Tomas Isdal
I am currently a software engineer at Google where I work in the Cloud Platforms group.
In 2012 I completed my Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Washington where I was adviced by Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy. I enjoy designing, building, and deploying real and widely used systems. My thesis work focused on peer-to-peer systems, specifically protecting the privacy of peer-to-peer users while maintaining high performance.
In addition to my Ph.D. I also have a Masters degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington and a Master of Science in Engineering from The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
You can reach me at isdal@cs.washington.edu or on Google+
Pre-Google projects
- OneSwarm
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OneSwarm is a P2P data sharing application that provides users with explicit control over their privacy. Data can be made public, it can be shared with specific friends for sharing with their friends, shared with some friends but not others, or shared anonymously.
The OneSwarm client is in active daily use by thousands of users. For more informantion, visit the OneSwarm homepage or
read the OneSwarm paper in SIGCOMM 2010.
- Tubeify
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Tubeify is a youtube / last.fm / billboard mashup I wrote "for fun" to test out Google AppEngine and some new features in HTML 5.
It is currently open to invited testers only, if you want an invitation code you can request Tubeify invitations here.
Tubeify has received quite a bit of press (a list of articles is availabe at the Tubeify press page).
Even older stuff
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BitProbes
BitProbes is a system created to unobtrusively measure bandwidth capacity, latency, and topology information of Internet end-hosts. Read more at the BitProbes homepage
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BitTyrant
BitTyrant is a strategic BitTorrent client. By managing uplink resources more intelligently, BitTyrant is on average 70% faster for clients with a 1 megabit uplink capacity than the currently most popular BitTorrent client. Read more on http://bittyrant.cs.washington.edu.
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"PlMan" or cPlane
The cPlane or "PlMan" is an application designed to simplify the process of deploying and running experiements on hundreds of computers using the PlanetLab testbed.
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iPlane
iPlane is a scalable service providing accurate predictions of Internet path performance between two arbitary IPs.
Publications
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Privacy and Performance in Social Overlay Networks [ PDF ]
Tomas Isdal,
Ph.D. Thesis, The Univerity of Washington, June 2012, Seattle, WA
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Privacy-preserving P2P data sharing with OneSwarm [ PDF ]
Tomas Isdal,
Michael Piatek,
Arvind Krishnamurthy,
Thomas Anderson
In SIGCOMM 2010, September 2010, New Delhi, India
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One hop Reputations for Peer to Peer File Sharing Workloads [ PDF ]
Michael Piatek,
Tomas Isdal,
Arvind Krishnamurthy,
Thomas Anderson
In the 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI '08), April 2008, San Francisco, CA.
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Leveraging BitTorrent for End Host Measurements. [ PDF ]
Tomas Isdal,
Michael Piatek,
Arvind Krishnamurthy,
Thomas Anderson
In the 8th Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM '07), April 2007, Louvain-la-neuve, Belgium
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Do incentives build robustness in BitTorrent? [ PDF ]
Michael Piatek,
Tomas Isdal,
Arvind Krishnamurthy,
Thomas Anderson
In the 4th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI '07), April 2007, Cambridge, MA. Awarded best student paper
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iPlane: An Information Plane for Distributed Services. [ PDF ]
Harsha V. Madhyastha,
Tomas Isdal,
Michael Piatek,
Colin Dixon,
Thomas Anderson,
Arvind Krishnamurthy,
Arun Venkataramani
In the 7th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '06), November 2006, Seattle, WA
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Using BitTorrent for Measuring End-To-End Internet Path Characteristics. [ PDF ]
Tomas Isdal
Masters Thesis, The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), October 2006, Stockholm, Sweden
Other Projects
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Wireless over sound
In my graduate network class project, we implemented a multi-hop ad hoc network that
used sound as the medium of communication. Using only commodity
microphones and speakers we achieved a maximum transfer rate of 128 bps. Though we suffered migraines
(due to the high pitched beeps which we used to encode bits), the
project was a resounding success (literally!). It was joint work with
John P. John and Tanya Bragin. The final report and source code is available for download.
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PageRank(ing)
As a class assingment in CSE454 we used different techniques for ranking search engine results. I used the open source webcrawler nutch and implemented different ranking algorithms including TF/IDF for both pages and anchortext, proximity of search terms, and Pagerank as described by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page in 1999. The Pagerank source code and the other ranker implementations can be found here
Tools