Ashwin Rao obtained his master’s degree in Information Technology in 2009 from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, and his PhD in Informatique (Computer Science) in 2013 (thesis defended in 2013 at Inria and certificate awarded in 2015) from University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, France. His doctoral studies were supervised by Professor Walid Dabbous and Professor Arnaud Legout. After graduating he arrived in Finland in July 2014 and has been a post-doctoral researcher since. He received the title of Docent from the University of Helsinki in September 2020.
He is actively teaching at the university, for example, co-supervising Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD theses. As of April 2021, he has co-supervised 1 PhD student, 10 Masters Students, and co-hosted research visits of 2 PhD students. More information about his research activities can be found on his webpage.
His research interests are in the area of distributed systems and networking, and his projects have touched mobile networks, video streaming, peer-to-peer communication, wireless networks, privacy and security issues, and recently operating system architectures. His research works are heavily systems-oriented, and they involve building systems for conducting large-scale measurement studies, analyzing the results, and addressing the issues identified.
His current research is along the following two interrelated threads.
1. Parallelism for high-performance computing. This work focuses on building an operating system which can be leveraged for I/O-intensive parallel tasks. It is motivated by the fact that the OS kernel needs to be bypassed for I/O operations because CPU speeds have stagnated while I/O speeds are increasing.
2. Multi-connectivity. Our devices use static rules for selecting the communication interface to use, and this work is focused on addressing this shortcoming and enabling the devices to coordinate with the network controllers managing the network functions in the network.
He received the title of Docent in September 2020. He helped organize two webinars on Edge Intelligence which had an audience of more than 50 people. He co-authored two research proposals, a) IDEA-MILL that received a 3-year funding from the Academy of Finland with Prof. Sasu Tarkoma, and b) Lean6G that received a 3 year funding with Prof. Sasu Tarkoma and Prof. Leandros (Yale University). In 2021, he also taught one Masters level courses: Networked Systems and Services (5 cr) and 1 student submitted a PhD thesis under his co-supervision.
Sample of publications in 2021:
[1] M. A. Hoque, A. Rao, and S. Tarkoma. Network and Application Performance Measurement Challenges on Android Devices. in SIGMETRICS Perform. Eval. Rev. 48, 3, pp. 6–11, 2021.
[2] M. Pozza, A. Rao, D. F. Lugones and S. Tarkoma, FlexState: Flexible State Management of Network Functions, in IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 46837-46850, 2021.
[3] S. Hätönen, A. Rao and S. Tarkoma, Programmable Session Layer MULTI-Connectivity, in IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 5736-5752, 2022.