Sean Quinlan
(908) 582-2706
seanq@bell-labs.com
Ph.D. Computer Science, 1994.
B.Sc. (Honors), Computer Science, 1988.
1995-present: Member of technical staff. Much my of time is spent working on the Plan 9 distributed operating system. Plan 9 is the work of many individuals; my contributions have been in the areas of storage, security, networking, embedded systems, and the interaction with Microsoft Windows.
1989-94: Research assistant. In addition to my dissertation research, I implemented the multi-processor real-time operating system used in the lab, designed a structured light sensor and various I/O boards, and was involved in other project such as: path planning, dynamic simulation of rigid bodies, and force feedback robotic manipulators.
Summer 1989: Consultant. I built a prototype of the Plan 9 file system; incorporating daily snapshots stored to write-once optical storage.
Venti: a network storage system intended for archival data. In this system, a unique hash of a block's contents acts as the block identifier for read and write operations. This approach leads to a number of interesting properties: blocks cannot be overwritten thus preventing accidental or malicious destruction of data, duplicate copies of a block can be coalesced reducing the consumption of storage, and both clients and servers can detect data corruption. Venti is a building block for constructing a variety of archival storage applications such as logical backup, physical backup, and snapshot file systems.
Viaduct: virtual private networking made easy. In this project, I designed and built a small, low cost hardware device, called a minibrick, that is placed between one or more home computers and a broadband Internet connection. The Viaduct minibrick transparently and securely connects these computers to the user’s corporate network. The architecture of this system is a physically distributed Ethernet switch, simplifying configuration and administration compared to the more typical IP layer VPNs. This project also developed and patented a novel approach to compression for unreliable packet networks.
Ph.D. Dissertation: The real-time modification of collision-free paths for robots. This research attempts to close the gap between global path planning and real-time sensor-based robot control. Contributions include: a method for re-planning in dynamic environments, an efficient algorithm for computing the distance between non-convex objects, and a real-time method for calculating a discrete approximation to the time-optimal parameterization of a path. Supervised by Oussama Khatib.
Cache Worm File System: This project explored the design of a general purpose file system for write-once read-many (WORM) storage. A magnetic disk cache enables blocks to be modified multiple times before they are written to the WORM and increases performance. Snapshots of the file system can be made at any time without limiting the users' access to files. These snapshots reside entirely on the WORM, are accessible to the user via a second read-only file system, do not contain multiple copies of unchanged data, and can be used to rebuild the file system in the event that the disk cache is destroyed.
R. Cox, E. Grosse, R. Pike, D. Presotto,
and
S. Quinlan, “The Real-Time Modification of
Collision-Free Paths”, Ph.D. Thesis,
S. Quinlan, “Efficient Distance Computation between Non-Convex Objects”, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 1994.
S. Quinlan and O. Khatib, “Towards Real-Time Execution of Motion Tasks”, in Experimental Robotics 2, ed. R. Chatila and G. Hirzinger, Springer-Verlag, 1993.
S. Quinlan, “A Cached WORM File System”, Software - Practice & Experience, 21(12), pp. 1289-1299, 1991.
6236341, 6388584: Method and apparatus for data compression of network packets.
ARCS Fellowship, 1993.
National Science Foundation Fellowship, 1990-1993.
1st place, 1991 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.
3rd place, 1990 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.
Ken Thompson
Fellow
Entrisphere, Inc.
ken@entrisphere.com
Rob Pike
Director of Computing Concepts Research
rob@bell-labs.com
Eric Grosse
Director of Networked Computing Research
ehg@bell-labs.com
Oussama Khatib
Professor of Computer Science
khatib@cs.stanford.edu