How to find research problems

Abstract

In this talk, I discuss how our group approaches the most basic question that faces all researchers: how to find good systems problems to work on? Through examples drawn from a research career now spanning nearly 30 years, I will present different problems we have worked on, and how we arrived upon them. The examples will highlight our work in file systems, storage systems, and distributed systems, including older work on reliability and more recent work on distributed systems.