Sean Quinlan

600 Mountain Ave

Murray Hill NJ, 07974

(908) 582-2706

seanq@bell-labs.com

 

Education

Stanford University

Ph.D. Computer Science, 1994.

 

University of Sydney, Australia

B.Sc. (Honors), Computer Science, 1988.

 

Employment

Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies

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.

 

Computer Science Robotics Laboratory, Stanford University

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.

 

AT&T Bell Laboratories

Summer 1989: Consultant. I built a prototype of the Plan 9 file system; incorporating daily snapshots stored to write-once optical storage.

 

Selected Research Projects

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.

 

Publications

R. Cox, E. Grosse, R. Pike, D. Presotto, and S. Quinlan, “Security in Plan 9”, Usenix Security Symposium, 2002. Awarded best paper at the conference.

 

S. Quinlan and S. Dorward, “Venti: A New Approach to Archival Storage”, Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2002. Awarded best paper at the conference.

 

S. Quinlan, “The Real-Time Modification of Collision-Free Paths”, Ph.D. Thesis, Stanford University, 1994.

           

S. Quinlan, “Efficient Distance Computation between Non-Convex Objects”, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 1994.

 

S. Quinlan and O. Khatib, “Elastic Bands: Connecting Path Planning and Control”, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 1993.

 

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.

 

Patents

6236341, 6388584: Method and apparatus for data compression of network packets.

 

Honors

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.

University of Sydney Medal for Computer Science, 1988.

 

References

Ken Thompson

Fellow

Entrisphere, Inc.

ken@entrisphere.com

 

Rob Pike

Director of Computing Concepts Research

Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies

rob@bell-labs.com

 

Eric Grosse

Director of Networked Computing Research

Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies

ehg@bell-labs.com

 

Oussama Khatib

Professor of Computer Science

Stanford University

khatib@cs.stanford.edu