Distinguished Speaker Series: Dr. Gloire Rubambiza '18

Thursday, October 17, 2024
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Allendale Campus
Alumni, Community, Faculty, Staff, Students

The College of Computing at GVSU presents the second of their Distinguished Speaker Series. Gloire Rubambiza is a 2018 alumnus of the computer science program at GVSU. He is postdoc in CS at Cornell University, where he conducts research in resilient networked systems with an emphasis on their societal impacts. Specifically, he implements, deploys, and anticipates the societal impact of networked systems for agricultural applications on rural US farms. As a Cornell student, he was a University Fellow and a fellow of NSF National Research Traineeship in Digital Plant Science. He regularly publishes in ACM, USENIX, and IEEE conferences. Beyond research, Gloire is passionate about broadening participation in computing, for which he recently won the Cornell Bowers CIS Distinguished Leadership in Service Award, a SUNY Provost Diversity Fellowship, and the Best Doctoral Presentation in the Doctoral Consortium at the 2023 ACM Richard A. Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference. In his free time, Gloire enjoys soccer, travel, and cooking.

Abstract

Data is transforming virtually every industry in the 21st century. The amount of new data generated by IoT devices is expected to grow from 33 Zettabytes (ZB) in 2018 to 175ZB in 2025. However, existing networking infrastructure cannot keep pace with the IoT data, especially in US rural areas. This work examines how to build resilient rural networked systems for agricultural IoT applications in this Zettabyte era. In this talk, I will discuss how we combine networking and HCI to do so in two complimentary parts.

First, we create rural networked systems that are vendor agnostic, resiliently allowing IoT data transmission, collection, and analysis, while autonomously detecting and repairing failures. We present the Software-Defined Farm (SDF), a cloud-based architecture that advances the state of the art towards resilient IoT systems. Critically, we upscale our technical systems investigation with HCI by using the SDF system building to analyze how researchers envision and orient toward the eventual use of such systems in rural areas. Our analysis shows a consequential contrast between researchers’ seamless visions of rural networked system deployments and the seamful realities of their own system building.

Second, building on insights from the first part, we investigate how to scale resilient rural networked systems across multiple geographically separated sites. We design, implement, deploy, and evaluate Ursula, a general purpose system that centrally manages applications deployed across intermittently available farm IoT devices. We use our technical deployments to analyze how institutional and disciplinary factors influence researchers’ envisioned societal impacts. Our analysis demonstrates how, even when computing researchers envision particular impacts, they do so within organizational practices that gradually reshape both the envisioned impacts and the work towards them.

In concluding each part, we show that our integrated approach of technical and sociotechnical aspects is one of the core contributions from this work. Specifically, we demonstrate that the networking and HCI advancements presented together in this work would not be possible without the integrated approach. We call the approach trilingualism, which entails the integration of deep technical work, its domain applications, and critical reflections on the technical decisions. Together, trilingualism provides a step in advancing the state of the art in networking for the Zettabyte era.

Location Information

BLL110 Mackinac Hall (MAK)

Download parking map for the Allendale Campus

Contact Information

Dr. Vijay Bhuse, [email protected]

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This event was added to the calendar by Shelby Harrison (harshelb@gvsu.edu) on Friday, October 4, 2024 and was last updated on Tuesday, October 8, 2024 at 9:01 a.m.

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