Dr. Katrina LaCurts
Senior Lecturer, Undergraduate Officer, MIT EECS
lacurts@mit.edu

77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 38-476
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139

Phone: +1 617 253 4613

About

I am a Senior Lecturer and Undergraduate Officer in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

My primary academic interests lie in the intersection of computer systems and society, and I specialize in teaching large undergraduate systems courses. Currently I teach 6.1800 (Computer Systems Engineering), and 6.1850 (Computer Systems and Society). I was also involved with 6.02 (Introduction to EECS via Communication Networks) for a long time.

As EECS Undergraduate Officer, I manage the undergraduate office, which serves nearly 1700 undergraduate and MEng students. In this role I've led efforts to make information and processes in the department more accessible and transparent to students and advisors. I currently serve on the Office of Minority Education's Faculty Advisory Committee and am one of the inaugural CES Infusion Fellows; I've also been involved with SERC, and much of that work shows up in my teaching. In 2021 I received the inaugural School of Engineering Distinguished Educator Award.

Outside of work, I can usually be found looking at birds, powerlifting, or chasing after my perfect dogs, Broccoli and Junebug.


Teaching

I've been the lead instructor for 6.1800 since 2015 and developed 6.1850 in Fall 2021. I was the lead instructor for 6.02 from 2014-2021.


Refereed Publications

Active Learning in Undergraduate Computer Systems: Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic (pdf)
K. LaCurts, M. Ghobadi, K. Sollins. ACM SIGCOMM Online Networking Education Workshop 2020

Cicada: Introducing Predictive Guarantees for Cloud Networks (pdf)
K. LaCurts, J. Mogul, H. Balakrishnan, Y. Turner. HotCloud 2014
Choreo: Network-Aware Task Placement for Cloud Applications (pdf | slides | web)
K. LaCurts, S. Deng, A. Goyal, H. Balakrishnan. IMC 2013
Making Currency Inexpensive with iOwe (pdf)
D. Levin, A. Schulman, K. LaCurts, N. Spring, B. Bhattacharjee. NetEcon 2011
Measurement and Analysis of Real-World 802.11 Mesh Networks (pdf | slides | web)
K. LaCurts, H. Balakrishnan. IMC 2010
VTrack: Accurate, Energy-aware Traffic Delay Estimation Using Mobile Phones (pdf | web)
A. Thiagarajan, L. Ravindranath, K. LaCurts, S. Toledo, J. Eriksson, S. Madden, H. Balakrishnan. SenSys 2009. Awarded Best Paper
BitTorrent is an Auction: Analyzing and Improving BitTorrent's Incentives (pdf | web)
D. Levin, K. LaCurts, N. Spring, B. Bhattacharjee. SIGCOMM 2008


Technical Reports

Cicada: Predictive Guarantees for Cloud Network Bandwidth (pdf)
K. LaCurts, J. Mogul, H. Balakrishnan, Y. Turner. MIT-CSAIL-TR-2014-004
A Plan for Optimizing Network-Intensive Cloud Applications (pdf)
K. LaCurts, S. Deng, H. Balakrishnan. MIT-CSAIL-TR-2013-003


Theses

Application Workload Prediction and Placement in Cloud Computing Systems (pdf)
K. LaCurts. Ph.D. Thesis, MIT EECS. 2014
Measurement and Analysis of Real-World 802.11 Mesh Networks (pdf)
K. LaCurts. Master's Thesis, MIT EECS. 2010


Software

I'm not actively involved with any software projects at the moment, but in the past I've done some work with OpenDaylight and Zeek (formerly Bro). My Zeek branch has been used for some interesting research.