Cristiana's Photo

Cristiana Amza

Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Computer Engineering Research Group
University of Toronto
10 King's College Rd.
Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G4


Cristiana Amza received the B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Bucharest Polytechnic Institute in 1991, the M.S. and the Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Rice University in 1997 and 2003 respectively. Her research interests are in the design, implementation and evaluation of distributed systems. Her current work focuses on scaling and consistency issues in web server technologies and distributed databases.   Her current research project, Chorus on the Cloud studies infrastructure design for Cloud environments that can automatically adapt to a changing environment and workload through self-managing, self-tuning and self-healing. The project goal is to provide ease of use, scalability, high availability and differentiated quality-of-service for a range of dynamic content services such as e-commerce, on-line bidding, neuroscience modeling and massively multiplayer games.

In the past, she has worked on algorithms for data replication in persistent memory clusters, and reducing the overhead of consistency maintenance for Software Distributed Shared Memory systems.


Research Interests

Adaptive and reconfigurable distributed systems, distributed database systems, Web server technologies, parallel and distributed computing.


Active Research Projects

  • Chorus on the Cloud
  • Software Transactional Memory

    Note for U of T grad students

    Any of my research directions could become either a Masters or Ph.D project for interested students enrolled at U of T in either the ECE or CS Departments. I'm also open to any student initiated project in the general area of distributed systems and/or web servers. Please contact me, preferrably by e-mail (see below) if you need an advisor for the upcoming academic year.

    Students

    Ph.D.

  • Francesco Iorio
  • Arnamoy Bhattacharyya
  • Seyed Ali Jokar

    M.Sc. and MASc.

  • Ishita Ray

    PDFs

  • Stelios Sotiriadis
  • Ali Hashemi

    Alumni

  • Timur Malgazdarov MASc. 2018
  • Sahel Sharify Moghaddam MASc. 2015
  • Alan Lu MASc. 2015
  • Mihai Burcea (co-advised with Greg Steffan) Ph.D. 2015.
  • Mike Dai Wang MASc. 2014
  • Reza Nakhjavani MASc. 2014 - PhD student, University of Toronto.
  • Venkatesh Nandakumar MASc. 2014
  • Saeed Ghanbari Ph.D. 2014 - NetApp, USA.
  • Mohamed Sharaf PDF 2008-2009 - The University of Queensland, Australia.
  • Weihan Wang Ph.D. student "on a break" - AeroFS, USA (founder).
  • Yuri Sagalov MASc student "on a break" - AeroFS, USA (founder).
  • Chengyan (Chuck) Zhao Ph.D. 2012 (co-advised with Greg Steffan) - Samsung, USA.
  • Madalin Mihailescu Ph.D. 2012 - NetApp, USA.
  • Jin Chen Ph.D. 2011 - PDF.
  • Gokul Soundararajan Ph.D. 2010 - NetApp, USA.
  • Don Pinto MSc. 2009 - GridCentric, Toronto, Canada.
  • Daniel Lupei MASc. 2009 - PhD student, EPFL.
  • Adrian-Daniel Popescu MASc. 2009 - PhD student, EPFL.
  • Bogdan Simion MASc. 2009 - PhD student, DCS, University of Toronto.
  • Trevor Armstrong MASc. 2006 - Microsoft, Redmond, U.S.A
  • Kaloian Manassiev M.Sc. 2005 - Microsoft, Redmond, U.S.A
  • Catalin Drula M.Sc. 2005 - Personal Networks, Bucharest, Romania (founder)

    Teaching

    ECE 454 Computer Systems Programming
    ECE 419 Distributed Systems
    ECE 1747 Parallel Programming
    ECE 1747 Parallel Programming - Quercus

    Professional Activities

    International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2007 Vice-chair for the Autonomic Computing Track
    International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2006 Program Committee
    VLDB 2006 Program Committee, Infrastructure for Information Systems
    International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2006 Program Committee
    Middleware 2005 and 2006 Program Committee
    Workshop on Middleware for Grid Computing (MGC) 2006, 2005 and 2004 Program Committee
    DOA 2005 Program Committee
    IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2005) Program Committee
    Middleware 2004 Program Committee and Publicity Chair

    Contact Information

    Office BA 4142
    416-946-0299

    e-mail amza at eecg dot toronto dot edu

    Mailing address Cristiana Amza
    Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical
    and Computer Engineering
    University of Toronto
    10 King's College Rd.
    Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G4
    Canada