William Leal






 

Research Scientist
Computer Science and Engineering
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH 43210-1277

leal@cse.ohio-state.edu
Ph: 251.648.7013
Fax: 815.301.8202

Research Interests

I'm a member of the Siefast group, led by Prof. Anish Arora. Our group's research focuses on properties of fault-tolerance, security, timeliness and power for wireless sensor networks and other distributed systems. My interests include fault tolerance, wireless sensor networks, resource management / fair scheduling and languages.

Sensor networks. The .NET Micro Framework enables C# programming on wireless sensor nodes. I'm leading the effort to port the framework to Crossbow's Imote2, to make it testbed friendly, and enable critical features such as two-way USB communication, USBNet communication, power management and custom radio MACs.

Fault tolerance: focus on self-stabilization. I’ve developed compositional frameworks for stabilization. I led development of Chowkidar, a novel distributed stabilizing protocol that’s being used to monitor system health on our WSN testbed, Kansei (one of the largest in the world). I used self-stabilization to design, implement and verify a safety system that protects property and lives. I'm working on self-stabilization to tolerate deliberate unfairness that benefits priority tasks.

Resource management / fair scheduling. I (with colleagues) developed and implemented an approach to unify share and weight in a proportional share systems. Currently we are working on fair load balancing for asymmetric multiprocessors and planning to look at cell phones and motes.

Languages. I was involved in developing DESAL, a sensor network language targeted to domain experts rather than computing specialists.