In this talk, I will present a series of research efforts carried out within my research group, all centered around a common goal: enabling the design and implementation of complex distributed systems through low-cost abstractions. While the systems we study vary widely in their goals and architectures, they share a unifying principle—the pursuit of abstractions that reduce the cost of building and operating distributed software. Crucially, the notion of cost is context-dependent: in some projects, it refers to development time or implementation complexity; in others, to performance overhead or limitations in expressiveness. By examining a variety of projects, I will illustrate how different forms of low-cost abstractions can support practitioners in managing the inherent challenges of distributed systems.
Alessandro Margara is an Associate Professor at the Politecnico di Milano. He obtained his PhD from Politecnico, and he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam, and at the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI) Lugano. I has been a visiting research scholar at the Purdue University. His research lab develops new solutions to ease the development of complex distributed software systems, targeting data-intensive applications in particular. His research intersects software engineering and distributed systems, proposing novel programming abstractions and implementing them into concrete systems.
