PDL PEOPLE

Research Interests:

Prof. Priya Narasimhan's research interests lie in the following areas: dependable distributed systems, embedded systems, and distributed system security. Her current research projects address a variety of related issues: proactively fault-tolerant and adaptive systems (MEAD), applying compiler techniques for reliable distributed computing (Midas), distributed secure sensor middleware (Maples, Sluice), secure Web Services (Thema), survivability benchmarking (Vajra) and automated failure prediction and root-cause analysis in distributed systems (Sherlock and Tiresias). She is also interested in the application of embedded systems to make society better -- in particular, she leads a research project (Trinetra) for assistive technologies for the blind, and the UNESCO Intelligent Book Reader Project aimed at tools for enhancing education in the rural areas of Africa. At CMU, she teaches the introductory embedded real-time systems course (18-349) and the capstone embedded-systems design course (18-549). She is affiliated with CyLab, the General Motors Collaborative Research Laboratory (GM-CRL), the Parallel Data Lab (PDL) and the Center for Sensed Critical Infrastructure Research (CenSCIR).

Before coming to CMU, she served as the Chief Technology Officer and, later, the Vice-President of Engineering of Eternal Systems, Inc., a high-tech startup company that commercialized the results of her Ph.D. research to develop reliable systems that are successfully used today. Her research greatly influenced the development of the Fault Tolerant CORBA specification, which has been officially adopted as an industrial standard.

She is a 2007 Sloan Fellow and has also received an NSF CAREER Award, a Best Paper Award, the UCSB Lancaster Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award and two IBM Faculty Partnership Awards. Apart from her service on various program committees of conferences, she serves on the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee. She is an elected member of the IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance. Her spare time is devoted to to watching professional (American) football games. She is a rabid fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Go Steelers!