Cristina L. Abad

I am a Professor at ESPOL University in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where I lead the Distributed Systems @ ESPOL Research Lab (DiSEL) and co-direct the Big Data Research Group. I have a PhD (2014) and an MS (2003) in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My graduate studies were funded in part through a Fulbright Fellowship and a Computer Science Excellence Fellowship from UIUC. At UIUC, I was a member of the Systems Research Group, under the guidance of Prof. Roy H. Campbell. During my PhD studies, I was a member of the Hadoop Core Team at Yahoo, Inc. for three years as a Software Engineering Intern (UIUC Research Park) and also worked on several projects with Prof. Yi Lu.

My main research interests lie at the intersection of distributed systems and performance engineering. I am particularly interested in improving the performance and scalability of the systems that compose the software infrastructure used to support Big Data and Cloud Computing applications. 

At DiSEL we work on projects in the cloud computing domain. In addition to improving performance, we seek to build systems that can auto-adapt to workload changes, without depending on expert human knowledge. Specific projects include: storage workload modeling, model-based synthetic workload generation, cloud caching and scheduling in cloud computing platforms (Hadoop, container-based microservices and serverless function-as-a-service platforms). My research has been funded via industry grants (Google 2016, Microsoft 2017, Google 2018, AT&T Labs 2019).

I am a member of Usenix, the ACM, the IEEE, and the SPEC RG Cloud Computing working group. I like to code; in particular, I like to build distributed systems. While at Yahoo, I contributed to the Apache Hadoop codebase. In my free time, I sometimes answer questions on stackoverflow.