Muneeb Ali

TigerLaunch 2009

2009-06-05T11:04:06Z

In Feb'09, I participated in Princeton's Annual Business Plan competition called TigerLaunch. The event was fun and had $15K cash prizes and 30+ initial teams. In the semi-finals, I enjoyed pitching in front of VCs from Sierra Ventures and Internet Capital Group. I ended up winning two awards at TigerLaunch'09 and today, after some needless university procedures, received my prize check through snail mail.

I'd like to thank the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club for organizing this. Keep up the good work guys! Results of TigerLaunch 2009 are here.

NSDI 2009

2009-03-26T23:08:54Z

I will be in Boston April 22-24 for NSDI'09. Looking forward to the event!

The Princeton Dinky

2009-01-22T19:39:16Z

The Princeton dinky is cute. The five minute ride on the dinky takes you from the main NJ rail system to the heart of Princeton University. The video on the left is made by a friend of mine, Markus Kneer. It takes a historic look at the "dinky" and the dinky station. Some parts of the video are fictional. Check it out.

Moved to Princeton

2008-12-28T23:22:24Z

This post is long over due. I left the Netherlands in August 2008 and joined Princeton University for my PhD. I had a great time working in Delft, specially because of Koen Langendoen. He made everything easy for me. Amazing guy.

Living in the Netherlands was liberating and exciting. All good things come to an end and I have moved further west. On my first day here, I walked past the famous tigers and heard a whisper in my head.

Welcome to Princeton.

Fire Near Office

2008-05-14T12:26:49Z

The building next to my office burnt down!

Cover Story on Protothreads

2008-05-08T17:49:08Z

In a previous post, I gave an overview of Protothreads and talked about my days in Sweden. Protothreads got featured on the cover of this month's Embedded Systems Magazine (May 2008 Vol. 21 No. 5). The cover story is by Michael Dorin and is titled "Building "instant-up" real-time operating systems". Check it out!

Koen Featured in ICT Mag

2008-02-07T00:13:01Z

Our group leader Koen Langendoen, recently got featured on the cover of a dutch ICT magazine. So apparently the sensornets research works of our group (like the infamous potato deployment) are not going unnoticed.

Also, congrats Koen on becoming a Full Professor!

Lectures at the Abdus Salam Center

2008-01-27T05:07:16Z

Next month, I will be a guest lecturer at the Abdus Salam Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy. Abdus Salam is the first Muslim and the first (and only) Pakistani Nobel Laureate. He unified two (electromagnetism and weak interaction) of the four fundamental forces of nature, which is still the latest step towards the unified description of all four physical forces. ICTP was founded by Salam in 1964.

Salam wanted to bridge the scientific and economic gap between the rich and poor populations of the world - something that we are trying to do through Dritte. ICTP, following on its founder's vision, is organizing a School on Wireless Networking for Development, where i will be giving lectures on Feb 24th and 25th.

I am excited about this trip, as I think that Abdus Salam's vision will inspire me to focus on fundamental problems in scientific research and to try and bring the benefits of science to the poor.

TinyPC Talk in Japan

2007-09-29T03:12:15Z

SIGCOMM 2007 workshop and main conference sessions were broadcasted live from Japan and are also archived here. Below is my TinyPC talk, you can also have a look at the paper and the presentation slides.

SIGCOMM in Kyoto

2007-08-27T23:55:32Z

We are having a lot of fun in Kyoto at SIGCOMM. Thats me in the picture talking to David Clark. This post needs serious updating.

The Original Google Storage

2007-07-10T00:07:28Z

I am spending the summer at Stanford working with Phil Levis. On my first day at the Gates Hall, Phil pointed me to something interesting in the basement of the building - the original Google storage (image on right). Its fascinating to think that the multi-billion dollar search giant came out of THIS machine.

WSNblog.com

2007-06-14T19:47:44Z

Why have I been quiet for a while? Well most of my entries related to sensor networks are now posted on WSNblog.com instead. WSNBlog.com recently got featured on M2M magazine (although they got some information wrong about us). Some comments on this issue of the M2M magazine:

I am keeping an eye out for ArchRock's IPv6 solutions. Lets see how the industry responds to the idea of running IPv6 on sensornets.
I recently attended a talk by Bob Metcalf at Cambridge, MA. It seems to me that Bob and Ember believe that they have found the "killer app" in energy management. I wonder how Metcalf's law will scale in that market.

Eric Brewer and Inktomi

2007-02-14T03:39:27Z

Computer History Museum has this talk by Eric Brewer (UC Berkeley) where he goes over the rise and fall of Inktomi. I highly recommend watching this talk for folks interested in the history of the Internet, case studies of startup companies, insight into the Internet bubble, or technology research in general.

Inktomi was founded in 1996, by Eric and a Berkeley grad student, and went onto the Nasdaq 100 before it was bought by Yahoo! in March 2003. Yahoo search and MSN search are still powered by the Inktomi engine. At one point, Eric actually got a little emotional while talking about Intkomi and I can clearly relate to why.

At the end, he talks about the time when his 10% shares in Inktomi were worth a billion USD and he got interested in doing something for the "third world countries". Eric (along with Umar Saif) is the program co-chair of the NSDR workshop that I am organizing. NSDR'07 is specifically aimed at bringing the benefits of networking technologies to the third world.

Below is the GoogleVideo embedded video of the talk:

Moteiv on Discovery Channel

2006-10-10T14:02:10Z

Joe Polastre, CEO of Moteiv (one of the co-authors of my recent MAC paper) recently got featured on Discovery Channel and Science Channel. Below is a YouTube embedded video of the Discovery Channel broadcast. The story was later picked up by CNN as well.

Protothreads and ACM SenSys 2006

2006-08-25T10:35:21Z

I was a visiting researcher at SICS (Sweden) last fall where I had an amazing time working with Thiemo Voigt and Adam Dunkels. Adam's work on Protothreads recently got accepted at ACM SenSys 2006 and I am listed as a co-author on the paper. SenSys is the premier conference in sensor networks. Much like what SIGCOMM is for networking folks.

"Threads vs. Event-Driven Programming" is an age-old debate in computer systems research. The late Roger Needham (Cambridge) tried to settle this debate with the "duality argument" in 1979 (essentially saying that threads and events are inter-convertible and are the same thing), but the Threads vs. Events remained a hot debatable topic e.g. Ousterhout (creator of the Tcl scripting language) made strong arguments against Threads in his "Why Threads Are A Bad Idea" invited talk at 1996 USENIX Technical Conference. An example of arguments in favour of Threads can be Eric Brewer's (UC Berkeley) "Why Events Are A Bad Idea" HotOS IX (2003) paper.

Protothreads are extremely lightweight stackless threads designed for severely memory constrained systems. One way to think about Protothreads is that they are a proof-of-concept of the 1979 Roger Needham "duality" argument. They are "something in-between" threads and event-driven programming. Maintaining state-machines makes event driven programming hard, but threads take too much memory to make them feasible on memory-constrained systems (e.g. sensor networks). Protothreads reduce/eliminate the need for maintaining explicit state-machines while keeping the memory overhead very low. Protothreads, unlike traditional threads, are stack-less and their memory overhead is very small (only two bytes per protothread).

For more details, read the Protothreads SenSys'06 paper. Also, you can download and use the Protothreads library.

Protothreads are already gaining popularity (checkout the Google hits). Here are a few interesting links:

Slashdot | Protothreads and Other Wicked C Tricks
The venerable Jack Ganssle talks about Protothreads in his Embedded Musings
Framework Lab ported Protothreads to Objective-C
Protothreads Library 1.3 Released (OSNews)