MSc Nafise Eskandani
nafise.eskandani@de.abb.com
0000-0001-9761-6319
NEskandani

Wallstadter Str. 59
68526 Ladenburg, Germany

I am a part-time PhD student at the Technical University of Darmstadt and an Associate Scientist at ABB Corporate Research Center. My research interests include Cloud Computing, Software Engineering, and Software Architecture. Currently, I am working on programming models for decentralized and resilient systems.

Publications

1. MSR
   

   The Wonderless Dataset for Serverless Computing

   Nafise Eskandani, Guido Salvaneschi

   In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 18th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR, 2021

   Abstract PDF

   Function as a Service (FaaS) has grown in popularity in recent years, with an increasing number of applications following the Serverless computing model. Serverless computing supports out of the box autoscaling in a pay-as-you-go manner, letting developers focus on the application logic rather than worrying about resource management. With the increasing adoption of the this model, researchers have started studying a wide variety of aspects of Serverless computing, including communication, security, performance, and cost optimization. Yet, we still know very little of how Serverless computing is used in practice.

   In this paper, we introduce Wonderless, a novel dataset of open-source Serverless applications. Wonderless consists of 1,877 real-world Serverless applications extracted from GitHub, and it can be used as a data source for further research in the Serverless ecosystem, such as performance evaluation and software mining. To the best of our knowledge, Wonderless is currently the most diverse and largest dataset for research on Serverless computing.

2. OOPSLA
   ConSysT
   

   Rethinking Safe Consistency in Distributed Object-Oriented Programming

   Mirko Köhler, Nafise Eskandani, Pascal Weisenburger, Alessandro Margara, Guido Salvaneschi

   Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages 4 (OOPSLA), 2020

   Abstract PDF

   Large scale distributed systems require to embrace the trade off between consistency and availability, accepting lower levels of consistency to guarantee higher availability. Existing programming languages are, however, agnostic to this compromise, resulting in consistency guarantees that are the same for the whole application and are implicitly adopted from the middleware or hardcoded in configuration files.

   In this paper, we propose to integrate availability in the design of an object-oriented language, allowing developers to specify different consistency and isolation constraints in the same application at the granularity of single objects. We investigate how availability levels interact with object structure and define a type system that preserves correct program behavior. Our evaluation shows that our solution performs efficiently and improves the design of distributed applications.

3. FTfJP
   ConSysT
   

   ConSysT: Tunable, Safe Consistency Meets Object-Oriented Programming

   Mirko Köhler, Nafise Eskandani, Alessandro Margara, Guido Salvaneschi

   In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Formal Techniques for Java-Like Programs, FTfJP, 2020

   Abstract

   Data replication is essential in scenarios like geo-distributed datacenters, but poses challenges for data consistency. Developers adopt Strong consistency at the cost of performance or embrace Weak consistency and face a higher programming complexity. We argue that languages should associate consistency to data types. We present , a programming language and middleware that provides abstractions to specify consistency types, enabling mixing different consistency levels in the same application. Such mechanism is fully integrated with object-oriented programming and type system guarantees that different levels can only be mixed correctly.

4. SPLASH Companion
   ConSysT
   

   Distributed Object-Oriented Programming with Multiple Consistency Levels in ConSysT

   Nafise Eskandani, Mirko Köhler, Alessandro Margara, Guido Salvaneschi

   In Companion Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity, SPLASH Companion, 2019

   Abstract

   Data replication is essential in scenarios like geo-distributed datacenters and edge computing. Yet, it poses a challenge for data consistency. Developers either adopt high consistency at the detriment of performance or they embrace low consistency and face a much higher programming complexity. We argue that language abstractions should support associating the level of consistency to data types. We present ConSysT, a programming language and middleware that provides abstractions to specify consistency types, enabling mixing different consistency levels in the same application. Such mechanism is fully integrated with object-oriented programming and type system guarantees that different levels can be mixed only in a correct way.