifically, as my part of our recently published paper (xCalls: Safe I/O in Memory Transactions), I spent a great deal of time working with the Intel Software Transactional Memory (STM) Prototype compiler, replacing different subsystems of the BIND DNS server with transactionalized versions and measuring performance results. The results will be published in paper form at EuroSys 2009.
In general, my interests in operating systems rest with issues of concurrency and parallelism. Transactional memory is one example of an emerging technology which I believe will require operating system support to be truly viable. I am also increasingly fascinated with OS treatment of heterogeneous processing units (like the IBM Cell, found in the Playstation 3), as well as the use of high-level programming language constructs to improve performance (as in K42). Computers are becoming faster, and our programming languages are getting better; I want to be at the meeting of those two trends, where our operating systems make neat and efficient programming easier to get right.
I enjoy, as my primary hobby, playing music. Since shortly before college, I play the euphonium and the trombone, and I've since played in numerous ensembles. I especially enjoy playing in british brass bands, and I am currently a euphonium player and board member of the Madison Brass Band.
I am, lastly, ethnically half-Estonian, having grown up with the language at my grandparents' house in my home town of Lake Forest. Foreign languages are a special fascination of mine; I'm currently learning French, in response to an enchanting trip to europe this past summer, and I've been steadily re-learning Estonian, my first language, for about a year now.