Dr. Emina Soljanin ‘94, professor at Rutgers University, presented her research about codes for data storage system during the Leaders and Innovators Speaker Series seminar in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University.
Soljanin discussed how coding reduces download time of large files in the cloud systems, and provided insights on increasing reliability against disk failures. Her seminar introduced a queuing framework to model multiple users requesting their data simultaneously and demonstrated the trade-off between the download time and the storage space.
“Coding exploits the diversity and parallelism in the system better than today’s replication schemes allowing faster download,” said Soljanin. “Several problems arise in distributed computing systems when some servers are struggling to complete their tasks, and the cloud data is hot, large, changing and expanding.”
Soljanin graduated from the electrical and computer engineering department with a master’s degree and Ph.D. in 1989 and 1994, respectively. She recently received the Texas A&M College of Engineering’s 2017 Distinguished Alumni Award. She is a former distinguished technical staff member at Bell Labs and has spent more than 25 years participating in diverse research and business projects in areas such as power system optimization, magnetic recording, color space quantization, hybrid ARQ, network coding, data and network security, and quantum information theory and networking.
Soljanin has served as the associate editor for Coding Techniques and IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, on the Information Theory Society’s board of governors, and in various roles on other journal editorial boards and conference program committees. She is a member of AMS and an IEEE Fellow. She served as a distinguished lecturer for the IEEE Information Theory Society in 2015 and 2016 and is currently serving as the second vice president for the society.