I started my graduate studies in Computer Science the Fall Semester of 2003, after being awarded a Fulbright fellowship to be part of the MSCS program. I received my MSCS in 2005, and currently continue with my goal of achieving a PhD in Computer Science. My research work is being done under Dr. Indranil Gupta's guidance, as part of the Distributed Protocols Research Group.
My research is focused on Application-Influenced Overlays. By making the interface between the application layer and the overlay a little fuzzy, we expect to provide more powerful services and new ways to design overlays. My last publication, AVMON: Optimal and Scalable Discovery of Consistent Availability Monitoring Overlays for Distributed Systems, shows how to build a monitoring overlay where the issue of colluding and selfish peers is addressed, thus allowing monitoring reports to be reliable in an untrusted node scenario. Using AVMON as underlying infrastructure, we are currently working on AVMem, an availability-aware membership protocol, useful to provide management operations such as multicasting or anycasting to nodes within an availability range.
Previous research involves endemic migratory replication on large scale unstructured overlay networks, ensuring high availability --even under attack-- exploiting replica untraceability, and the design and implementation of two systems: Folklore and Reactive-Folklore. In a collaboration with INRIA we designed and implemented a malleable unstructured overlay, exploiting small-world network properties, which allows applications to influence the structure of the overlay to allow efficient group communications. This malleable overlay can be used to implement distributed management software, games, or whiteboards.
My undergraduate studies in Computer Science were done in my home country, Panamá. I graduated Magna Cum Laude, fourth place overall. The research projects I participated in while in Panama --PKI and Digital Government, Multimedia Networks and IP Multicasting, Mobile IPv6-- were part of my involvement with Panama's SENACYT, National Secretariat of Science and Technology.
Before coming to Champaign-Urbana I had the chance to work in two small high-tech startups that were based in the USA, in Panama's Cable & Wireless, and SENACYT. As a musician I recorded a CD with my prog-rock group, Talisman. Among my hobbies are scuba diving, mixed martial arts, and trying to deadlift 500lb by the end of December (95lb to go!).
Nota para Panameños: Si tienes interés en una Maestría o PhD, mi página, Estudios Graduado en Computer Science para Panameños, tiene los detalles.