According to the ex-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt, “every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003″. Massive amounts of data at our disposal and exponential advances in computing technology enabling us to process it, ushered in the era of “big data”. Businesses, healthcare industry and governments alike are keen on leveraging big data for improving their products and services, for discovering trends in disease proliferation, for personal health improvement and other goals. Big data is everywhere.
Professor Alexandra (Sasha) Fedorova has come from Harvard, by way of SFU, to join ECE’s faculty. In September, she will be teaching our students about key technologies underlying the processing, storage and analysis of big data in EECE 571B seminar, Big Data Systems. Members of the class will have an opportunity to study and discuss the most prominent big data technologies, such as Google’s GFS, Spark, the RAD stack (Kafka, Storm, Druid, Zookeeper) and many others.
While she was at Harvard, Dr. Fedorova interned at Sun Microsystems Labs and contributed to the development of the Niagara processor simulator and experimented with adopting transactional memory in real applications. Her research centers around performance, usability and energy-efficiency of computer systems; the current focus is on effective management of memory and CPU resources. She also measures and hacks operating systems, runtime libraries and other system software and teaches courses on all kinds of systems: operating, distributed, Big Data. In her spare time she consults for MongoDB; working on enhancing performance of their back-end key-value store WiredTiger. Dr. Fedorova will be joining the Computer and Software Engineering research group at ECE.
If you are an undergraduate you can take Dr. Fedorova’s course if you meet the requirements set out by the Faculty of Graduate Studies; essentially you need to have completed 75% of your course work and have a 76% average. Don’t forget to complete the form.
If you see Dr. Fedorova in the hallway this September say hello and help her find her way around our big, beautiful campus.