My name is Sumita Barahmand and I've been doing my graduate studies at the  Department of Computer Science , University of Southern California since Fall 2009. I'm currently in my fourth year of PhD studies and I'm working as a research assistant in the Database Systems Lab with Prof. Shahram Ghandeharizadeh.

I completed my undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering-Information Technology Engineering at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran.

My current research interests include social benchmarking, evaluationg datastores within social networks, and social streaming, sharing of multimedia streams in social networks using smart devices and the cloud. I am interested in benchmarking and evaluating the true processing capability of SQL, NoSQl, New SQL and Cache Augmented SQL data stores striving to model reality as close as possible. I am also interested in investigating approaches for streaming video as a component of real-time mode of communication within social networks. These concepts are exercised in a prototype named RAYS that was deployed in early 2011. So far I have targeted data availability and benchmarking social behavior within RAYS and have focused on the design and implementation of novel memory management techniques that allow viewers of social streams to perform time-shifted displays on the streams.