Muneeb Ali

Engineers as Thought Leaders

2012-02-23T05:59:03Z

In the past decade software has been eating the world. Silicon-based technologies are disrupting traditional industries everywhere. The publishing industry is struggling against digital content; the telecom industry is threatened by voice-over-IP; computer animation is raising the bar for producing movies; postal services are going bankrupt, and so on. Yet most leadership roles in society are still reserved for people who don't fully understand computing technologies. The recent near-disaster of SOPA screams out that many business executives and politicians have questionable understanding of the technologies that are fundamentally changing our society.

Maybe engineers are partly to blame for this.

Engineers are analytic by nature. They are problem-solvers: give an engineer a problem and her brain will obsess over it for days. But why do so few engineers take on leadership roles in society? Qi Lu (Microsoft) recently talked about why it's hard to find engineers that can think beyond technology, and described his personal lessons from attempting this transition. Qi leads Microsoft Bing (amongst other things) as the President of Online Services, and reports directly to Steve Ballmer. He took a red-eye flight to talk especially in the "CTO Course" at Princeton (thank you Qi!). This thought provoking talk had enough lessons to justify a series of posts. I'm going to focus on just one point right now: leadership roles and the skillset required for them.

Qi Lu speaking at Princeton

When Steve Ballmer was looking for someone to lead Bing, he could have either considered someone from sales/marketing or someone from technology. Ballmer went for the latter. And in my biased view, it will turn out to be one of the best decisions Microsoft has made in the past many years. Qi learned that his new job requires him to step out of his comfort zone and get more involved with product design, marketing, and business models. Like most engineers he is deeply analytical and mostly relies on his left-brain logical thinking for functioning (Qi has a CS PhD from Carnegie Mellon). He had to force himself in using the right-brain more often, and believes that with enough practice engineers can polish their intuition and design skills. Almost like how going to the gym is hard only initially, and then the human body adapts to the change.

As our society becomes more and more dependent on technology, there is a tremendous opportunity for engineers to take larger leadership roles and have a broader impact than just creating great technologies that may or may not get utilized to their full potential otherwise. My argument is that perhaps it's easier for a naturally analytical brain to learn to be a better thinker, communicator, designer, or leader than the other way around. Analytical and scientific skills are considered "hard" for a reason after all. Sadly, our current education system never really pushes engineers to think beyond becoming, well, great engineers. Qi's advice to engineering students? Drop in on classes, or talks, outside your area - like anthropology or economics or literature. Try to learn the aesthetics behind a beautiful building or a piece of art. Interact with people outside your discipline, learn to appreciate what they do, and learn to communicate the importance of what you do. The list can go on, but the single most important thing is to always be uncomfortable. If you're uncomfortable that means you're doing something new and are learning.

Analytical brains operating beyond their comfort zone can produce the next great leaders of a tech-dependent society.

Disclaimer: All opinions presented here are mine and not of anyone else at Princeton or of Qi Lu. Any mistakes in quoting Qi's talk are also mine.

Role of Universities in Local Tech Industry

2011-04-11T23:38:33Z

Fred Wilson talking to students

Yesterday, we had Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) as a guest speaker in a "CTO Course" at Princeton that I'm the preceptor for. During the lecture Fred mentioned that even though Princeton is just a train ride away from NYC, it's the first time he is speaking here: something he hopes to change. In this post, I'm going to follow up on that discussion (summarize the relevant parts of what Fred said), and discuss role of universities in local tech industry. I'll mainly talk about Princeton and NYC, but similar arguments can be applied to other areas/universities as well.

I've often thought about the link between university research and startup activity e.g., the Silicon Valley started on land leased from Stanford University, maintained a close link with Stanford, and over the years not only did tech giants emerge from university research (recent examples are Google, VMWare), but the companies then came back full circle to support the university (funding research, hiring graduates).

Silicon Valley is considered the top "startup hub", with Boston being a not-so-close second (see this post by Paul Graham). It's not a coincidence that these tech hubs emerged around the top Computer Science programs (Stanford and Berkeley in the Bay Area, and MIT in Boston/Cambridge). Looking at the startup landscape, an interesting recent development is the rise of NYC (as pointed out by Fred Wilson and many others). I'm making sweeping generalizations, but I like to divide tech/Internet startups into three categories:

a) Infrastructure Startups: target large enterprises, and/or build the foundation and "pipes" that others then benefit from e.g., Data Domain (cloud backups), Nicira Networks (network virtualization), and Meraki (enterprise wireless). They typically attract the "tech heavy" talent, are usually located in the valley, and are not as visible as services startups in the public eye.
b) Service Startups: target end users and provide some direct service/application e.g., Foursquare (location), Twitter (micro-blogging), and Etsy (marketplace for crafts). Are based both in the valley and at other places, and often struggle with attracting the top tech talent.
c) Hybrid Startups: build the infrastructure as well as the end-user services. Google directly serves end-users, but innovates heavily in infrastructure-support for these services. Amazon is where you buy Christmas gifts, but is a large player in cloud infrastructure as well. Such companies get the best of both worlds (attracting talent, plus public recognition - think Google).

New York's tech industry is largely services/applications/media startups and has evolved without much involvement from the universities in the area (Columbia, NYU, and Princeton). Fred said that initially he really believed in universities playing a major role in startups, but over the years he has noticed that universities (at least in and around NYC) don't matter that much. Their tech transfer is not very efficient, but he believes that their real value is in the (local) talent pool. I'm going to extend that argument a little, and add my two cents:

Local Community: The single biggest challenge for NYC startups is finding good technical talent. Princeton engineering graduates, for example, rarely consider taking jobs in NYC or even working in the city over the summer. They move on to either the Valley or Seattle, partly because during their time at Princeton they never really spend enough time in NYC to feel a connection or are not aware of opportunities available to them here. This needs to change. It will require both an effort from Princeton and from the NYC startup community. As Fred puts it, there is a need to open a dialogue and increase interaction. He is willing to involve USV and other players, and the universities need to reciprocate.

Industry Feeds Research (and vice versa): On the flip side, without having a vibrant local tech industry, the universities in the area are never going to be able to compete with their Silicon Valley (or Boston) counterparts. The line between systems research and industry work is often blurry and it's not clear which problems are best suited for whom. If Mark Zuckerberg proposes the idea of Facebook, researchers are not going to take it seriously, but years after Facebook's success they might find themselves designing systems that Facebook may (or may not) use. Industry, on the other hand, is usually short sighted and is not going to burn money on solving fundamental problems that don't have an immediate impact. It's the age old "useful" vs. "technically hard" debate, and I'm not going to get into it in this post. The important point is that industry and academia, can however, reach an equilibrium over the long run, where both can benefit from a healthy ecosystem. Stanford has that local ecosystem. Princeton -- despite having one of the best Computer Science departments -- doesn't have that kind of a local ecosystem yet (partly because of it's location). Their best bet might be to look at the closest tech hub (NYC) and try to fill the void of technical expertise needed there.

Here are some quick suggestions from the top of my head:

- Train CTOs: NYC's tech industry finds it extremely hard to find people who can operate on the intersection of technology and business. Princeton doesn't have a business school, but has very talented engineering students. It's possible to take this engineering talent and channel it in the direction of entrepreneurship. JP Singh's course aims to introduce students to challenges faced by CTOs, but there is obviously room for further effort (and on a larger scale).

- Share Data: Princeton researchers might be interested in talking to local companies to get a better feel of what engineering problems they face and/or what engineering problems are important, especially when they try to scale their services and hit millions of users. Researchers usually lack access to real data and real companies have tons of it. There is enormous value in working out ways to share data for research projects (e.g., by removing business sensitive information, and anonymizing data sets, etc.)

- Entrepreneurship Culture: Princeton's entrepreneurship club needs to figure out their "next big thing". It might be taking their TigerLaunch competition to the scale of MIT 100K, or teaming up with incubators in NYC, or something else. More importantly, they need to convince the University, the Computer Science Department, and the Engineering School that building a healthy ecosystem of high tech entrepreneurship is a long term investment, and it's only going to make their academic programs stronger. There is always a tension between academic interests and entrepreneurial pursuits, but in the long run it's hard to remain on the cutting edge of teaching and research, without having close ties to the real world, and successful startups.

- Useful vs. Technically Hard: University research has more overlap with infrastructure startups (technically hard) than service/application startups (considered "fluffy" in the research community). This is not a perfect world, and there is a need to make the best of what's locally available. The "fluffy" things of yesterday (Facebook) can become big players and hit very interesting research challenges. They also end up earning top dollar for their products and some of that money can come back to fund research. As more engineers and researchers participate in NYC's startup culture, their ability to do technically challenging things can go up.

- Better Transportation: The train ride between Princeton and NYC takes only ~60 minutes, if you catch an express train. However, the express trains are not very frequent, there is no WiFi on trains, and the switch to the "Dinky" at Princeton Junction is inefficient. Also, the NJTransit rides are expensive ($33 for a return ticket). Making the transportation system cheap and efficient is a critical long term investment that the local government and the University need to make.

There is a lot more that can be said about this topic, but this post is already getting long. I want to thank Fred for coming and giving a great talk, and thank JP for inviting him.

Disclaimer: All opinions presented here are mine and not of anyone else at Princeton or of Fred Wilson. Any mistakes in quoting Fred's talk are also mine.

Computing for Global Development

2009-11-12T20:21:22Z

Oct 2009 issue of the SIGCOMM CCR has an editorial by Kentaro Toyama and me where we ask the question if technologies for developing regions be considered a core area of computer science research? It is relatively easy to argue that technology can help improve the lives of the poorest billion people on the planet. But, is it research? More specifically, is it computer science research? This editorial stems out of our discussions at the CCC Workshop on Global Development. Keshav asked us to merge our, somewhat opposing, views into an editorial. You can read it here. In this post, I will give a summary of the Workshop on Global Development:

Entrance of the Claremont, Berkeley

CCC Workshop on Global Development:
The Workshop on Global Development was held at the Claremont, Berkeley. Thanks to the CCC funding, we were able to fly 40+ participants and cover all their expenses. Although I was one of the organizers, the views presented here are mine and not of the participants or sponsors.

Background:
Digital technologies have done wonders for mankind. However, benefits of digital technologies (e.g., the Internet) are often limited to the “first world”, leading to the so-called “digital divide”. People in developing regions get access to a decreasing share of digital resources, which are critical for socio-economic development in the 21st century.

The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in the application of digital technologies to address problems in global development. Eric Brewer’s TIER group at Berkeley is one example. However, this area has not (yet) gained acceptance as core computer science research. There are many reasons for this and the CCR editorial talks about them in detail. The purpose of the CCC workshop was to bring together lead researchers in the area, along with experts in more established areas, and have a frank discussion about the future of developing regions research. This was a true workshop in the sense that unlike a “mini-conference” there were no PowerPoint presentations. The participants came with a vague idea of what their thoughts were and, after some intense discussion, left with a deeper understanding of the problem and possible solutions. We had to feel the pulse of the audience and adapt the workshop agenda on-the-fly. This was truly exciting.

Highlights of Day 1:

Panel on Technical vs. Non-Technical: Eric Brewer (Berkeley), Kentaro Toyama (Microsoft Research), Tapan Parikh (Berkeley), Bhaskar Raman (ITT-Bombay) went over the “Is ICTD a technical or a non-technical field”. There is a combination of some hard technical problems and some application of existing technologies in new ways. Computer scientists won’t get interested unless the problems are technically hard. The challenge is to either find problems that are both technically hard and can have a real impact or find innovative use of existing technologies that solves problems at large scale i.e., for millions of poor people.

Panel on Technical vs. Non-Technical

Panel on Starting New Research Areas:
Before more researchers get interested in the area and a plethora of research material is published, we need to step back and learn from history. Deborah Estrin (UCLA), Randy Katz (Berkeley), Gaetano Borriello (Univ. of Washington), and Rakesh Agrawal (Microsoft Research) gave their insights on starting a new field. Deborah talked about her early experiences with sensor networks, Gaetano’s commented on the early days of pervasive computing, Rakesh on data mining and Randy talked about the opportunities and problems facing new fields in general. Food for thought: what is the use of X amount of papers published that all solve a problem Y, which will never actually occur in real life? Ever. I have purposely left out specific views of the panelists from this post. Some information is available from the workshop summary and proceedings, but we decided not to make the workshop minutes public. Feel free to contact me in private, if you want more information.

Keynote – Anil Gupta (Honey Bee Network):
Most of the afternoon was spent on discussing issues like branding, publication venues, funding, and education. And then Anil Gupta gave a very interesting keynote. He showed specific examples of innovation in developing regions, where poor people have engineered technology in various ways to solve their everyday problems. This shows that a) technology, specifically designed for their needs, can help their daily lives and b) people in the developing regions should not only be consumers of such research/products, but can actively participate as innovators themselves. Watch this Discovery Channel video about Honey Bee Network to get an idea of what Anil was talking about:

I must admit that after the first day, everything was unclear. We raised more questions than answers and it was not clear what direction this research community will take. Or if this research community even exists in the first place.

Highlights of Day 2:

The day started with presentations on specific problems in networks/systems, HCI, AI, applications, and software engineering that the participants considered important in the area. This helped to set some “grand challenges” for each sub-area. Frankly, I think most of them were examples of good individual projects instead of “grand challenges”. Nevertheless it helped the participants to get a feel of what research direction each sub-area may take.

Vijay holding a Simputer

Panel on Technology Transfer:
We had a panel on technology transfer with Nathan Eagle (MIT), Umar Saif (LUMS), Jonathan Jackson (Dimagi), and Vijay Chandru (Strandls). Vijay was behind the famous Indian Simputer project and talked about how they went about commercializing the Simputer and what lessons they learned (the image of the left is Vijay holding a Simputer). Umar talked about a startup that provides citizen journalism and another one that is like a SMS-Twitter for Pakistan. He described how these services have helped in disaster situations or how they are providing means for disseminating information in a place where there are often restrictions on the freedom of media. Jonathan talked about the ups and downs of providing healthcare technology solutions in Africa.

New SIG/Conference:
A turning point in the workshop was when Bill Thies presented a proposal for a new ACM SIG. There was unanimous support for forming such a SIG and everyone agreed with the goals and purpose of the SIG. Suddenly, there was a sense of community building. The area now had a name (sort-of) and a SIG to associate with. If developing regions research becomes part of main stream computer science in the coming decades, this exact moment was its birth in a way. We went on to discuss the specifics of publication venues (conferences and journals). I don't want to disclose information about what exactly is happening, but it will be public soon.

Closing & Acknowledgments:
In the closing comments someone emphasized that “let’s not forget that we are all here because we want to touch human lives in someway. What we are doing in the end boils down to the direct impact on the underprivileged. This is the single most important and unique aspect of this area of research.” This thought stuck with me after the event.

I’d like to thank Tapan Parikh (Berkeley), Lakshmi Subramanian (NYU), and Bill Thies (Microsoft Research) for doing all the work. I merely helped in a few tasks here and there.

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.

TigerLaunch prize ceremony

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.

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.

The Original Google Storage

2007-07-10T00:07:28Z

I'm 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

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 -- interesting.

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'm organizing. NSDR 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, CTO of Moteiv (one of the co-authors of our recent MAC editorial) 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

2006-08-25T10:35:21Z

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 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., John 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 "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)

Erdős Number

2006-08-04T03:40:50Z

I found out about Erdős Numbers from my alma mater faculty Arif Zaman, who has done some early work on random number generation. After seeing the list of famous paths to Erdős numbers I got curious about my own Erdős number (if it was not infinite). Let me explain Erdős numbers a little;

Paul Erdős is the only person with an Erdos number 0
Anyone who has published a paper with Paul Erdős has Erdős number 1
So, Arif Zaman has an Erdos number 4 because he published a paper with George Marsaglia who published a paper with George P. H. Styan who published a paper with Paul Erdős.

The Erdős number is basically a measure of research collaborations taking Paul Erdős as the center. The Erdős Number project found that Fields Medalists and Nobel Prize winners have small Erdős numbers. In other words this shows that the research circles are smaller than what we imagine them to be e.g.

Albert Einstein (Physics) has Erdős 2,
John Nash (Economics) has Erdős 4,
Stephen Hawking (Cosmology) has Erdős 4

The online collaborative distance search page was not so useful in calculating my Erdős number primarily because I am not a Mathematician or a Theoretical Computer Scientist. So I had to manually calculate my Erdős paths and find the limit on the Erdős number (I had to find manual paths to someone recognized by the Erdős project database and reduce the overall path length as much as possible). Here are some paths I found (listing only one example path for each Erdős number):

Erdős 7 Path: Muneeb Ali ------ Joseph Polastre ------ David Culler [Culler, David E. is recognized as Erdős 5]
Erdős 6 Path: Muneeb Ali ------ Koen Langendoen ------ Frans Kaashoek [Kaashoek, M. Frans is recognized as Erdős 4]
Erdős 5 Path: Muneeb Ali ------ Kay Römer ------ Friedemann Mattern [Mattern, Friedemann is recognized as Erdős 3]

So I can say that my Erdős number is 5? What it really means is that from my co-author index on DBLP Bibliography after 5 clicks you should be able to see Paul Erdös. Small world!

MIT TechReview TR 10

2006-06-19T20:26:36Z

The MIT Technology Review "10 Emerging Technologies" list (TR-10) for 2006 has been released. This year the list is something like:

Comparative interactomics
Nanomedicine
Epigenetics
Cognitive radio
Nuclear reprogramming
Diffusion tensor imaging
Universal authentication
Nanobiomechanics
Pervasive wireless
Stretchable silicon

David Culler appears again this year (for wireless sensor networks) under "Pervasive wireless". Some highlights from previous years would be Hari Balakrishnan (2004) for "Distributed storage" and David Culler (2003) for "Wireless sensor networks". 2003 is the year I was finishing my undergrad and was just moving into sensor networks research. I was excited to see sensor networks top the TR-10 of 2003.

For archival purposes I am giving links to the TR-10 articles (as PDF) starting from year 2003. I cant seem to find a PDF for year 2005 so that year is a link to TechReview web article; if anyone has the original PDF for year 2005, feel free to email me.

The MIT TechReview TR 10 archive: