Statement of Objectives -- MIT EECS (Area II) -- KHARE, Rohit

In the spring of my senior year at Caltech, I surprised myself by putting aside traditional options of graduate school or Silicon Valley to join the brand-new World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT. Working full-time on the Web was such an exciting prospect I wrapped up my degree work early to report for duty in the Web security wars. Over the next two years, the Consortium grew from three people on the third floor to thirty on three continents and I gained hands-on experience with an incredible range of Web-related technology. Better yet, beyond exploring the new frontier and writing specifications in a cubicle, I had the opportunity to go out in the world and collaborate with the Web industry, academics, and other consortia. As W3C's in-house "technology expert", I developed a broad enough understanding of the field to even go on to editing our quarterly World Wide Web Journal.

Working at W3C has been a unique opportunity to see into the future. I am reapplying to MIT's Computer Science Sc.D. program to aim further: to move beyond developing today's cutting-edge technology to researching the long-term challenges ahead for massively distributed information systems. I believe my work experience has helped me develop the focus, professional depth, and skills to succeed in graduate school. LCS's strength in Information Infrastructure research, in turn, makes it an ideal place to leverage my interest in Internet technology. Finally, pursuing a doctorate, with all the research, teaching, and publishing abilities it testifies to, will help me achieve my goals for developing distributed systems in industry.

My dream is to help design infrastructure and applications for tomorrow's global information systems. As the latest wave of distributed applications such as the Web and streaming audio/video explode in popularity, many centralized subsystems at the heart of the 'decentralized' Internet are not coping well with vast increases in scale, mobility, and bandwidth. I suspect that these forces will drive the development of peer-to-peer naming, addressing, routing, and caching strategies. At the application layer, developers are adapting to the same changes by adopting distributed objects, transaction services, and messaging middleware. I've been impressed by several MIT groups which are investigating these problems, notably the Advanced Network Architecture team and the Infomesh project. W3C itself is also exploring part of this agenda; I hope that by changing my role from staff to student, I can help forge new academic links between LCS researchers and the Web Consortium.

Doctoral study is an opportunity for me to build upon my talents and passion for networked systems to help reach my career goals. Many of the best distributed systems designers I have worked with came from industry or industrial research labs and had Ph.D.s, even those who migrated to Internet technology from other fields. That's proof that it requires serious dedication and scholarship to develop perspective on the thicket of interrelated issues facing massively distributed information systems developers. I want to dedicate myself to this path because I know why I want the degree, because I am prepared for it, and because LCS's Information Infrastructure agenda matches my interests.

Background

My career choices have exposed me to many aspects of distributed systems design. As an undergraduate, I studied parallel and object-oriented programming extensively because Caltech specialized in the former and my personal interest in commercial software development and early advocacy of NeXTstep led me to the latter. For my undergraduate research, I designed and built eText, a collaborative, interactive hypermedia textbook engine used to teach parallel programming techniques. As eText evolved into one of the world's first visual Web site authoring tools, I began encouraging other developers to establish interoperable standards for exchanging URLs and HTML files. Launching the WebStep group and editing its specifications introduced me to the W3C.

At W3C, I learned more about the interplay between distributed systems technology and application areas. As I branched out from Web security and cryptographic protocols to electronic commerce, content rating, privacy & demographics, and trust management, I kept coming back to fundamental issues about the extensibility and expressive power of the Web. So while I investigated these concrete scenarios for the W3C Technology & Society domain, I also developed PEP, an abstract model for adding extensions and negotiation to HTTP. Along the way, I've enjoyed the opportunity to work with world-class experts on security, Internet protocols, and policy issues from academia and from our corporate members on each of these projects.

These experiences and MIT classes have prepared me for graduate school by focusing my research interests and by developing my project management, writing, and speaking skills. I have learned to organize and lead workshops, supervise students, edit technical specifications and architecture documents, and work through the IETF and W3C standardization processes. I have also been responsible for outreach to other communities, including invited talks at DARPA, DIMACS, RSA Data Security, and National Research Council workshops. My broad involvement with W3C has also prepared me for my current role writing a series of survey papers which will hopefully culminate in a book on Web Architecture.

[An online version of this statement with links to the various talks, project, papers, and groups mentioned in it is at http://xent.w3.org/MIT-Statement ]