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• About Me

• Curriculum Vitae

• Publications

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Curriculum Vitae

Also available as a PDF.

Contact Information

• Current Address

  3001 Triverton Pike Dr. #101, Fitchburg, WI 53711

• Phone Number

  (847) 302-0450

• E-mail

  tack@cs.wisc.edu

Objective

To take part in the design and implementation of systems projects with an exploratory focus.

Education

• University of Wisconsin at Madison

  • Seeking

    Doctor of Philosophy

  • Graduation Expected

    May, 2013

  • Major

    Computer Science

  • GPA

    3.75 / 4.0

• University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign

  • Degree

    Bachelor of Science in Engineering

  • Graduated

    May, 2008

  • Major

    Computer Science

  • GPA

    3.51 / 4.0 (Honors)

Publications

• xCalls: Safe I/O in Memory Transactions
  (To Appear in EuroSys 2009)

  • Haris Volos
  • Andres Jaan Tack
  • Neelam Goyal
  • Michael Swift
  • Adam Welc

  The xCalls API allows the efficient use of memory transactions that produce I/O. I joined this project when I joined the Wisconsin CS department, and aided in its subsequent acceptance at EuroSys by constructing experiments to test its performance characteristics.

  Personal Contributions

  • Converted log and memory subsystems in the BIND DNS server to use Intel STM in place of locks.
  • Constructed a script to systematically test patches for performance impact.
  • Demonstrated performance benefits: 35% over mutexes, 15% over irrevocable transactions.

Other Systems Research

• Research Assistant for Michael Swift
  Since 1st Semester, 2008-2009

  • Focusing on the use of transactional memory in systems applications.
  • Joined and assisted with accepted paper, "xCalls: ..." with Haris Volos (see "Publications").
  • Continuing to explore concurrency bugs, transactional memory, and the use of condition variables.

• Heterobalance: Linux Scheduling for Heterogeneous Multi-core Systems
  cs736: Advanced Operating Systems, Fall 2008

  • Explored the relationship between Linux interactive (or I/O-bound) processes and heterogeneous CPU scheduling and interactive load balancing.
  • Intuition: I/O-bound tasks get less from fast CPUs, and should be scheduled on slower cores.
  • Designed and implemented a replacement load balancer for Linux 2.6, following our intuition.
  • Demonstrated that, in several cases, our best performance was better than Linux CFS.

• Encoding with Packet Timings
  Undergraduate Research Assistant with Todd P. Coleman, University of Illinois, 2007-2008

  • Wrote a Linux kernel module to precisely and covertly control the timings of IP datagrams.
  • Continuing to serve in an advisory capacity, issues and constraints from the OS.

• Collaborative Text Editor
  Private Undergraduate Research, Univ. of Illinois SIGSoft student chapter, 2006-2007

  • Designer and chief implementor of a distributed collaborative text editor.
  • Designed an expansion of the dOPT algorithm, serving arbitrary-length replacement operations.
  • Won 3rd place in the Siebel Center Computing Habitat competition.

Software Development and Project Management

• Association for Computing Machinery (Illinois Student Chapter)
  ACM General Chair, 2007-2008
  Reflections | Projections Computing Conference Chair, 2006-2007
  ACM Corporate Committee Chair, 2005-2006
  SIGSoft President/Chair, Fall 2005 - 2006 (emeritus)
  

  • Chief organizing member of the 2007 R|P conference, a $30,000 student-organized event.
  • Principal coordinator of the 2006 R|P job fair, hosting 24 companies with a small team.
  • Lead designer and developer for CTE, supervising six other developers.
  • Founder and lead developer of the Scheedule project: a web-based class scheduling system for Illinois which currently receives over 6,000 unique hits each semester.
  • Delivered tutorials on web technologies periodically.

• Microsoft Corporation
  SDE/Test Intern, Windows Kernel/Platform Architecture, May 2007 - August 2007
  Program Manager Intern, Windows Lifecycle Group, May 2006 - August 2006

  • Designed and implemented a remote test framework for the Windows boot environment.
  • Wrote a partial VT-220 emulator and a UTF-8 to Unicode Converter using C++.
  • Owned 2 specifications for the Windows "Vienna" Basics program, including new internal tools.

• Scheedule.com
  Founder, Fall 2006 - Fall 2008

  • Presented the original application concept and managed the project through the first prototype.
  • Designed the algorithm used to calculate possible schedules.
  • Implemented mechanisms for course information retrieval, scraping web pages programmatically.
  • Evaluated causes of pathological performance on the application back-end.

• University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
  Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, 2006-2007

  • Taught Data Structures and Programming Studio, eventually leading about 80 students.
  • Designed instructional material for Data Structures with C++ in a lab environment.

All content is Copyright 2009 Andres Jaan Tack unless otherwise noted.