Sam Liang

sliang .at. dsg .dot. stanford .dot. edu

I finished my Ph.D degree from Stanford University. I conducted computer network research in the Distributed System Group, led by Professor David Cheriton. This is my Ph.D dissertation.

Research Projects

I have been working on TCP-RTM (Real Time Mode), which extends TCP to support real time applications, such as audio/video streaming. We recently submitted a paper to ICNP 2002, titled "TCP-RTM: Using TCP for Real Time Applications".

I have also extended TCP to support multicast applications, either reliable or semi-reliable (with TCP-RTM). A paper on this topic is published in InfoCom 2002, titled "TCP-SMO: Extending TCP for Medium Scale Multicast Applications".

Currently, I am working on my Ph.D dissertation: "Unifying the Transport Layer of a Packet-Switched Internetwork".

Before focusing on TCP, I made WRAP, an important component of the TRIAD project, work, based on the initial implementation by Chetan Rai. Now you can use WRAP to communicate with a host in a different address realm. In TRIAD, a host is identified by its name, instead of IP address, which is not unique across address realms, and TCP checksum is based on the names of the endhosts.

Past Projects

In my previous life, I did research on graphical user interface, software visualization and computer graphics.

If you have a VRML plugin installed in your browser, you can view this Macarena dancer.
With a QuickTime plugin, you can get a panoramic view of the Stanford Robotics Lab.
Based on data obtained by a laser scanner, I reconstructed the interior of a corner of the robotics lab. Click here to see some cool picture.
My "Real-time Ray Tracer" won an Honorable Mention Award in the annual Stanford Rendering Competition. We all know that ray tracing is very time consuming, doing it in real-time is hard to believe. The mpeg movie in the web page doesn't capture the excitement of the actual animation. If you are interested, ask me to show you the actual animation. It's reall cool!

(Links to more cool computer graphics projects of mine will be added later.)

Work Experience

Member of Technical Staff, Silicon Graphics Inc. Worked on SGI's C++ debugger, and in particular a special debugger for X/Motif programs.
Senior Software Engineer. Worked on VLSI CAD systems.

Education

MS in EE, Stanford University.
MS in CS, University of Arizona.
BS in CS, Beijing University.