I am a Software Engineer at Google, where I work on scheduling large-scale ML workloads on Borg.
I earned a PhD in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin in May 2022.
My dissertation was on Scalability through Asynchrony in Transactional Storage Systems.
My advisors were Prof Lorenzo Alvisi and Prof Simon Peter.
During my PhD, I interned at Facebook (Summers 2013, 2014 and 2015) and VMware (Summer 2017).
My LinkedIn profile has details of these and prior experiences.
Previously, I earned a MS in Computer Science from Stanford University and a
BE in Software Engineering from the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan.
ScaleDB: A Scalable, Asynchronous In-Memory Database
Syed Akbar Mehdi, Deukyeon Hwang, Simon Peter, Lorenzo Alvisi
17th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '23)
[pdf], [talk video]
Scalability through Asynchrony in Transactional Storage Systems
Syed Akbar Mehdi
PhD Dissertation, UT Austin (May 2022)
[pdf]
Writes: the dirty secret of causal consistency
Lorenzo Alvisi, Natacha Crooks and Syed Akbar Mehdi
Bulletin of the IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering (Dec 2017 Vol. 40 No. 4).
[pdf]
I Can't Believe It's Not Causal! Scalable Causal Consistency with No Slowdown Cascades
Syed Akbar Mehdi, Cody Littley, Natacha Crooks, Lorenzo Alvisi, Nathan Bronson and Wyatt Lloyd
14th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '17)
[pdf], [slides], [talk video]
Application-Defined Decentralized Access Control
Yuanzhong Xu, Alan M. Dunn, Owen S. Hofmann, Michael Z. Lee, Syed Akbar Mehdi and Emmett Witchel
2014 Usenix Annual Technical Conference (ATC '14)
[pdf]
An Architectural Evaluation of SDN Controllers
Syed Abdullah Shah, Jannet Faiz, Maham Farooq, Aamir Shafi and Syed Akbar Mehdi
2013 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC '13)
[pdf]
Revisiting Traffic Anomaly Detection using Software Defined Networking
Syed Akbar Mehdi, Junaid Khalid and Syed Ali Khayam
14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID 2011)
[pdf], [slides], [Talk 1, 2, 3, 4]
I Can't Believe It's Not Causal! Scalable Causal Consistency with No Slowdown Cascades
2017 Industry-Academia Partnership Cloud Workshop
Best Poster Award
[pdf]
