Overview

The second Doctoral Workshop (SySDW'24) will provide a forum for PhD students to present their work and receive constructive feedback from experts in the field, as well as from peers. The workshop will also offer a platform for senior graduate students/recent graduates/postdocs to showcase their research to other community members as a way to help their job search. Technical presentations will be augmented with keynotes and panels offering general advice and discussions for students in all stages of their career. SySDW'24 will also offer the opportunity for mentoring.

The idea is to give graduate students/recent graduates/postdocs a chance to talk one-on-one (or, in some cases, one-on-two) about their research with outstanding researchers beyond those available at the students' universities.

Program

Sunday 11/03 2024
Begin-End	Subject
9:00-9:10	Welcome & Introduction
9:10-10:00	Keynote 1: Vijay Chidambaram (UT Austin) -- "How to be a successful PhD student" Bio Vijay Chidambaram is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Texas at Austin. His research group focuses on building the next generation of data systems. His research has influenced the Linux kernel, and products and tools at VMware and Microsoft. His papers have been awarded Best Paper Awards in Eurosys 2023, ATC 2018, FAST 2018, and FAST 2017. He was awarded the NSF CAREER Award in 2018 and the SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Dissertation Award in 2016. He co-founded the diamond open-access journal, Journal of Systems Research (JSys), in 2020. He is the author of the "CS Assistant Professor Handbook", a guidebook for new and aspiring professors in computer science. Show details ▶
10:00-10:30	Lightning talks from graduating PhD students
10:30-11:00	Break
11:00-11:50	Keynote 2: Matei Zaharia (UC Berkeley, Databricks) -- "What I learned about systems research in academia and industry" Bio Matei Zaharia is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley as well as Cofounder and CTO at Databricks. He started the Apache Spark open source project during his PhD at UC Berkeley in 2009, and has worked broadly on other widely used data and AI software, including MLflow, Delta Lake, DSPy and ColBERT. His recent research interests are in cloud computing systems, databases, and building reliable applications with AI. Matei’s research was recognized through the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Mark Weiser Award, and the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Show details ▶
12:00-1:00	Lunch
1:10-2:00	Keynote 3: Natacha Crooks (UC Berkeley) -- "How to manipulate your advisor in three easy steps?" Bio Natacha Crooks is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley. She works at the intersection of distributed systems and databases. Most recently, she is focused on developing scalable systems with strong integrity and privacy guarantees. She obtained her PhD from UT Austin and is a recipient of a VMWare Early Career Faculty Grant, the Dennis Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award and the Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award (Honorable Mention). Show details ▶
2:00-3:30	Panel: Future of Systems Research Shivaram Venkataraman (UW Madison) Rachit Agarwal (Cornell University) Gala Yadgar (Technion) Anand Padmanabha Iyer (Georgia Tech) Anurag Khandelwal (Yale)
3:30-4:00	Break
4:00-5:30	Lightning pitches from WiP PhD students

Workshop Format

The goal of the workshop is to provide feedback and advice to PhD students in all stages of their career both on technical aspects of their research as well as career development. We expect a range of participants such as the presenters' peers, as well as senior researchers who will attend to share their expertise and provide constructive feedback. The idea is to create opportunities for students to meet with peers outside of their home institution, to get technical feedback as well as career advice from senior researchers in their field, to find out about internship and job opportunities, and to articulate their own work in a public, non-threatening forum. We encourage the participants to stay for the duration of the SOSP main conference.

We will accept two types of submissions:

1. Work-in-progress abstract: This is intended for early PhD students who have selected a clear research topic. The students will submit a 2-page abstract (instructions below) followed by a research work presentation during the workshop.
2. Research statement: This is intended for senior PhD students who plan to be on the job market in the next 1-2 years. Students will submit a 3-page description of past and future research. The students will then present their research plan in the form an elevator pitch presentation during the workshop.

Research topics of interest cover computing systems in the broadest sense, including work on formal foundations, as well as the design, implementation and evaluation of real systems. More specifically, research topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Operating systems
• Distributed systems
• Cloud computing and datacenter systems
• File and storage systems
• Networked systems
• Language support and runtime systems
• Systems security and privacy
• Dependable systems
• Analysis, testing and verification of systems
• Database systems and data analytics frameworks
• Virtualization and virtualized systems
• Systems for machine learning/machine learning for systems
• Mobile and pervasive systems
• Parallelism, concurrency, and multicore systems
• Real-time, embedded, and cyber-physical systems
• Systems for emerging hardware

Note: the workshop is not a venue for publication; there will be no published proceedings. Work-in-progress or simultaneous submissions are allowed (and in fact encouraged) from the perspective of SySDW'23.

Submission Instructions

If you would like to participate in the workshop, please submit your materials before the deadline. Submissions will receive written feedback from the PC, but the submission process is very lightweight and the main purpose is to put together the program and to match students with mentors.

Submission site: https://sysdw24.hotcrp.com/

For work-in-progress abstracts, submissions should be up to 2 pages (including title and figures but excluding references) and should only include the following sections:

• Abstract
• Introduction (problem statement, an overview of the proposed work, main differences from prior work)
• Overview of the proposed work
• Preliminary results (if applicable)
• Work to be done (description of the planned work to address the proposed research problem)
• Related work

Submissions will be assessed based on the importance, clarity, and relevance to SOSP of the research problem, excellent understanding of the core related work, a realistic and clear roadmap to work completion towards the PhD, and the overall quality of the submitted paper.

For research statements, submissions should be up to 3 pages (including title and figures but excluding references).

Please note that there will be no published proceedings. Submissions shall be in .pdf, 2-column, single-spaced, 10pt format.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: September 10th 15th, 2024, 11.59 PM AoE (Deadline extended to September 15th)
• Acceptance notification: October 10th, 2024

Organizers

Workshop Chairs

• Ram Alagappan (University of Illinois)
• Sudarsun Kannan (Rutgers University)
• Stephanie Wang (University of Washington)

You can contact the workshop chairs at ramn@illinois.edu sudarsun.kannan@rutgers.edu or smwang@cs.washington.edu with any questions or concerns.

Program Committee

• Aishwarya Ganesan, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and VMware Research
• Akshay Narayan, Brown University
• Deepti Raghavan, Brown University
• Emma Dauterman, MIT and Stanford
• Jian Huang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Malte Schwarzkopf, Brown University
• Neeraja J. Yadwadkar, UT Austin and VMware Research
• Pedro Fonseca, Purdue University
• Qizhe Cai, Enfabrica/University of Virginia
• Rishabh Iyer, UC Berkeley
• Rohan Kadekodi, University of Washington
• Ryan Stutsman, University of utah
• Saurabh Kadekodi, Google
• Soujanya Ponnapalli, University of California, Berkeley
• Tej Chajed, UW-Madison
• Theano Stavrinos, University of Washington
• Tianyin Xu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• Xingda Wei, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
• Yi Xu, UC Berkeley
• Yujie Ren, EPFL