Jacob Sorber Ph.D. Candidate Department of Computer Science University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA

Research Interests

I am broadly interested in distributed systems, embedded systems, and mobile computing. Specifically, my research touches a variety of areas, including (but definitely not limited to) programming languages, context-aware computing, energy management, sensor networks, distruption-tolerant networks, and runtime application modelling .

My current work focuses on using high-level coordination languages in support of automatic energy management. The goal is to provide perpetual operation in embedded computing devices that rely on energy harvesting, without placing undue burden on the programmer. [see Eon and TurtleNet.]

Other research efforts include Hierarchical Power Management (see Turducken and Triage papers) and distributed model checking algorithms while at BYU.

Publications

• Energy Harvesting/Turtle Tracking

  • J. Sorber, A. Kostadinov, M. Garber, M. Brennan, M. D. Corner, E.D. Berger. Eon: A Language and Runtime System for Perpetual Systems. In Proceedings of the Fifth International ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys '07), Sydney, Australia, November 2007. (Previously as Technical Report~06-61. University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Amherst, MA. December, 2006. [Slides]
  • J. Sorber, A. Kostadinov, M. Brennan, M. D. Corner, E.D. Berger. eFlux: Simple Automatic Adaptation for Environmentally Powered Devices (Poster/Demo). In 7th IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile/WMCSA), Semiahmoo Resort, Washington, April 2006.

• Hierarchical Power Management

  • N. Banerjee, J. Sorber, M. D. Corner, S. Rollins, and D. Ganesan. Triage: Balancing Energy Consumption and Quality of Service in Tiered Microservers, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys 2007), Puerto Rico, June 2007.
  • J. Sorber, N. Banerjee, M. D. Corner, and S. Rollins. Turducken: Hierarchical Power Management for Mobile Devices. Proceedings of The Third International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys '05), Seattle, WA, June 2005. Previously as Technical Report 05-01. University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Amherst, MA. January, 2005. [Slides]



• Parallel Model Checking (at BYU)

  • Michael D. Jones, Jacob Sorber, "Parallel search for LTL violations", International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT), Volume 7, Issue 1, Feb 2005, Pages 31 - 42
  • Michael Jones, Jacob Sorber, "Parallel Random Walk Search for LTL Violations", Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Model Checking(PDMC), Brno, Czeck Republic, August 2002
  • M. Jones, J. Sorber, "Using Idle Workstations to find LTL property violations", Laboratory for Applied Logic Technical Report [FV-001], Brigham Young University, June 2002.

Awards

About Me

I am a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, in the Department of Computer Science with hopes of getting a Ph.D.. I work in the PRISMS lab with my advisor, Mark Corner. My wife, Trisha, my three daughters Maren, Eliza, and Jane and I have been in the Amherst area for almost 5 years and we love it here.

Before moving to Massachusetts, I worked as a software engineer for Mobile Productivity Inc (MPI) and before that at Wavetronix LLC. I also completed a BS in Computer Science at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT.

I grew up in Utah. I love to hike, run, bike, flyfish, and paddle when I get the chance. I have also recently taken up making cheese as a hobby (more to come). I also spent 2 years in Cambodia (in Phnom Penh and Kampung Cham) serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.