Friday, Feb. 7, 2025
10:20 – 11:10 a.m. (CST)
ETB 1020
Dr. Venkat Arun
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Computer Science
University of Texas, Austin
Title: “Synthesizing Provably Performant Controllers for Networked Systems”
Abstract
Computer systems rely on various controllers to allocate CPU, memory, network and storage resources. The quality of their decision making significantly impacts system performance, sometimes degrading it by over 10x. Poor controller decisions also lead to performance variability that makes it difficult to build real-time applications and highly distributed computations. Controller design is hard due to incomplete system observability and the lack of an accurate system model. This makes it difficult to formally define, let alone guarantee, desired performance properties. As a result, these controllers are designed largely through empirical trial-and-error.
In this talk, I will discuss a set of principles and tools that we have developed to not only verify, but also synthesize controllers with provable performance guarantees. I will focus on the controllers involved in low-latency video streaming and show how program synthesis techniques can uncover novel solutions overlooked by human designers for decades.
Biography
Venkat Arun is an assistant professor at UT Austin. His research seeks to enable networked systems to support the next generation of applications. His past work has spanned internet congestion control, video streaming, privacy-preserving computation, wireless networks, and mobile systems. A common theme across these is the use of theoretical ideas to gain insights into the real-world that would have been difficult to discover otherwise. He has received multiple dissertation and best paper awards and the Marconi society young scholar award. He received his PhD at MIT.