About Us

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The Exploratory System Laboratory aims at Making Permissioned Blockchain Systems Fast Again.

A unique promising outlook for everyone at ExpoLab is rooted in creativity, curiosity, passion, humbleness, kindness… reaching the ultimate ideal of “science for the sake of science” to the betterment of humanity, attaining a noble society.

Journey

Director/Principle Investigator

Mohammad Sadoghi

Sadoghi's research spans all facets of secure and massive-scale data management. He leads the ExpoLab research group with the aim to pioneer a resilient data platform at scale, a distributed ledger centered around a democratic and decentralized computational model (Blockchain Textbook, ResilientDB Fabric, Journey, Outlook/Slides, Talk/Slides, Bitcoin Radio, Code, Hands-on, Wiki) that further aims to unify secure transactional and real-time analytical processing (Transaction Textbook, L-Store, QueCC). We envision ResilientDB to serve as a platform to foster "creativity". He has co-founded a blockchain company called Moka Blox, a spin-off of our ResilientDB Fabric.

Team

Junchao Chen

Junchao Chen is a second-year Ph.D. student at University of California, Davis. His research interest is BFT protocols. Currently, he is working on smart contract concurrency.

Dakai Kang

Dakai Kang is a second-year Ph.D. student at University of California, Davis. His research interest is BFT protocols. His last work was a novel high-performance BFT protocol with a Rapid View Synchronization mechanism. Currently, he is working on Ordering Fairness in BFT protocols. In NexRes, he implemented the recovery and checkpoint algorithm.

Suyash Gupta

Is a PhD Candidate and Research Assistant at Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis. He is also the Lead Architect at ResilientDB, and is associated with Exploratory Systems Lab. He is on job market and open to research opportunities in both industry and academia.

Sajjad Rahnama

Sajjad Rahnama is Ph.D. student at Department of Computer Science of the University of California, Davis supervised by Prof. Mohammad Sadoghi. His current research focuses on the geo-scale byzantine fault tolerant protocols, distributed systems, and their applications in blockchain and secure transaction processing. He is also a system designer and main developer of ResilientDB. He recieved his B.Sc. in Computer Science from Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.

Jelle Hellings

Previously, a Postdoc Scholar in the Exploratory Systems Lab, Prof. Jelle Hellings is now an Assistant Professor at McMaster University. His research centers around novel directions for high-performance large-scale data management systems. His research has a strong theoretical component (e.g., lower bound results, finite model theory, dependency theory) and a strong algorithmic component (e.g., external-memory algorithms, distributed algorithms, join algorithms). Currently, his focus is on the development of scalable resilient systems that can manage data and processing complex transactions, while providing strong guarantees toward users in the presence of faulty behavior (e.g., hardware failures, software failures, and malicious attacks).

Thamir Qadah

Thamir M. Qadah received his Ph.D. degree from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, in 2021. He is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department in the College of Computer and Information Systems at Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. He is a member of the ExpoLab Research Group. His research interests include designing and implementing secure, dependable, and high-performance software systems that exploit modern hardware technologies and cloud infrastructures. His research on queue-oriented transaction processing is recognized by the Best Paper Award in Middleware’18. Since 2015, He has been serving the research community as a reviewer for top-tier conferences such as SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, ICDCS, ATC, EDBT, Middleware, and CIKM as well as a reviewer for the IEEE Access journal. Moreover, he served as a committee member of the artifact evaluation committee for ASPLOS, OSDI, and SOSP. He has been an IEEE member since 2005.

Rohan Sogani

As a MSc graduate, Rohan's interests lie in the field of Distributed Systems with a focus on Consensus Protocols and scaling distributed systems, where he not only played a key role in RingBFT, but also played an instrumental role in developing Cerberus protocols at scale. He is now a Member of Technical Staff at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Apart from that, he loves to automate small things to speed up tasks and make a stream lined process in order to have consistency in his work. Just out of curiosity, he also likes to build small web applications, in order to stay in touch with the latest technologies.

Priya Holani

Priya Holani is a M.Sc. graduate at the University of California, Davis where she worked on Scaling ResilientDB Fabric via sharding (2020). She is now an engineer at Amazon.

Dhruv Krishnan

Dhruv Krishnan recieved a MSc Degree in Computer Science at the University of California, Davis in 2021. His research interest focused on scaling blockchain systems via sharding where he was supervised by Prof. Mohammad Sadoghi; he simultaneously served as a graduate teaching assistant under Dr. Joël Porquet-Lupine, for Operating Systems (ECS 150). He now works at Amazon AWS as a Software Developement Engineer. He was also a student member of the Campus Judicial Board, whose aim is to uphold academic campus standards. He had two years of experience working in the banking industry as a senior software engineer where he built middle office applications and led the agile transformation for his team consisting of dozen people. His general interests lie in building secure and efficient systems.

Shubham Pandey

Presently Shubham Pandey is working as Software Engineer in the Enterprise Wireless Development team at Cisco. He graduated from UC Davis with an MSc in Computer Science. At Exploratory Systems Lab, UC Davis, he was supervised by Prof. Mo Sadoghi for research and development of efficient and scalable consensus for the ResilientDB blockchain fabric. He led the Research of RDMA based Communication Layer for ResilientDB, blockchain fabric. Previously, he was Data Engineer Intern at SpringML where he was responsible for developing views, queries for data analysis. He was also involved in the development, maintenance, and operations of Get Vaccinated Oregon project. Before SpringML, he have worked with Mercedes Benz in automated Quality Assurance using Selenium and Appium in Java.

Haojun (Howard) Zhu

Haojun (Howard) Zhu is a M.Sc. Candidate at the Department of Computer Science of the University of California, Davis. His current interests focuses on the design and development of Reconfigurable BFT protocols as well as their incorperation into PBFT and GeoBFT, which is a very important practical aspect that is currently almost entirely missing from the literature.

Alejandro Armas

As a NSF LSAMP/CAMP and AvenueE/VIP Research Scholar, Alejandro is a B.Sc. Candidate at the University of California, Davis. Previously an intern at both the MIT Summer Research Program and Interdisciplinary and Quantitative Biology REU at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras; he now is leading effort to make ResilientDB, our blockchain fabric, more accessible and consumable for students, practitioners, and researchers at UCD and beyond by extending its toolkit and developing core documentation. He is interested in distributed systems and their corresponding architecture and has passion for performant systems and optimization. When he is not studying, he does weight-training at the Davis' ARC.