Anna Karanika's picture

Anna Karanika

Ph.D. Student and Research Assistant

CS @ UIUC

Room #3111, Thomas M. Siebel Center

201 N. Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

annak8@illinois.edu

Skills

C, Java, Python

100%

Git, Maven, SQL

90%

C++, LATEX, R, MATLAB

70%

Go, JavaScript, Scala, OpenMP, CUDA, MPI, PyTorch

50%

Languages

Greek

Native

English

Fluent

French

Basic


About

I am a final year Ph.D. student at the Computer Science Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with Professor Indy Gupta as a member of the Distributed Protocols Research Group (DPRG).
Before starting my Ph.D., I studied Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Computer Science at the University of Thessaly, Greece.
I have worked on decentralized and adaptive abstractions that enhance systems-facing metrics of scalability and fault-tolerance, and user-facing metrics of observability and programmability for device and automation management systems in IoT/Edge setting. Additionally, I have worked on replicated storage systems's optimizations, and studies of open-sourced system failures in the cloud and smart home control interfaces. Currently, I am working on an adaptive hybrid-parallelism system for private LLM inference at the edge and studying AIOps adoption challenges. You can find my CV here.
Job Search: I am currently looking for a full-time research position in the industry, where I can apply my skills and knowledge in distributed systems. Please reach out if you know of any opportunities.

Education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL

Ph.D. in Computer Science
Advised by Indranil Gupta
Distributed Protocols Research Group (DPRG)
Thesis: "Adaptive Distributed Systems for Smart Spaces"
August 2020 - May 2026

University of Thessaly, Lamia, Greece

M.Sc. in Computer Science
Advised by Kostas Kolomvatsos
Intelligent Pervasive Systems Research Group (iPRISM)
October 2019 - June 2020

University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece

Diploma (B.Eng. + M.Eng.) in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Advised by George Stamoulis and Kostas Kolomvatsos
Thesis: "An Intelligent, Data-Centric Scheme for Allocating Queries to Query Processors"
September 2014 - June 2019

Selected Publications

TNSM '25 Anna Karanika, Rui Yang, Xiaojuan Ma, Jiangran Wang, Shalni Sundram, Indranil Gupta. "There is More Control in Egalitarian Edge IoT Meshes." [doi] [deployment/simulation code]
EuroSys '23 Lilia Tang, Chaitanya Bhandari, Yongle Zhang, Anna Karanika, Shuyang Ji, Indranil Gupta, and Tianyin Xu. "Fail through the Cracks: Cross-System Interaction Failures in Modern Cloud Systems." [pdf] [doi] [data/code]
CSUR '21 Panagiotis Oikonomou, Anna Karanika, Christos Anagnostopoulos, Kostas Kolomvatsos. "On the Use of Intelligent Models towards Meeting the Challenges of the Edge Mesh." [doi]
EVOS '21 Madalena Soula, Anna Karanika, Kostas Kolomvatsos, Christos Anagnostopoulos, George Stamoulis. "Intelligent Tasks Allocation at the Edge based on Machine Learning and Bio-Inspired Algorithms." [doi]
CD-MAKE '20 Anna Karanika, Panagiotis Oikonomou, Kostas Kolomvatsos, Christos Anagnostopoulos. "An Ensemble Interpretable Machine Learning Scheme for Securing Data Quality at the Edge." [doi]
FUZZ-IEEE '20 Anna Karanika, Panagiotis Oikonomou, Kostas Kolomvatsos, Thanasis Loukopoulos. "A Demand-driven, Proactive Tasks Management Model at the Edge." [doi]
IDCS '19 Anna Karanika, Madalena Soula, Christos Anagnostopoulos, Kostas Kolomvatsos, George Stamoulis. "Optimized Analytics Query Allocation at the Edge of the Network." [doi]

Industrial Experience

AIML Intern
Internship
Apple
Mentor: Li Li, Manager: Emad Soroush
Team: Iris under Machine Learning Platform and Training (MLPT)
Seattle, WA, USA
May 2024 - August 2024
Engineering Intern
Internship
Twitter
Mentor: Rebecca Isaacs, Manager: Yao Yue
Team: Infrastructure Optimization Performance (IOP)
San Francisco, CA, USA
May 2022 - August 2022
PLC Programmer and SCADA Designer
Internship
APOSTOLAKIS Engineering
Farsala, Greece
July 2017 - August 2017

Service

External Reviewer: ATC '24
Artifact Evaluation Committee: EuroSys '25, SOSP '25, NSDI '26, EuroSys '26