David Wolinsky

Welcome to the homepage of David Isaac Wolinsky.  My life has been defined by challenge, struggle, and success.  While accepting failure as a sign of growth, I press forward learning from my mistakes and growing.  I have an awesome son named Isaac. My studies began at the University of Florida's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in August 2001, I obtainied a bachelors of science degree in the spring of 2005, masters of science degree in the spring of 2007, and finished my doctorate of philosophy in May 2011.  My adviser was Professor Renato Figueiredo, whom I began working with in the spring of 2006 at the Advanced Computing and Information Systems Lab.  Since June 2011, I have been working with Professor Bryan Ford in the dedis group at Yale University.

During my PhD, I primarily focused on network virtualization using structured P2P overlays and grid computing.  My networking research was been realized in IPOP, a free (BSD) network virtualization software.  I have worked on enabling DHTs, decentralized NAT traversal through relays, software models for improved network virtualization, and autonomic virtual networking stacks.  This work is a major contribution to my grid computing research focus, Grid Appliance, which enables the creation of decentralized, distributed grids using virtualized, physical, and cloud resources.  Going forward, I see these concepts contributing to other distributed systems such as sensor networks, social networks, cloud services, or even web services.

As a Postdoc Researcher at Yale, I am now focused on anonymity networks, in particular, Dissent.  The initial thrust has been getting a reasonable software foundation available, which is slowly coming into existence.  With much of the base work in place, my initial research thrust focuses on making a provable anonymity system scalable in terms of participants, which has a direct relation to network size, peer interarrival rate, and bandwidth and CPU consumption, balanced against provable anonymity.

During my free time, I enjoy time with my boy, running, playing basketball and badminton, and occassionally playing video games.  At one point, I was ranked in the top 20 on the US East Warcraft III Free For All Ladder.