Keynote, Monday, May 17th,
2004, 8:45 AM – 9:30 AM
Title: Why Recovery Should Be Free, and Often Can Be
Speaker: Armando Fox, Assistant
Professor,
Abstract:
The "Autonomic Computing Manifesto" of 2001 put forth both a vision and an inspiration. The vision is one of systems that are self-managing, self-repairing, and self-tuning; the inspiration is the biological analogy to the autonomic nervous system.
We are coming up on three years since the Manifesto, and it's time for some collective navel-gazing. Have we made serious progress toward this goal, or have we simply relabeled existing research directions as "autonomic"? Where do we stand in producing "new science" and fostering new collaborations that could result in systems that rise to the Autonomic challenge?
I will present some perspectives on these questions, as well as a concrete research agenda centered around "recovery as rapid adaptation". I will argue that the real value of the "autonomic" analogy to biology is the realization that we should, as biologists do, try to understand the behavior of our complex systems through observation and measurement. In particular, I will propose statistical learning theory as a powerful set of tools to accomplish this, but since such techniques invariably produce some false positives, we must combine them with fast and unobtrusive "micro-recovery" actions if we are to automate the "observe-analyze-act" cycle. The resulting research agenda combines systems, networks, statistical learning theory and control theory in one possible path toward a "new science" of autonomic computing systems.
Speaker Bio:
Armando Fox joined the Stanford faculty as an Assistant Professor in January 1999. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where he worked with Professor Eric Brewer (co-founder of Inktomi Corp.) building research prototypes of today's clustered Internet services and showing how to use them to support mobile computing applications, including the world's first graphical Web browser for handheld computers. Armando was listed among the "Scientific American 50" of 2003 for his work on Recovery-Oriented Computing. He received a BSEE from M.I.T. and an MSEE from the University of Illinois, and worked as a CPU architect at Intel Corp. He is also an ACM member and a founder of ProxiNet (acquired by Pumatech in 1999), which commercialized thin client mobile computing technology he helped develop at UC Berkeley. He can be reached at fox@cs.stanford.edu.