Abstract
Today's social networking and communication software are closed and proprietary, built with the goal of monetizing users' data. This talk calls upon the students in universities to help create a programmable open mobile internet. Developed expressly for the mobile device, Omlet provides a rich platform for impactful computer science research.
Omlet is (1) a chat app and (2) an open and distributed mobile app platform, made commercially available by a spinout from the Computer Science Department at Stanford after 4 years of research funded by the National Science Foundation. This platform makes possible a new ecosystem where
(1) users can share and communicate freely while owning their data;
(2) app developers can easily create social mobile apps, uncontrolled by proprietary social networks;
(3) cloud services can interoperate to host users' social data.
The core technologies in this system are an identity-based group message routing system and a distributed semantic file system.
Launched in March 2014, Omlet has already been adopted by Stanford and shipped on Asus's new line of smartphones--the ZenFones. It has partnered with Baidu Cloud, Box, Dropbox, Flickr to provide users a choice of storage for their data. Omlet is available in the Google app store, iTunes store, as well as Wandoujia.
About the speaker
Prof Monica S. Lam received her PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1987. She has been a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University since 1988, and is also the founding Director of the Stanford MobiSocial Computing Laboratory.
Prof Lam’s research interests spanned high-performance computing, computer architecture, compiler optimizations, security analysis, virtualization-based computer management, and most recently, open social networks. She loves working on disruptive startups – she was on the founding team of Tensilica (configurable processor cores) in 1998, and she was the founding CEO of both MokaFive (desktop management using virtual machines, 2005) and MobiSocial (open social networking, 2012). She is a co-author of the book Compilers, Principles, Techniques, and Tools (2nd Edition), also known as the Dragon book.
Prof Lam received prestigious awards including the NSF Young Investigator Award, the ACM Most Influential Programming Language Design and Implementation Paper Award, an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, and the ACM Programming Language Design and Implementation Best Paper Award. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
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