2023 MSc graduate Myles Thiessen
Supervisor: Eyal de Lara
You have earned your bachelor’s and master’s degrees at U of T’s Department of Computer Science and are currently working toward your PhD here. Why was U of T the right place for you to study computer science?
My undergraduate actually started off at the University of Windsor, but I transferred to U of T after my second year because I had aspired to the challenge that U of T was known for. It made sense to me because U of T has lots of opportunities for students; in my opinion, it’s the best school for computer science in Canada, especially if you’re interested in research. When it came to my master’s, I had already found a supervisor that I had a great relationship with. I’d known Professor Eyal de Lara for about three years at that time and couldn’t see myself working with anyone else.
I’m very proud that U of T has been my alma mater twice now and feel I’m already at the best university in the country, so there was no need to look elsewhere when applying for PhD programs. I also enjoy Toronto as a city. I’d always wanted to live in a metropolis like this at some point in my life, and my partner and I are enjoying all it has to offer.
Tell us about your master’s research.
Today’s online applications are deployed across many physical machines to improve end-user latency and remain available, even when machines crash or become unresponsive. To achieve this, applications store multiple copies of their data across different physical machines. To build more reliable and maintainable software, this data replication should be opaque to the application developer: they are provided with the illusion of a single copy centralized system. Unfortunately, providing this so-called strong consistency results in worse performance compared to weakly consistent systems, i.e. systems that don’t provide this illusion. The goal of my master’s research was to explore various techniques to shrink the performance gap between these two consistency models.
Tell us about an experience from your master’s degree program that stands out to you.
As an undergrad, I had multiple experiences collaborating on research projects, and over this past year, I had the opportunity to lead my first project. This experience has shown me how important collaboration is in the research process. I speak with Eyal and other graduate students in our lab quite frequently throughout the week. We’re constantly sharing ideas and challenging each other to improve our work. Through these conversations, I’ve come to know the work of other students, which has given me a fresh perspective on my own work and broadened my perspective on the field as a whole. I’ve really valued the working relationships and friendships that have come from spending my days at the lab, and their positive impact is one of the main reasons I chose to continue my graduate studies at U of T.
What’s one piece of advice you would share with incoming computer science graduate students?
Come to the lab! I think an important aspect of graduate education is learning from your peers; you may be surprised at how learning about others’ work can change your perspective on your own work. I also think it’s a good idea to take classes outside of your comfort zone. You could be surprised by what can come from that. I’m currently taking a course that’s really changing my view on the subfield I work in, and I think it will lead to some interesting future directions to explore. Overall, I think it’s really about being open-minded to ideas you have never considered. Nobody truly knows what they don’t know.
What’s next for you?
This September marks the start of my PhD where I am still under the supervision of Professor Eyal de Lara. I’ve really appreciated his guidance and I’m glad that he’s allowed me to continue learning under him for the remainder of my education. I’m continuing my research on strongly consistent distributed datastores and hoping for my current work to be published sometime in 2024. I’ve also been mentoring an undergraduate student for about a year and we’re making some excellent progress. I’ve really enjoyed being on the other end of a project and guiding someone else through their work, so I’m hoping that other teaching and mentorship opportunities are on the horizon for me before I complete this degree. There’s still lots of time for me here and I’m excited about the opportunities the University of Toronto will provide me.
This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.