Charles "Buck" Krasic Assistant Professor Department of Computer Science University of British Columbia
Office: CISR 327 2366 Main Mall Vancouver, B. C., CANADA V6T 1Z4	Phone: (604) 822-5628 FAX: (604) 822-5485 Cell: (604) 313-9429 E-mail: krasic@cs.ubc.ca
Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it; it belongs to those who need it. Mario Ruoppolo from Il Postino.

Teaching

The public view of my calendar is here . Please check it before requesting an appointment.

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• Winter 10/11 (Winter Session 2010/11 - Term 1)
  • CPSC 538k - Topics in Cloud Computing
• Winter 09/10 (Winter Session 2009/10 - Term 2)
  • CPSC 538k - Topics in Cloud Computing
• Fall 08/09 (Winter Session 2008/09 - Term 2)
  • CS 508 - Operating Systems
• Winter 07/08 (Winter Session 2008/09 - Term 1)
  • CS 317 - Internet Computing.
• Winter 07/08 (Winter Session 2007/08 - Term 1)
  • CS 527 - Computer Communication Protocols.
• Fall 06/07 (Winter Session 2006/07 - Term 1)
  • CS 508 - Operating Systems
• Fall 05/06 (Winter Session 2005/06 - Term 1)
  • CS 317 - Internet Computing.
    Marks are available here (access restricted).
  • CS 508 - Operating Systems
• Winter 04/05 (Winter Session 2004/05 - Term 2)
  • CPSC 538A - Topics in Computer Systems.
• Fall 04/05 (Winter Session 2004/05 - Term 1)
  • CPSC 416 - Distributed Systems.
    Marks are available here (access restricted).
• Winter 03/04 (Winter Session 2003/04 - Term 2)
  • CPSC 538A - Topics in Computer Systems

Research

My research interests span operating systems, networking, multimedia, and real-time. The key theme of my work is to investigate various forms of quality-adaptation, with the intent of addressing the conflicts between the requirements of time-sensitive applications and the predominantly best-effort service model of the Internet infrastructure.

Video streaming is a prime example this class of applications. In my research, quality adaptation mechanisms are developed toward the goal of an encode-once, stream anywhere capability for video streaming in its various forms (video on-demand, conferencing, multicast, P2P).

I am generally interested in system support of all classes of time-sensitive distributed applications. Aside from media streaming, there are many such application classes, a few of them are the following: virtual tourism, distance education, distributed collaboration, real-time simulations (including multi-player network games), and various applications from the domain of sensor networks (localization, environmental sensing, precision agriculture).

To realize the vision of these time-sensitive applications, I believe a wholistic approach the entire end-to-end communication path is necessary---both in terms of software layers (application, middleware, OS, and network protocol stack) and resource types (network, processor, and storage). Therefore, my research interests span all of those areas. The common theme is about understanding how to design systems so that they co-ordinate and execute end-to-end adaptation in the most effective manner.

Publications (follow link)

Students

Current

• Michael Blackstock, Ph.D student
• Anirban Sinha, Masters student
• Nels Anderson, Masters student
• Steve Wilson, Masters student
• Randeep Singh Gakhal, Masters student

Graduated

• Jung-Rung 'Ron' Han, Masters student
• Lowell Kirsh, Masters student
• Kun-Ting Tsai, Undergraduate student (directed studies)
• Jon DeYoung, Undergraduate student (honors thesis)

Software

• QStream - an advanced quality-adaptive video streaming system.
• libdv - a software codec for the DV video format. This was the first open source (GPL) DV codec.
• MxTraf - a network traffic generator, capable of saturating a network with a tunable mix of flows. Using a reasonably capable Linux based server, MxTraf can generate traffic consisting of upto hundreds or even thousands of flows, with aggregate bandwidth of the generated traffic in the Gigabit range. MxTraf has extensive support for visualizing the traffic, including highly detailed views of the dynamics of TCP flows.

Bio

I joined the faculty at UBC in August 2003. I did my Ph.D. (2003) at OGI/OHSU, working under Prof. Jonathan Walpole. I received my M.Math (1996) and B.Math (1992) from the University of Waterloo.