Kenneth P. BirmanProfessor

At present Professor Birman is working on a new software platform for reliable cloud computing to support use of machine-learning in cloud computing environments that track sensor data and need to take actions under tight time pressure. One concrete example involves managing the smart power grid, a topic he is exploring in collaboration with the New England ISO, the New York Power Authority, and the New York ISO. He has several recent publications on this work, and one of the main components, a system he calls Derecho, is available on GitHub.com for open-source download. Beyond the smart power grid, Derecho has applications to other kinds of smart infrastructures (such as highways, homes, cities), and can be used to create cloud storage infrastructures that use machine intelligence to decide what to store, how to preprocess it, and what forms of indexing to run now in anticipation of future requests.