Laura Feeney

Laura Marie Feeney

Contact: lmfeeney@sics.se; mobile(temporary US) +16178180256

I'm a member of the Communication Networks and Systems (NETS) Laboratory at the Swedish Insitute of Computer Science. I'm also a Ph.D student in the Communications Research (CoRe) Group at Uppsala University.

My broad research area is computer systems and networking. I'm currently studying communication in autonomous wireless networks and trying to address the problem of energy-efficient coordination of access to the shared wireless channel in a multihop wireless environment, such as ad hoc and sensor networks. I especially enjoy working on problems where I can do practical system implementation and experimentation work and look at the system behavior analytically, as well.

I applied to attend the summer school because I think it may be interesting to think about the problem of coordinating channel access in a complex systems context. In a multihop wireless network, contention and interference effects generally extend further than the data communication range. As a result, senders have to decide when to transmit, despite having incomplete knowledge of both conflicting transmissions and the impact of their transmissions on the network.

So one of my goals this summer is to learn about complex systems techniques to see whether there is some interesting way to model the problem of coordinating channel access. But I'm also excited to learn from and collaborate with people working on all sorts of interesting problems...

In my free time, I enjoy travel and photography.

I'm looking forward to seeing you all in June!

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Answers to Daniel Rockmore's questions (some duplication wrt text above):

1. What are your main interests?

My research area is computer systems and networks; more broadly, I'm interested in "how stuff works". Right now, I'm looking at the problem of coordinating transmissions in decentralized wireless networks. Each device has to decide when to sleep, when to transmit and with what parameters, despite having only limited knowledge of the effects of other devices' transmissions on the intended receiver and the impact of its own transmission on ongoing transmissions.

Mostly, I'm looking at the problem in a very practical way, but I'm interested in a complex systems perspective on the underlying interactions. Whether this will lead to practical mechanisms isn't clear: Because the point is managing low level channel access, the amount of information and feedback is very limited (e.g. communicating agents is right out). Moreover, the lifetime of real data flows might not be long enough for adaptive mechanisms to converge. But at a minimum, it should be possible to gain some analytic understanding of system performance.

2. What sorts of expertise can you bring to the group?

All of the research groups that I've been affiliated with have been strongly oriented toward implementation and experiment, so I have good systems programming and software development skills. More generally, I think my background has given me some insight about experimental design: Does this experiment really show what it's intended to? Is there some orthogonal experiment that would confirm our results?

3. What do you hope to get out of the CSSS?

My practical goal is to strengthen my math and increase the range of techniques available to me in studying problems in systems and networking. More specifically, I hope to add some analytic component to my thesis work, which is currently very practically oriented. I also hope to enjoy new ideas, new people and a new environment.

4. Do you have any possible projects in mind for the CSSS?

I plan to use the CSSS experience to develop some analytic model for the operation of the channel access mechanisms that I'm working on for my thesis. At the summer school itself, of course, my choice of project(s) will be guided by the joint interests of the students.

One topic that some members of my group have been looking at is content delivery in DTN's (disruption tolerate networks), where information is shared during intermittent contact between wireless devices carried by people, vehicles, etc. Modeling the dynamics of inter-contact times in social networks, especially in rural or underdeveloped areas seems like a good interdisciplinary project for the scope of the summer school.