WiE is excited to recognize Guyue (Grace) Liu, who made the list of Rising Stars 2019, published by host institution, University of Illinois. Rising Stars is an intensive workshop launched at MIT in 2012 and held annually around the country for women graduate students and postdocs who are pursuing academic careers in computer science, computer engineering and electrical engineering.

Grace received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from GW in 2019, advised by Prof. Timothy Wood. Currentlhy a postdoctoral researcher at CMU working with Prof. Vyas Sekar, her research interests are in the areas of networking, security and systems. Grace is widely published in top conferences including SIGCOMM, and has interned and collaborated with leading research institutes, such as Microsoft Research and Hewlett Packard Labs.

Grace won her place as a Rising Star 2019 with her research on Novel Abstractions for Software-Based Networks. Network Functions (NFs) (e.g., firewalls, proxies and caches) are crucial to modern networks to meet security, performance and policy compliance goals. Specialized hardware devices used to perform these tasks, but are no longer a good choice for cloud providers and large carriers, due to the high cost and low flexibility. Thus, network operators are seeking to run network functions on commodity servers using software-based solutions. One answer requires processing packets at 10Gbps or beyond to avoid slowing down applications; conquering software failures without disrupting network operations; managing large-scale hosts efficiently to minimize extra communication overheads - yet traditional software and virtualization techniques cannot fulfil these requirements.

Grace's work at the intersection of systems and negtworking solves the problem by building Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platforms, demonstrating not only how to design and optimize the underlying system to overcome performance problems, but also how to provide flexible abstractions for applications, hiding system-level communication and processing concerns. 

Specifically, Grace has designed (1) a high-performance service chaining platform that provides a unified abstraction, enabling packets to be moved efficiently at each level; (2) a novel service chaining abstraction that breaks the monolithic model into modular micro-services; (3) a distributed real-time performance monitoring platform that allows users to unobtrusively identify and extract necessary data in the middle of the network, without instrumenting the application or understanding the complicated underlying network topology.

Congratulations on your continuing achievements, Grace! WiE is proud to count you amongst the GW SEAS alums!

GW and the School of Engineering are proud to announce the opening of our applications for the highly competitive Scholarship for Service. The form is available at this link. 

The scholarship is open only to U.S. citizens. Please contact cspri@gwu.edu for more information on the scholarship program.

...by WiE Director Shelly Heller

A must-read just appeared in Nature - Race and Racism in the Geosciences, December 16, 2019. Kuheli Dutt, The Director of Academic Affairs and Diversity at Columbia University’s Earth Institute,  focuses on the lack of diversity in the field of geosciences and suggests that only with focused, intentional efforts will we be able to effect change. Kuheli notes that in the geosciences, the least diverse STEM field, over 90% of the doctorates go to white students, and this has been the status quo for at least the last 40 years. The impact is not only to the lack of new members in the scientific community, but also to the inability to retain those members from underrepresented minority groups. 

I focused on one of her conclusions:

“Diversity and inclusion need to be prioritized in institutional procedures such as search and awards committees. Furthermore, bias training needs to be considered on a par with scientific and technical training. To set an example, institutional leaders should visibly and actively participate in bias trainings. There are mixed opinions about the efficacy of bias trainings, as it takes more than training to transform a culture. Nevertheless, bias trainings are still an essential first step towards better understanding race and racism.”

I am proud to say that the WiE Center has taken a leading position in focusing change within the GW Engineering school -- not only the trainings we have held, but in regular notes to our community with additional information and insights into addressing and expanding representation of a diverse community. 

Kuheli's article in Nature was picked up in a December 23 New York Times piece titled "Earth Science Has a Whiteness Problem." To quote the piece: "Her article in Nature Geoscience last week, titled 'Race and Racism in the Geosciences,' was so popular that the journal’s editors removed its pay wall.”