Current Focus – The pitter patter of small feats

Hi,

I am Krishna Sankar, a technologist/Distinguished Engineer at a networking company. Like everybody, I have a variety of interests and like all of us, do not have enough time to pursue all of them to their full extent ;o(

You will see some musings on cloud computing, Big Data, Scala, Clojure, Erlang, p2p mechanics and mechanisms wireless and sensor networks, community networks, urban sensing, robotics, First Lego League, kids, music, open source, ….

You can find me in Quora, Launchpad (storage, compute), twitter, …

• OSCON 2012 Talk “The Art of Social Media Analysis with Twitter & Python” got accepted ! Should be interesting …
• Joined Genophen as Lead Software Engineer/Data Scientist (Employee # 64439 to 39 to 9 !) – part of initial engineering team working on a scientific/consumer Bioinformatics Big data Platform (AWS/MongoDB/JBoss ESB/Hadoop)
• Completed the on-line Artificial Intelligence class (Fall 2011/Basic) by Prof.Tharun/Prof.Norvig
• Completed the on-line Machine Learning Class (Fall 2011/Advanced) by Prof.Ng with 100% !
• Am starting Graduate Certificate Course in MMDS (Modern Massive Data Sets) at Stanford. 1st credit course is under Prof. Jure Leskovec & am auditing CS229 under Prof. Andrew Ng. Should be an interesting 10 weeks (Sep-Dec 2011)
• Now am at Egnyte as Lead Architect, focussing on scalable object store design/development as well as cloud storage security …

• Architecture and development (across Devops, load test, prod) of 10 X scaling of Cloud Object Store to billions of objects
• Distributed horizontally scalable infrastructure incl ZooKeeper, MySQL et al
• Object store security services (Encryption, SSO/SAML Integration and so forth)

• USPTO approved one more patent ["Processing document streams using look-ahead automata" http://goo.gl/BPYEo ]
• The CDMI Media Types RFC6208 got published &
• Two of my talks [ "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to A Kaggle Competition" & "Big Data, Machine Learning & R – An etude" (Accepted, but withdrew to leave room for others ! Maybe Next Year !)] got selected for OSCON Data 2011 !

• The Big Data talk had ~1200 views in a few days & appeared on Slideshare homepage as “Hot in Linkedin”  http://www.slideshare.net/ksankar/oscon-kaggle20
• Conduced tutorial @OSCON’10-Building a NOSQL Data Cloud It is now available as a video from O’Reilly and at Safari Books !
• General Chair ISPCS 2012 (penciled in ;o) Time Synchronization always has been one of my interest areas

• First quarter ’11, I was focusing on a few technology areas in and out of work realm – as usual cannot give each the required attention:

• Cloud Architectures – DataCloud (Hadoop, NOSQL) for application domains like BioInformatics/social networking
• Infrastructure optimization for compute-storage-network for Hadoop Cloud
• Hadoop papers – “Hadoop Architecture with Unified Fabric”, “Hadoop Metering & Chargeback” & “Hadoop Clouds”
• Service Framework for Hadoop Cloud
• Developing Data Cloud & MMDS (Modern Massive Data Set) processing Platform, Infrastructure & Frameworks
• Embedding primitives in Cisco MDS FC Switches using Intelligent Switch API
• Scalability based on UCS memory footprint as well as network connectivity
• Implementing SNIA CDMI(Cloud data management Interface) as part of our demo at OGF29
  • CDMI RI is available as a part of SNIA Technical Projects
  • Coding object store primitives – GET, PUT and so forth (REST/JSON)
  • Wrote IETF RFC 6208 media type for CDMI MIME types – application and implications [Link]
    • RFC approved & cdmi-capability / cdmi-container / cdmi-domain / cdmi-object / cdmi-queue are valid media types !
  • CDMI blueprint for OpenStack Object Layer
• Building Cloud Concept Lab with Cisco UCS – Good hands on work, from scratch ! UCS is interesting …
• Completed Cloudera Hadoop Dev and Admin training (Oct’10)
  • Passed Cloudera Certified Hadoop Developer Exam & Administrator Exam
• Passed VCP4 (VMWare Certified Professional) Certification (413/500)! (Dec 1, 09)
  • Completed vSphere FastTrack (Oct’09) & attending vSphere troubleshooting class (11/10)
• Developing “Cloud OS”/Cloud API Concepts
• Conceptual Cloud Computing/Big Data
  • Am slowly working on the Machine Learning Systems (Big Data perspective) – very initial stages, will write blogs as I gain knowledge & working experience
    • Attending Machine Learning 201 (Jan-Mar 2011)
    • Attended Statistical Learning & Data Mining III (Mar 2011)
    • Just started Not yet developing for SwiftRiver Platform (SVM based) Predictive location tagging for MIT Challenge : Disambiguation of Real-time Disaster and Relief Information
  • OpenStack based data cloud (preliminary)
  • Working on M.S. Bioinformatics (John Hopkins Advanced Academic Program)
  • Writing “Building Clouds Using Amazon Web Services” for The Pragmatic Bookshelf (soon to be in beta)
  • Co-chair : Workshop on Algorithms, Architectures and Applications for Big Data Clouds & Modern Massive Datasets, held in conjunction with HiPC 2010 in Goa, India (Couldn’t get enough critical mass, definitely next year)
  • OGF29 Talk on NOSQL
  • Co-chair – DMTF Cloud Incubator (Received DMTF Annual Star awardfor this work) Always an honor to get accolades from one’s peers)
    • Editor – White paper : Interoparable Clouds
    • Editor – Architecture for Managing Clouds
    • Sub-team lead  – Cloud Security Mechanisms for the Provider Interface (threat & protection architecture, rules/constraints/policies, Elasticity rules …)
  • Participated in two Panels at Cloud Connect. One was a little controversial !
  • Cloud Networking (blog at VMWare Communities)
  • Guest Lecture at Naval Post Graduate School (10/28/09) – Is Secure Clouds An Oxymoron ?
  • Two talks at OMG “Strategies & Technologies for Cloud Computing Interoperability”
    • Inter-Cloud http://federalcloudcomputing.wik.is/@api/deki/files/38/=Cisco_-2009-03-23_SATCCI__D.pdf
• Social Networking always has been a passion for me, especially the intersection of the Social & knowledge graph
  • Published the book “Enterprise Web 2.0 Fundamentals“
  • Mobile Social Tagging with Context Hitchhiker’s Presentation
• Planning to get involved in Scala – for example STM
• Used To Work on ..
  • Application Oriented Networking
  • Distributed Precision Time Synchronization in the order of microSeconds for automated electronic trading infrastructure
    • Implemented topology design, state machine & protocol for the emerging IEEE1588v2 and participated (successfully!) in plugfest at Vienna, Austrian Academy of Sciences
    • Architecture and design to incorporate PTP in our products
  • Lead Author : Cisco Wireless LAN Security
  • Lead Author/Co-author of books on Java/Internet (They are too old, don’t buy them ;o))
  • … more on my publishing hobby!
  • … more on my work history
• Patents
  • 3 Issued, a few in the works
• Hobbies
  • FLL/Lego Robotics
    • Tech Judge – First Lego League (FLL) Word Festival Atlanta : 2007, 2008
    • Judge Adviser/Tech Judge at North CA tournaments
    • Rube Goldberg machines using Lego
  • iPhone programming

My linkedIn page and my page in ubuntu launchpad [Ubuntu page might be this due to reorganization]

**[June 17, 2007] I got the idea for the title from the recent Dr.Dobbs Journal last page; will link it when I find it