Research Associate

  Computer Science Department
 University of California, Santa Barbara


 

Brief Intro

I am a Research Associate at University California Santa Barbara. I am working in collaboration with Prof. Ben Y. Zhao and several Current Lab's students. Before UCSB I completed my Ph.D in Computer Science at University of Salerno, Italy.
More information (CV) .

"Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach
we are never satisfied"                                                         
                                                                                                      - Niccolo' Machiavelli

News

The Cisco University Research Program Fund is the sponsor of my research proposal entitled: Understanding and Using the Human Network to Improve the Internet Experience.




Research Interest

My research focus lies in Distributed Systems with an emphasis on communication and privacy
issues in large scale systems. My main interest is to develop efficient distributed systems that allow robust and flexible services as scalable search or resource sharing, efficient data dissemination, or reliable anonymous communication.

I am currently analyzing social networks by investigating their graph structures in order to design efficient large scale graph algorithms; I'm also playing with graph models to generate synthetic graphs which are able to provide a resilient experimental platform to evaluate social systems and applications without compromizing user privacy.  (more)

I have also been looking at the fundamental characteristics of social networks by
building a more resilient anonymous communication system that leverages trust
relationships from social networks. (more)





Committee Services


Technical Program Committee Member

IEEE Next Generation Networking Symposium (ICC-NGN ’12)
Protocols Network Architecture & P2P Protocols (NAPP) Symposium (ICNC ’12)
The 11th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P ’11 )
IEEE Next Generation Networking and Internet Symposium (ICC-NGNI’11)
International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM ’11)
The 4th IFIP Wireless Days (WD ’11)
The 24th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS ’10)
The 10th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P ’10)
The 2nd International Workshop on Search and Mining User-generated Contents (CIKM- SMUC ’10)
The 3rd IFIP Wireless Days (WD ’10)


Serving Reviews

IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC ’11)
The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB Journal ’10-’11)
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Elsevier (JPDC ’09-’11)
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (J-SAC ’09-’11)
The 13th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp ’11)
The 29th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM ’10)
The 6th ACM International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technolo- gies (CoNEXT ’10)
IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM ’10)
The 9th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P ’09)
The 28th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM ’09)

Publicity Chair

The 18th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP ’10)

Session Chair

The 29th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM ’10)






Teaching experiences

Operating Systems: I taught two classes of about 15 students, covering the main concepts of Operating Systems. Advised book: Operating System Concepts, by A. Silberschatz, P. B. Galvin and G. Gagne.

 

Programming Fundamentals: I taught two classes in this area, covering the main concepts of programming principles. Advised book: Principles of Compiler Design by Aho Alfred V., and Ullman Jeffrey D.



Contact Info

Alessandra Sala
Computer Science Department
University of California Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA  93106-5110

Phone: +1 805-893-3417
E-mail: