Lucian Carata

About me

I am a Research Associate in the Computer Laboratory and a member of the Digital Technology Group, working on developing ideas in the data provenance space and appying them to computing systems in order to make their behaviour more trackable and explainable.

I have completed my PhD in the DTG under the supervision of Professor Andy Hopper, and worked closely with Dr. Ripduman Sohan in exploring the research area of provenance, building systems for attributing resource consumption and explaining performance variablity. [PhD thesis]

My PhD research was funded by UK's EPSRC, by a CHESS Scholarship, and by a Computer Laboratory Departamental Scholarship.

I am an alumni of Wolfson College.

I am involved in the following projects:

Research

My research interests span the following topics: The overarching goal of those research interests is the understanding and automated control of complex systems and of their performance during unexpected situations (such as chain failures).

Supervisions

I supervise or have supervised for the following courses: I have also supervised the following students for their part II projects: Oliver Crawford, Branislav Uhrin, Tudor Avram, Han Liang Tan, Simon Iremonger, Tom Lee, Tiberiu Copaciu, Mihnea Ocian, Luke Sheeran

Experience

I have previously been an intern at both Microsoft (2010) and Google (2013), where I have worked in infrastructure teams dealing with performance evaluation and service configuration, respectively. My time within both companies has helped me gain valuable experience and a better understanding of real-world requirements at scale. This continues to drive my interests towards research that has a real impact and solves challenging engineering problems.

I have graduated (B.Eng.) as valedictorian from the "Gh. Asachi" Technical University of Iasi, Romania. My bachelor thesis dealed with real-time object recognition in video streams using interest point detectors. I have obtained a M.Sc. in Distributed Systems from the same university, with a research stint in the Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms from the Vienna University of Technology, during an ERASMUS Scholarship.

GPG Keys

If you want to securely communicate with me or make sure a particular software artifact was released (signed) by me, please download my OpenPGP public key 0x1AFE0D9B85AA6C3E from one of the public key servers or from this key file (https, local copy).

After importing the key into your keyring, please verify that its fingerprint matches BC97 80C1 939D 3711 6415 A117 1AFE 0D9B 85AA 6C3E (please take this value as a hint, and only when you have accessed this page through https). The usual way of checking the fingerprint is through out-of-band communication (phone, email, discussion in person).

I use different subkeys for encryption/authentication/signatures (given below with their ids). Unless compromised, the validity date of most of those subkeys will be prolongued before they expire. An exception is the encryption subkey, which I might choose to rotate in order to limit the number of communication sessions that are leaked if the corresponding private key is compromised.

DTG