Hossein Falaki
I am an experienced software engineer and data scientist constantly looking for new technical challenges at the intersection of computer science and statistics.
Industry
Currently, I am a staff software engineer at Databricks, where I joined in December 2013 as an early engineer. I have had the opportunity to wear different hats including development, product management, data science, and field engineering. I have been presenting my work at leading industry conferences.
As a software engineer, in addition to regular software development responsibilities, I championed and implemented several key features in Databricks product and contributed to Apache Spark. These include integration with third-party visualization libraries, end-to-end implementation of R Notebooks, integration with SparkR, integration with sparklyr, programmable input widgets, and data ingest UI. I also made several contributions to Apache Spark open source project, including the CSV data source.
As a founding member of the data science team, I built our first usage monitoring dashboards using our product, and performed several deep dives and advanced analyses on topics of interest to the executive team.>
Past Experiences
I have had the opportunity to work at some of the best technology companies and research labs. Here you can find brief summary of my past work.
Apple
I was a senior data scientist in Apple's Siri group between August 2012 and November 2013. I used statistical analysis and machine learning to improve performance and accuracy of Siri. During my time at Apple I introduced several new tools to the data team workflow including R for advanced analytics and visualization, and Spark for machine learning. I invited creators of Spark from UC Berkeley AMPLab to give technical talks at Apple and encouraged other engineering teams to take advantage of the latest big data stack.
Center for Embedded Network Sensing
I was a graduate researcher at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) between 2008 and 2012. I worked with Prof. Deborah Estrin, and collaborated with Prof. Ramesh Govindan.
My work involved building mobile systems including smartphone applications and backend systems for data collection and management. I advised several undergraduate students and collaborated with other researchers. I used data to research understand user interaction with smartphone in the context of other mobile projects such as mobile health.
Microsoft Research
I interned at Microsoft Research in Redmond during summer of 2009. I started a new project related to my Ph.D. research at UCLA on understanding smartphone usage using detailed on-device measurements. After the summer I continued my collaboration with my mentor, Ratul Mahajan, as a part-time Microsoft employee throughout 2010. This work lead to two highly cited research papers on Smartphone usage.
Cisco Systems
I spent three months as an intern at Cisco Systems. I developed an application for direct video communication between smartphones on vehicles. The work was used to evaluate the effectiveness of a new software stack for P2P communication.
Industry Talks
I have been presenting my work at several public and private industry conferences and meetups.
- Apache SparkR Under the Hood: How to Debug your SparkR Applications, Spark Summit, San Francisco, June 2017 [slides] [video]
- Processing large data in R using Apache Spark, Enterprise Application of the R Language, San Francisco, June 2017 [slides]
- Parallelizing Existing R Packages with SparkR, Spark Summit, Boston, February 2017 [slides] [video]
- Apache Spark Usage in the Open Source Ecosystem, Spark Summit, San Francisco, June 2016 [slides] [video]
- Keynote Demo Presentation, Spark Summit, Amsterdam, October 2015 [video]
- Enabling Exploratory Data Science with Spark and R, Spark Summit, Amsterdam, October 2015 [slides] [video]
- Visualizing Big Data in the Browser Using Spark, Spark Summit, New York, 2015 [slides] [video]
- Supercharging R with Spark for end-to-end data science, Strata + Hadoop World Conference, New York, September 2015 [slides] [video]
- Exploratory Data Analysis with Apache Spark, Strata + Hadoop World Conference, Barcelona, Spain, November 2014 [slides] [video]
- Interactive Visual Data Exploration with Spark, Strata + Hadoop World Conference, New York, October 2014 [slides] [video]
Academics
My Ph.D. research was focused on making mobile phones smarter networked devices when they were used in health applications. My Ph.D. dissertation is available here. As a Master's student at the University of Waterloo, I was a member of the Tetherless Computing Lab, where I worked on the KioskNet Project with Prof. S. Keshav. I also studied scanning strategies for opportunistic communication over Wi-Fi on mobile devices.
- Ph.D. Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 2012
- M.Math. Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2008.
- B.S. Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, 2006.
- SparkR: Scaling R Programs with Spark, Shivaram Venkataraman, Zongheng Yang, Davies Liu, Eric Liang, Hossein Falaki, Xiangrui Meng, Reynold Xin, Ali Ghodsi, Michael Franklin, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, SIGMOD 2016 [PDF] [BibTeX]
- SystemSens: A Tool for Monitoring Usage in Smartphone Research Deployments, Hossein Falaki, Ratul Mahajan, and Deborah Estrin, ACM MobiArch 2011 [PDF] [BibTeX]
- A First Look at Traffic on Smartphones, Hossein Falaki, Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, Ratul Mahajan, Srikanth Kandula, and Deborah Estrin, IMC November 2010 [PDF] [BibTeX]
- Diversity in Smartphone Usage, Hossein Falaki, Ratul Mahajan, Srikanth Kandula, Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, Ramesh Govindan, and Deborah Estrin, MobiSys'10, June 2010 [PDF] [BibTeX]
- Design and Implementation of the KioskNet System, S. Guo, M.H. Falaki, E.A. Oliver, S. Ur Rahman, A. Seth, M.A. Zaharia, U. Ismail, and S. Keshav, International Conference on Information Technologies and Development (ICTD), December 2007 [PDF] [BibTeX]
- The Wi-Fi Roaming Game, Hossein Falaki, The 3rd International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (WINE), December 2007 [PDF][BibTeX]
- Hierarchical Graph: A New Cost Effective Architecture for Network on Chip, Alireza Vahdatpour, Ahmadreza Tavakoli, and Hossein Falaki, Proceedings of The 2005 IFIP International Conference on Embedded And Ubiquitous Computing, Nagasaki, Japan, December 2005. [PDF] [BibTex]
- Performance Evaluation and Analysis of Delay Tolerant Networking, Earl Oliver, and Hossein Falaki, Proceedings of ACM/USENIX Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys 2007), Workshop on System Evaluation for Mobile Platforms (MobiEval), Puerto Rico, June 2007. [PDF] [BibTex] (Erratum)
- Design and implementation of the KioskNet system, S. Guo, M. Derakhshani, .H. Falaki, U. Ismail, R. Luk, E.A. Oliver, S. Ur Rahman, A. Seth, M.A. Zaharia, S.Keshav Computer Networks, August 2010 [PDF] [BibTeX]
- Very Low-Cost Internet Access Using KioskNet, S. Guo, .H. Falaki, E.A. Oliver, S. Ur Rahman, A. Seth, M.A. Zaharia, and S. Keshav, ACM Computer Communication Review, October 2007. [PDF] [BibTeX]
- Smart Screen Management on Mobile Phones, Hossein Falaki, Ramesh Govindan, and Deborah Estrin, Center for Embedded Network Sensing Technical Reports #74, June, 2009 [PDF] [BibTeX]
- Design and Implementation of the KioskNet System (Extended Version), S. Guo, M.H. Falaki, E.A. Oliver, S. Ur Rahman, A. Seth, M.A. Zaharia, U. Ismail, and S. Keshav University of Waterloo Technical Report No. CS-2007-40, November 2007. [PDF] [BibTeX]
- Automating Personalized Battery Management on Smartphones, Hossein Falaki, University of California, Los Angeles Ph.D. dissertation [PDF] [BibTex]
- WLAN Interface Management on Mobile Devices, Hossein Falaki, University of Waterloo Master's Thesis [PDF] [BibTex]
- Simulation and Analysis of a Scalable Application Level Multicast Protocol, Hossein Falaki, Sharif University of Technology Bachelor's Project [Abstract]
- Understanding Smartphone Usage, Hossein Falaki, Ratul Mahajan, Srikanth Kandula, Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, Ramesh Govindan, and Deborah Estrin, Seventh Annual Microsoft Research Networking Summit [Poster]
- Challenges of Smarter Power Management on Smartphones, Hossein Falaki, Ramesh Govindan, and Deborah Estrin, ACM HotMobile 2009 Poster Session [Abstract] [Poster]
- Trace-based Analysis of Wi-Fi Scanning Strategies, Hossein Falaki, and Srinivasan Keshav, ACM MobiCom 2008 Poster Session [Abstract] [Poster]
- KioskNet - Low-cost Internet Access for Developing Regions, Hossein Falaki, Casey Ho, Usman Ismail, Alex Leong, Rowena Luk, Earl Oliver, Sumair Ur Rahman, and Srinivasan Keshav, ACM SIGCOMM 2008 Poster/Demo Session [Abstract]
- Energy Modeling for KioskNet, Hossein Falaki, and Rajat Sethi, ACM MobiCom Workshop on Challenged Networks (CHANTS 2007) Poster Session. [Abstract] [Poster]
Conferences
Workshops
Technical Reports
Theses
Posters and Demos
- Numerical Computing with Apache Spark, Spark Workshop at ICME, April 2014 [slides]
- SystemSens: A Tool for Monitoring Usage in Smartphone Research Deployments, MobiArch June 2011 [slides]
- Diversity in Smartphone Usage, MobiSys, June 2010 [slides]
- WLAN Interface Management on Mobile Devices, University of Waterloo Master's Thesis Presentation, July 2008 [slides] [abstract]
- The Case for Opportunistic Communication, CENS Technical Seminar Series, University of Califronia, Los Angeles, February 2008 [slides] [abstract]
- The Wi-Fi Roaming Game, Networks and Distributed Systems Seminars, University of Waterloo, October 2007 [slides]
- Selected papers from MobiSys 2007, Networks & Distributed Systems Seminars, University of Waterloo, July 2007 [slides]
- Performance Evaluation and Analysis of Delay Tolerant Networking, Workshop on System Evaluation for Mobile Platforms (MobiEval), Puerto Rico, June 2007 [slides]
- Performance Evaluation and Analysis of Delay Tolerant Networking, Networks & Distributed Systems Seminars, University of Waterloo, June 2007 [slides] [abstract]
- Improving Phones through Surveillance, October 2010, MIT Technology Review
- Tuning Smartphone Performance, October 2010, Microsoft Research Press
- The Looming Smartphone Power Crunch, April 2012, IT Business Edge
Contact
The best way to contact me is by email: my last name at gmail.com. I read all my messages including recruiting ones. I will respond to all emails from engineers and managers. Recruiters, if I am not responding to you, I am not interested. I also check my LinkedIn inbox from time to time.