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Professor Philip Levis
(he/him/his)
Office: 409 Gates, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305 Office hours: Tuesdays 1:00-2:00 or by appointment Phone: +1 650 725 9046 email: pal at cs stanford edu BiographyI'm a Professor in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Departments of Stanford University. I head the Stanford Information Networking Group (SING) and co-direct lab64, the EE maker space at Stanford. I research operating systems, networks, and software design, especially for embedded systems. I appreciate excellent engineering and have a self-destructive aversion to low hanging fruit. From 2014-2019, I co-directed the Secure Internet of Things Project, a collaboration between Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the University of Michigan. I was on leave at SystemsResearch@Google 2022-2023. These days, I'm especially interested in the future of computer memory, and co-direct the DAM Project. |
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The results of my research are used by thousands of people, run on hundreds of thousands of devices, and are the basis for Internet standards. I written some papers. I've been awarded an NSF CAREER Award, a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship, and an Okawa Grant. I've received four Test of Time awards for work that, in retrospect, has had especially high impact. In 2010, three of my advisees, Kannan, Mayank, and Jung Il, had the bold idea that it's possible to build a full duplex radio. The Tock operating system runs on the root-of-trust chip of over a million Google Chromebooks, protecting the boot sequence. I place all of my industrially funded work in the public domain. |
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Advisees, Past and Present (Ph.D.)
- Kannan Srinivasan: quantifying wireless networks (EE 2010), Ohio State
- Jung Woo Lee: mesh routing to a mobile node (EE 2010), Verizon
- Jung Il Choi: network protocol isolation (EE 2011), Kumu Networks
- Mayank Jain: wireless physical/link boundary (EE 2011), Kumu Networks
- Ewen Cheslack-Postava: planetary-scale virtual worlds (CS 2013), Confluent
- Maria Kazandjieva: green enterprise computing (CS 2013), Netflix
- Tahir Azim: instance-aware simplification (CS 2013), Amazon
- Jae-Young Kim: full duplex link layers (EE 2013), Samsung
- Behram Mistree: transaction defined networking (EE 2015), Forward Networks
- Omid Mashayekhi: fast distributed cloud computing control planes (EE 2017), Google
Judson Wilson: architectures for network transparency (EE, on leave), Google - Chinmayee Shah: distributed multi-resolution and sparse data structures (EE 2018), Waymo
- Hang Qu: scheduling microtask analytics (EE 2018), Facebook
- Amit Levy: securing networks and systems with languages (CS 2018), Princeton
- Sergio Benitez: secure systems with safe languages (CS)
Holly Chiang: embedded system power management (EE 2020), Apple - Francis Yu Yan: machine learning in network protocols (CS 2020), UIUC
- Luke Hsiao: automatic datasheet extraction (EE 2021), Google
Raejoon Jung: distributed wireless desynchronization (EE 2021), Facebook Kevin Kiningham: hardware acceleration of cryptography and learning (EE 2021), Cruise - Kexin Rong: analytics on IoT data (CS 2021), Georgia Tech
Hudson Ayers: secure real time systems (EE 2023), Cruise - Deepti Raghavan: distributed systems (CS 2024), Brown University
Agur Adams: hardware-accelerated intrusion detection (EE, expected 2026) Obi Nnorom: programmable renewable energy (EE, expected 2027) Evan Laufer: secure systems (CS, expected 2028) Shahir Rahman: distributed machine learning systems (CS, expected 2028)
Advisees, Past and Present (M.S.)
- Bhupesh Chandra: virtual world scripting (CS)
- Arjun Roy: mobile phone operating systems (CS), Ph.D. at UCSD
- Shane Leonard: hardware/software IoT platforms (EE), SpaceX
- Jean-Luc Watson: low-power IPv6 networking (CS), Ph.D. program at UC Berkeley
- Yancheng Ou: programming grid-connected battery storage (CS)
Selected Publications
You can generally find more up-to-date and detailed information for the complete list on the SING website.
- Luke Hsiao, Sen Wu, Nicholas Chiang, Christopher Ré, and Philip Levis.
Creating Hardware Component Knowledge Bases with Training Data Generation and Multi-task Learning. In ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS), 2020.[PDF] - Amit Levy, Bradford Campbell, Branden Ghena, Daniel Giffin, Pat Pannuto, Prabal Dutta, and Philip Levis.
Multiprogramming a 64 kB Computer Safely and Efficiently. In Proceedings of the The 26th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2017).[PDF] - Omid Mashayekhi, Chinmayee Shah, Hang Qu, Andrew Lim, and Philip Levis.
Automatically Distributing Eulerian and Hybrid Fluid Simulations in the Cloud. In ACM Transactions on Graphics 37, 2, Article 24, 2018. - Judson Wilson, Riad S. Wahby, Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, Dan Boneh, Philip Levis and Keith Winstein.
Trust but Verify: Auditing Secure Internet of Things Devices. In Proceedings of the The 15th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys 2017). - Philip Levis.
Experiences from a Decade of TinyOS Development. In Proceedings of the 10th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2012. - Omprakash Gnawali, Rodrigo Fonseca, Kyle Jamieson, David Moss, and Philip Levis.
Collection Tree Protocol. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems SenSys, 2009.
Received SenSys Test of Time Award (2022).[PDF] - Mayank Jain, Jung Il Choi, Taemin Kim, Dinesh Bharadia, Siddharth Seth, Kannan Srinivasan, Philip Levis, Sachin Katti and Prasun Sinha.
Practical, Real-time, Full-Duplex Wireless. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom 2011).
Received SIGMOBILE Test of Time Award (2021).[PDF] - Philip Levis, Neil Patel, David Culler, and Scott Shenker.
Trickle: A Self-Regulating Algorithm for Code Propagation and Maintenance in Wireless Sensor Networks. In Proceedings of the First USENIX/ACM Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2004).
Received NSDI Best Paper Award (2004), NSDI Test of Time Award (2014). - David Gay, Philip Levis, Robert von Behren, Matt Welsh, Eric Brewer, and David Culler.
The nesC Language: A Holistic Approach to Network Embedded Systems. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI).
Received PLDI 2003 Most Influential Paper Award (2013).
TinyOS Programming Manual
I wrote a short book on programming TinyOS. Programming TinyOS digs into nesC and how you can use it to build TinyOS applications. A second version of the text, co-written with David Gay, is available for purchase as of April 2009. We tried to keep the cost down by making it softcover and having very tiny royalties. Unfortunately, though, TinyOS programming is not a blockbuster topic, so the book is a bit pricier than I'd like. You can download the full text of the published version for free. There's a short errata page.Education and Job Opportunties in STEM, 2008
Education and Job Opportunties in STEM, 2018
Service
| 2025: | OSDI |
| 2024: | NSDI, OSDI, SOSP, HotNets |
| 2023: | OSDI |
| 2022: | OSDI |
| 2021: | OSDI (external review) |
| 2020: | MobiSys, ATC |
| 2016: | IPSN, OSDI, SenSys (general chair) |
| 2015: | HotNets (co-chair) |
| 2014: | SenSys |
| 2013: | NSDI, SOSP, HotMobile |
| 2012: | CCR, SenSys |
| 2011: | CCR, IP+SN, MobiSys, HotPower, SOSP, SenSys (co-chair) |
| 2010: | TOSN, CCR, NSDI, MobiSys, DMSN |
| 2009: | TOSN, IPSN (co-chair, IP track), SenSys, SOSP, HotPower (co-chair) |
| 2008: | TOSN, MODUS, IPSN, ICDCS, NSDR, SIGCOMM, OSDI |
| 2007: | IPSN, EmNets (co-chair), SIGCOMM, DMSN, SenSys, MidSens |
| 2006: | NetDB, IPSN, DCOSS, SenSys, RTSS |
Quote
"Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent."- Herbert Simon, Sciences of the Artificial