Geoffrey Thomas

I'm a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working towards a Master of Engineering degree in Computer Science (6-3) in 2011. As an undergraduate, I lived in Next House, and before that I lived in Lafayette, LA, where I graduated from Lafayette High School in 2006.

I like computers, and in particular I like Linux, security, computational theory, virtualization, and networking. My current research involves applying virtualization technology to the problem of practical desktop and server application security.

As a graduate student I've been a teaching assistant for the following courses:

• 6.858 Computer Systems Security, fall 2011.
• 6.857 Network and Computer Security, spring 2011.
• 6.046 Design and Analysis of Algorithms, fall 2010.

I'm involved with a handful of organizations at MIT, including:

• the Student Information Processing Board (SIPB), MIT's student computing organization.
  • I'm the current technical architect of scripts.mit.edu, a user-friendly and secure wiki/blog/CGI/procmail/SVN/git/anything hosting service run by SIPB.
  • I'm one of the lead developers for the Debathena project, an implementation of MIT's Athena computing environment for Debian and Ubuntu. In summer 2009, Debathena became the official implementation of the Athena client environment. I continue to be involved in maintaining Debathena for the public workstations at MIT.
  • I've contributed various improvements, including IRC support, to BarnOwl, an IM client quite popular at MIT, and I've helped with the XVM virtual machine hosting service.
• the MIT Cross Products, an a cappella group singing contemporary Christian music (the photo above is from a recent concert).
• the MIT Association of Student Activities, the student government group that coordinates and represents student groups at MIT.
  • I'm the ASA representative to the Undergraduate Association Finance Board, which funds undergrad student groups.
  • I'm also the ASA representative to the Graduate Student Council Funding Board, which likewise funds graduate student groups.

This past summer I was at at VMware, an industry leader in virtualization, as part of a research group looking at ways to analyze resource use of virtual machines to increase their efficiency. The previous summer, I worked with several of my friends at Ksplice, a tech startup with technology that eliminates the need to reboot in order to apply software patches to a system. We released the first version of a Linux security product based on this technology that summer.

In the past I've also worked for Akamai on Linux kernel security, and as a UROP for CSAIL, working on porting Linux drivers and utilities to smartphones. I've also been part of MIT's College Bowl team, taught for ESP's high school enrichment classes a couple of times, sung with the MIT Chamber Chorus, and served on the Dormitory Council as secretary.

I am a Christian, identifying as Methodist. This means I believe that we are inherently imperfect, fallible (“sinful”) people, to whom a gracious God freely offers forgiveness and redemption.

My MIT username is geofft, which you can use to contact me by e-mail (@mit.edu) or Zephyr (@ATHENA.MIT.EDU), or find me on Launchpad or IRC (Freenode). You may also see me go by my older username geoffreyerffoeg, especially on Google's services (Gmail, Talk, Calendar, Docs, etc.), as well as on AIM.

My resume is available in HTML (canonical) and PDF.

I've also recently started a blog about things that interest me.