Research

My main research interest is information management from the perspective of storage and file systems.  My recent focus in the area is on the problems of gathering, storing, and utilizing metadata, most specifically context metadata used to improve file system search for personal desktop machines.

Projects

Connections

Connections is a search framework that utilizes context information identified from a user's file access patterns to improve results. Connections integrates context gathered both from the file system and the user interface using a variety of algorithms. This project integrates the original Connections work, follow-on research in provenance-based context, Confluence, and SeeTrieve.

Metabox

Metabox integrates metadata gathered from across an enterprise into a logically unified metadata repository, which can then be queried by interested information management applications. Metadata includes existing file system information (e.g., inode stat data), content indexing, context information, data analytics, similarity, and much more. Current focuses include scalability, privacy, metadata integration, query interfaces, and performance.

Publications

Seeing is retrieving: Building information context from what the user sees
Karl Gyllstrom, Craig A. N. Soules
Intelligent User Interfaces, January 2008.

Using provenance to aid in personal file search
Sam Shah, Craig A. N. Soules, Gregory R. Ganger, Brian D. Noble
USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 2007.

Using context to assist in personal file retrieval
Craig A. N. Soules
Ph.D. Dissertation CMU-CS-06-147, August 2006.

Connections: using context to enhance file search
Craig A. N. Soules, Gregory R. Ganger
Symposium on Operating System Principles, October 2005.

Toward automatic context-based attribute assignment for semantic file systems
Craig A. N. Soules, Gregory R. Ganger
Technical report CMU-PDL-04-105. June 2004.

System support for online reconfiguration
Craig A. N. Soules, Jonathan Appavoo, Kevin Hui, Robert W. Wisniewski, Dilma Da Silva, Gregory R. Ganger, Orran Krieger, Michael Stumm, Marc Auslander, Michal Ostrowski, Bryan Rosenburg, Jimi Xenidis
USENIX Technical Conference, June 2003.

Why Can't I Find My Files? New Methods for Automating Attribute Assignment
Craig A. N. Soules, Gregory R. Ganger
Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, May 2003.

Metadata efficiency in versioning file systems
Craig A. N. Soules, Garth R. Goodson, John D. Strunk, Gregory R. Ganger
Conference on File and Storage Technologies, April 2003.

An infrastructure for multiprocessor run-time adaptation.
Jonathan Appavoo, Kevin Hui, Michael Stumm, Robert W. Wisniewski, Dilma Da Silva, Orran Krieger, Craig A. N. Soules.
Workshop on Self-Healing Systems, November 2002.

Enabling autonomic behavior in systems software with hot-swapping
Jonathan Appavoo, Kevin Hui, Craig A. N. Soules, Robert W. Wisniewski, Dilma M. Da Silva, Orran Krieger, Marc A. Auslander, David J. Edelsohn, Ben Gamsa, Gregory R. Ganger, Paul McKenney, Michal Ostrowski, Bryan Rosenburg, Michael Stumm, Jimi Xenidis.
IBM Systems Journal, Volume 42, No. 1, 2003.

Survivable Storage Systems.
Gregory R. Ganger, Predeep K. Khosla, Mehmet Bakkaloglu, Michael W. Bigrigg, Garth R. Goodson, Semih Oguz, Vijay Pandurangan, Craig A. N. Soules, John D. Strunk, Jay J. Wylie.
DARPA Information Survivability Conference and Exposition (Anaheim, CA, 12-14 June 2001), pages 184-195 vol 2. IEEE, 2001.

Storage-based intrusion detection: watching storage activity for suspicious behavior.
Adam G. Pennington, John D. Strunk, John Linwood Griffin, Craig A. N. Soules, Garth R. Goodson, Gregory R. Ganger.
Technical report CMU-CS-02-179. Oct 2002.

Metadata efficiency in a comprehensive versioning file system.
Craig A. N. Soules, Garth R. Goodson, John D. Strunk, Gregory R. Ganger.
Technical report CMU-CS-02-145. May 2002.

Intrusion detection, diagnosis, and recovery with self-securing storage.
John D. Strunk, Garth R. Goodson, Adam G. Pennington, Craig A. N. Soules, Gregory R. Ganger.
Technical report CMU-CS-02-140. May 2002.

Self-securing storage: Protecting data in compromised systems.
John D. Strunk, Garth R. Goodson, Michael L. Scheinholtz, Craig A. N. Soules, and Gregory R. Ganger.
Operating Systems Design and Implementation (San Diego, CA, 23-25 October 2000), pages 165-180.

Soft Updates: A solution to the metadata update problem in file systems.
Gregory R. Ganger, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Craig A. N. Soules, and Yale N. Patt.
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Volume 18 , No. 2 (May 2000).

Design and implementation of a self-securing storage device.
John D. Strunk, Garth R. Goodson, Michael L. Scheinholtz, Craig A. N. Soules, and Gregory R. Ganger.
Technical report CMU-CS-00-129. May 2000.

Journaling versus Soft Updates: Asynchronous Meta-data Protection in File Systems.
Margo I. Seltzer, Gregory R. Ganger, M. Kirk McKusick, Keith A. Smith, Craig A. N. Soules, and Christopher A. Stein
USENIX Annual Technical Conference. June 2000.