About Me

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Hi! I'm Jalani Williams, a 6th year PhD student in the Computer Science Department at CMU, where I am advised by Weina Wang. Together, we've been working on various topics in queueing theory and stochastic analysis, but, for my thesis, I've been studying multiserver systems with setup times. If you're interested, you can find my thesis proposal here and a draft of my thesis here.

Research Interests

Broadly, I'm interested in applying techniques from applied probability and decision making under uncertainty to guide the design of large-scale service systems (e.g. datacenters). In the long term, I want to create a world where we have the theoretical foundation for understanding when a system is efficient, performant, and robust. Recently, I've been focused on investigating how the energy-saving methods being used in today’s datacenters affect the fundamental characteristics of their latency performance.

Publications

  1. The M/M/k with Deterministic Setup Times. Jalani K. Williams, Mor Harchol-Balter, Weina Wang. ACM SIGMETRICS 2023. [pdf]
  2. Probing to Minimize Weina Wang, Anupam Gupta, Jalani K. Williams (random author order). ITCS 2022. [link]
  3. The Mouse Action Recognition System (MARS) software pipeline for automated analysis of social behaviors in mice. Cristina Segalin, Jalani Williams, Tomomi Karigo, et al. eLife 2021. [link]