I will discuss research lifecycle and connections between seemingly disjoint areas using two recent projects: the first in privacy and security, and the second in OS power management.

Emerging mobile social apps use short-range radios to discover nearby devices and users. A "good" protocol must enable secure communication (both during and after a period of device co-location), preserve user privacy (users must not be tracked by unauthorized third parties), while providing selective linkability (users can recognize friends when strangers cannot) and efficient silent revocation. I will briefly discuss a protocol, SDDR, that provides these properties.

Next, I will talk about Drowsy: a new OS power management state that replaces "awake." In the Drowsy state, not all system components are woken up, only the minimal set required for a pending task(s). Drowsy constructs and maintains the minimal task set by dynamically and continuously inferring dependencies between system components at run-time.

Drowsy was a direct result of the prior work on SDDR.  I will describe this connection and using these as examples discuss the process of research in systems in general.