I am part of the O2S group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). I was part of the Oxygen core team and used to manage the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) collaboration on Pervasive Computing. I am the faculty leader of NEWT and Dritte at LUMS . My LUMS page.

A year of hacking has resulted in BumpIn.com (see the top-right BumpIn widget or install the browser plugin) -- my take on social browsing and networking.

Watch demo videos of our two goal-oriented systems: Goal-oriented Sockets [Follow-Me-Video] and Goal-oriented Programming System [Adaptive Teleconference].

 Teaching  

* Spring 2003: 6.898 Pervasive Computing

Research

I am a systems person; I build stuff. I am broadly interested in Distributed Systems, Operating Systems, Computer Networks and Mobile Computing. My recent research has largely focused on two themes: Pervasive Computing and ICT for Development.

• In pervasive computing, my work has largely focused on a new area called goal-oriented systems ; a goal-oriented system takes a high-level, typically underspecified, service-request, like show this video on the best available display , and automagically satisfies and maintains the goal despite changes in available resources. Goal-oriented applications are, therefore, self-adaptive. We are exploring the goal-oriented paradigm in three domains.
  • Application Programming: Our O2S system affords an environment to express application logic in terms of high-level goals, while automatically generating the implementation and structure of the application in response to changes in the runtime conditions of the application. For an example application, watch the Adaptive Teleconference Demo. This application was featured in a BBC article. The technical details of the system are described in the following papers: [1] Goal-oriented Programming Position Paper, [2] System Design and Implementation Paper, [3] Example Applications of O2S
  • Network Service Access: Our SoNS and LANS extend the Operating System Network Socket Interface such that an OS socket may be bound to a service rather than a specific server. Instead of taking an IP address and a Port number of a server, Service-oriented Network Sockets take a service specification as an input and opportunistically connect the socket to a server that best satisfies the service specification in a dynamically changing network environment. As an example, watch the demo of the Follow-Me-Video application, designed for mobile media devices such as a portable DVD player. The technical details of the systems are described in the following papers: [1] Paper on system design and implementation, [2] Paper on lessons learned from initial system design.
  • Data Access: Mobile devices have limited I/O capabilities. Therefore, while data may be stored on a mobile device, it is typically impractical to view, edit or manipulate most types of data on a mobile device. We implemented a system that hijacks the file-association mechanism of a mobile operating system (such as Windows CE), and opportunistically establishes file-associations with available resources in the environment of the mobile device. For instance, when a user clicks on a music file on a portable music player, our system would opportunistically establish a media-type association (.mp3) with the music player on a nearby desktop machine. The technical details of the system are described in the following paper: Opportunistic File-associations


• Recently, I have become increasingly interested in the emerging field of Information and Communication Technology for the Developing World (ICTD). Our first system, sponsored by MSR's Digital Inclusion Grant, enables modem-speed p2p dialup connections to circumvent the Internet bottleneck in the developing-world. The system, called the Poor Man's Broadband, is based on the observation that the limited Internet bandwidth in the developing-world is not a last-mile problem. Modern modems can support up to 54 kb/sec, while average end-user bandwidth in the developing-world rarely exceeds 15 kb/sec over a pre-paid dialup connection. Our system enables Bittorrent-style incentive-driven sharing of downloaded content between clients over modem-speed dialup connections (much like a modern-day Fidonet). The system was featured in an article in the New Scientist magazine. Technical details of the system are described in the following papers: [1] DitTorrent: Dialup Peer-to-Peer BitTorrent. [2] Internet Access at Modem-speed Dialup Connections


• I have dabbled in system design on the emerging all-purpose multicore architectures. We designed and implemented an all-software 15Gb/sec Network Router for tiled-microprocessors such as the MIT RAW Microprocessor. Our software router achieved close to four times the throughput compared to Intel IXP1200.

Previous Research

I received my Ph.D. at Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. At Cambridge, I was part of AutoHAN/SRG group. For my doctoral thesis I built two systems; AutoHAN to enable low-end dumb devices like electric kettles to participate in a pervasive system, and UbiqtOS, a context-aware, embedded operating system to enable medium-to-high-end pervasive devices, like handheld computers, to support adaptive applications in a pervasive system.

Current Research

* Poor Man's Broadband: Peer-to-Peer Dialup networking for the developing-world
* Opportunistic File-Associations for Mobile Operating Systems: Context-aware file-associations
* RAW Network Router: Gigabit IP routing on Tiled-microprocessors
* Pebbles: A middleware for adaptive applications in a pervasive system.
* Goal-oriented Programming Semantics: A goal-oriented abstraction for programming adaptive applications in a pervasive system.
* Service-oriented Network Sockets: Context-aware operating system sockets that react to changes in their environment.

Popular Media

* Poor Man's Broadband has a Turn of Speed, New Scientist - 17/11/2007
* Computers to be Oxygen of the Future, BBC - 31/03/2004
* Universities Focus on Pervasive Computing Research, Distributed Systems Online - June, 2004
* CMI Launches Pervasive Computing, MIT Tech Review - 24/03/2004

Organizer/Program-Committee Member

* 17th International World Wide Web Conference(WWW 2008), Track on Technology for Developing Regions
* Networked Systems for Developing Regions(NSDR), ACM SIGCOMM 2007: Program Committee Co-chair
* 4th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems (Mobiquitous), 2007
* AI in ICT for Development, 20th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2007
* 24th IEEE International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), 2006
* 5th Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), 2007
* ACM/IEEE Annual Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communication Systems (ANCS), 2006
* IEEE International Symposium on Pervasive Computing and Applications (SPCA), 2006: Keynote Speaker
* 4th Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), 2006
* 3rd International Workshop on System Support for Ubiquitous Computing (UbiSys), 2006: Part of Ubicomp'06
* 3rd International Workshop on Frontiers of Information Technology (FIT), 2006: Leveraging IT in developing-world countries
* Workshop on Middleware Support for Pervasive Computing (PerWare'06), 2006: Part of Percom'06
* 2nd International Workshop on Frontiers of Information Technology, 2004
* Workshop on System Support for Ubiquitous Computing (UbiSys), 2004: Part of Ubicomp'04
* 2nd International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys'04), 2004
* Workshop on System Support for Ubiquitous Computing (UbiSys), 2003: Part of Ubicomp'03
* 4th International Workshop on Smart Appliances and Wearable Computing (IWSAWC), 2004: Part of ICDCS'04

* Rahul Agrawal, MEng'04. Thesis Title: "A Programming Environment for On-demand Service Overlays", Nominated for the Masterworks Thesis Award
* James W. Anderson, MEng'04. Thesis Title: "The RAW Router: Gigabit Routing on a General-purpose Microprocessor", Nominated for the Masterworks Thesis Award
* Anthony Degangi, MEng'04. Thesis Title: "Performance, Scalability and Flexibility in the RAW Network Router", Nominated for the Masterworks Thesis Award

• Structured Decomposition of Adaptive Applications [ PDF ] (Mark Weiser Best Paper Award)
  

  Paluska, J.M., Pham, H., Saif, U., Chau., G., Terman, C., Ward, S., In Proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communication (PerCom), March 17-21, 2008.

• Internet for the Developing World: Offline Internet Access at Modem-speed Dialup Connections [ PDF ]
  

  Saif, U., Latif, A., Butt, S. F., and Butt, N. F., Murtaza, G. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD), December 2007. (Extended version of the SIGCOMM CCR paper)

• Poor Man's Broadband: Peer-to-Peer Dialup Networking [ PDF ]
  

  Saif, U., Latif, A., Butt, S. F., and Butt, N. F., In ACM SIGCOMM CCR Journal, vol. 37, no. 5, October 2007. (ACM Press)

• Opportunistic File Association for Mobile Operating Systems [ PDF ]
  

  Saif, U., In Proceedings of the 7th IEEE Annual International Workshop on Mobile Computing and System Architectures (HotMobile'06), April, 2006.

• Medium Access Control Issues in Sensor Networks [ PDF ]
  

  Ali, M., Saif, U., Dunkels, A., Voigt, T., Römer, K., Langendoen, K., Polastre, J., and Zartash, U., In ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (CCR), vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 33–-36, April 2006.

• Reducing Configuration Overhead by Using Goal-oriented Programming [ PDF ]
  

  Paluska, J.M., Pham, H., Saif, U., Terman, C., Ward, S., In Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communication (PerCom), March 13-17, 2006.

• Gigabit Routing on a Software-exposed Tiled- microprocessor [ PDF ]
  

  Saif, U., James, W., Anderson, Degangi, A., Agarwal, A., In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Annual International Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communication Systems (ANCS), October 2005.

• Practical Experience with Adaptive Service Access [ PDF ]
  

  Saif, U., Paluska, JM., and Chauhan, V., In ACM Mobile Computing and Communication Review Journal (MC2R), vol. 9, ISSN 1559-1662. pp 27-40, January 2005.

• A Case for Goal-oriented Programming Semantics [ PDF ]
  

  Saif, U., Pham, H., Paluska, J.M., Waterman, J., Terman, C., and Ward, S., In System Support for Ubiquitous Computing (UbiSys), at the Fifth Annual Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Ubicomp 2003.

• Service-oriented Network Sockets [ PDF ]
  

  Saif, U., and Paluska, J.M., In USENIX Annual Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), 2003.

• Internet Access to A Home Area Network [ PDF ]
  

  Saif, U., Gordon, D., and Greaves, D.J., In IEEE Internet Computing, 54-63, January-February 2001.

• Communication Primitives for Ubiquitous Systems or RPC Considered Harmful [ PDF ]
  

  Saif, U., and Greaves, D.J., In Proceedings of ICDCS International Workshop on Smart Appliances and Wearable Computing, 2001.