My Research

New flash: my research is now involved with “Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Electric Power Grid”, a $7.5M center-scale project from the National Science Foundation which started in August, 2005. The press release from my college can be found here, and the project’s web site is here. Drs. Hauser and Bose are also co-PIs on this, and GridStat is a foundational technology for this center.

I am involved with a number of research projects. Most of them involve improving the state of the art in what I call infrastructure software, software that others build large distributed software systems on top of. In particular, most of my work directly involves devising new kinds of middleware. Many of them involve fault tolerance, because that is my core expertise. All involve pragmatic research in systems software that involves significant prototyping activities; I have neither patience nor time for ivory tower research that has no practical application, i.e. it is strictly “academic” in the full sense of the word.

My major research projects include:

GridStat: status dissemination middleware for the electric power grid and other critical infrastructures; co-PI is Prof. Carl Hauser. GridStat is being used in a technology demo with Avista Utilities. GridStat has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (multiple grants) and the National Institute of Standards and Technologies and donations from Intel and Avista.
MicroQoSCORBA: middleware for small devices that can be tailored to the constraints of both the application and the target environment. This is funded by two a research donations from Cisco and also by a research grant from the National Science Foundation.

Select Recent Publications

K. Tomsovic, D. Bakken, M. Venkatasubramanian, A. Bose. “Designing the Next Generation of Real-Time Control, Communication and Computations for Large Power Systems”, Proceedings of the IEEE (Special Issue on Energy Infrastructure Systems), 93(5), May, 2005.
A.D. McKinnon, K.E. Dorow, T.R. Damania, O. Haugan, W.E. Lawrence, D.E. Bakken, J.C. Shovic. "A Configurable Middleware Framework for Small Embedded Systems that Supports Multiple Quality of Service Properties," Software: Practice and Experience, Wiley, to appear.
A. David McKinnon, David E. Bakken, and John C. Shovic. “A Configurable Cryptography Subsystem in a Middleware Framework for Embedded Systems”, Computer Networks, Elsevier, 46:6, 20 December 2004, 771–195.
Carl Hauser, David Bakken, and Anjan Bose. “A Failure to Communicate: Next-Generation Communication Requirements, Technologies, and Architecture for the Electric Power Grid”, IEEE Power and Energy, 3(2), March/April, 2005, 47–55.

My Teaching

I teach applied courses in distributed systems, networking, and fault tolerance, at the senior and graduate level. Classes I teach include:

CptS 224, Programming Tools
CptS 464/564, Distributed Computing Concepts and Programming
CptS 500, Proseminar
CptS/EE 562, Fault Tolerant Computer Systems

My Students

My current, former, and potential future students how have their own web page.

My Education and Background

My current CV is online (.pdf, .html).

I am a hands-on middleware builder for wide-area distributed systems; more detailed information about my background and the impact of my applied research can be found here. My applied background also includes consulting, and my consulting web page has deeply-technical letters of reference documenting this.

Like a number of applied experimental “systems software” researchers, I like to skirt the line between the academia and industry, because neither is perfectly satisfying. In the academe, prototypes lead to papers but are rarely fully shaken down, released, used by others, etc. But in industry you rarely get to look at the fundamental issues of a problem in depth. So this skirting the line I my way to try to have it both ways! It never quite works out perfectly that way, but it seems much like being stuck completely on one side or the other of the industry-academia chasm.

Contact Info

David E. Bakken

School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

PO Box 642752 (for postal mail); or 102 EME Building, Spokane Street (for Fedex)

Washington State University

Pullman, WA 99164-2752.

Phone: +1 509 335 2399 Fax: +1 509 335 3818

Email: bakken@eecs.wsu.edu