william::school

General Info

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Notre Dame under the direction of Surendar Chandra as part of the Notre Dame Systems Lab research group. I received a M.S. in Computer Sciencce from Notre Dame in 2005 and a B.S. in Computer Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) in 1998. From 1998 to 2002 I worked as a software developer and consultant.

My main area of interest is the general field of distributed systems. I am currently working on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems and networks. I have analyzed traffic and query performance in file-sharing P2P networks (Gnutella) and I am currently working on designing efficient search mechanisms based on the findings from my analysis. My prior work looked at designing mechanisms for creating efficient and well-connected unstrucured topologies.

A peripheral area of interest is software architectures for distributed, object/component systems. Specifically interested in software architectures that allow for seamless integration across distributed object/componet technologies. I have written a chapter on designing flexible component systems for the book "Component-Based Software Development".

Curriculum Vitae

Publications

On the need for query-centric unstructured peer-to-peer overlays, William Acosta and Surendar Chandra, In Proceedings of the IEEE Fifth International Workshop on Hot Topics in Peer-to-Peer Systems (HotP2P '08), April 18, 2008, Miami, FL (PDF)

Exploiting the Properties of Query Workload and File Name Distributions to Improve P2P Synopsis-based Searches, William Acosta and Surendar Chandra, In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM '08) Mini-Symposium, April 14, 2008 (PDF)

Understanding the Practical Limits of the Gnutella P2P System: An Analysis of Query Terms and Object Name Distributions, William Acosta and Surendar Chandra. In Proceedings of the ACM/SPIE Multimedia Computing and Networking (MMCN '08), January 30-31, San Jose, CA (PDF)

Improving Search Using a Fault-Tolerant Overlay in Unstructured P2P Systems, William Acosta and Surendar Chandra, In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP '07), September 10-14, 2007, XiAn, China (PDF)

Trace Driven Analysis of the Long Term Evolution of Gnutella Peer-to-Peer Traffic, William Acosta and Surendar Chandra, In Proceedings of the eigth Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM '07), April 5-6, 2007,Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (PDF)

Designing Flexible Distributed Component Systems, William Acosta and Gregory Madey, Chapter in Development of Component-Based Information Systems, eds., M. Lycett, S. de Cesare and R. Macredie M.E. Sharpe Inc., 2005

Constructing Efficient and Fault-Tolerant Peer-to-Peer Networks, William Acosta, Master's Thesis, University of Notre Dame, 2005 (PDF)

Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks - Next Generation of Performance and Reliability, William Acosta and Surendar Chandra, In the IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM '05) Poster Session, March 13-17, 2005, Miami, FL