Declarative Programming in Software-defined Networks: Past, Present, and the Road Ahead

Speaker:        Prof. Boon Thau Loo
                University of Pennsylvania

Title:          "Declarative Programming in Software-defined Networks:
                 Past, Present, and the Road Ahead"

Date:           Thursday, 18 July 2019

Time:           10:00am to 12 noon

Venue:          Room 4472 (via lift no. 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Declarative networking is a technology that has transformed the way
software-defined networking programs are written and deployed. Instead of
writing low level code, network operators can write high level
specifications that can be verified and compiled into actual
implementations. This talk describes 15 years of research in declarative
networking, tracing its roots as a domain specific language, to its role
in verification, debugging of networks, and commercial use as a
declarative network analytics engine. The talk concludes with a peek into
the future of declarative networking programming, in the area of
examples-guided network synthesis, and infrastructure-aware declarative
query processing.


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Biography:

Boon Thau Loo is a Professor in the Computer and Information Science (CIS)
department at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a secondary
appointment in the Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) department. He
is also the Associate Dean of the Master's and Professional Programs,
where he oversees all masters programs at the School of Engineering and
Applied Science. He is also currently the interim director of the
Distributed Systems Laboratory (DSL), an inter-disciplinary systems
research lab bringing together researchers in networking, distributed
systems, and security. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science
from the University of California at Berkeley in 2006. Prior to his Ph.D,
he received his M.S. degree from Stanford University in 2000, and his B.S.
degree with highest honors from University of California-Berkeley in 1999.
His research focuses on distributed data management systems,
Internet-scale query processing, and the application of data-centric
techniques and formal methods to the design, analysis and implementation
of networked systems. He was awarded the 2006 David J. Sakrison Memorial
Prize for the most outstanding dissertation research in the Department of
EECS at University of California-Berkeley, and the 2007 ACM SIGMOD
Dissertation Award. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award (2009), the
Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Award
(2012) and Penn's Emerging Inventor of the year award (2018). He has
published 100+ peer reviewed publications and has supervised twelve Ph.D.
dissertations. His graduated Ph.D. students include 3 tenure-track faculty
members and winners of 4 dissertation awards.

In addition to his academic work, he actively participates in
entrepreneurial activities involving technology transfer. He is the Chief
Scientist at Termaxia, a software-defined storage startup based in
Philadelphia that he co-founded in 2015. Termaxia offers low-power
high-performance software-defined storage solutions targeting the
exabyte-scale storage market, with customers in the US, China, and
Southeast Asia. Prior to Termaxia, he co-founded Gencore Systems (Netsil)
in 2014, a cloud performance analytics company that spun out of his
research team at Penn, commercializing his research on the Scalanytics
declarative analytics platform. The company was successfully acquired by
Nutanix Inc in 2018. He has also published several papers with industry
partners (e.g. AT&T, HP Labs, Intel, LogicBlox, Microsoft) applying
research on real-world systems that result in actual production deployment
and patents.