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Hi, I’m Abdelrahman.
CS PhD student

I am currently a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, specializing in Systems and Networking. My supervisor is Prof. Samer Al-Kiswany. I am part of the Waterloo Advanced Systems Lab (WASL) and the Systems and Networking Group. I have an extensive background in various areas of computer science, including Web development and Hardware Design verification. Outside of research, I am lucky to share life with my partner Lara, also a CS PhD student at Waterloo.

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News

  • May 2026 I am serving on the Artifact Evaluation Committee for OSDI 2026.
  • Apr 2026 I will present DROPS at EuroSys 2026 in Edinburgh, UK.
  • Apr 2026 I will start an internship at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, working on serverless infrastructure optimizations.
  • Jan 2026 I have been awarded for the Intersop PhD Fellowship (valued at $110,000).

Awards

  • Interop Labs PhD Fellowship 2026-2027.
  • Acronis Best Patent Award for 2023.
  • UWaterloo Graduate Student Research Dissemination Award 2023, 2026.
  • UWaterloo International Doctoral Student Award (IDSA).

Publications

  • DROPS: Managing Resource Pools in a Large-Scale Commercial Serverless Platform

    Ahmed Alquraan*, Abdelrahman Baba*, Rafael Mendes da Silva, Sameh Elnikety, Paul Batum, Yan Chen, Hamid Henry Safi, Seth Fine, Samer Al-Kiswany
    (EuroSys'26). [pdf]

  • VectorCDC: Accelerating Data Deduplication with SSE/AVX Instructions

    Sreeharsha Udayashankar, Abdelrahman Baba, Samer Al-Kiswany
    (FAST'25). [pdf]

  • SeqCDC: Hashless Content-Defined Chunking for Data Deduplication

    Sreeharsha Udayashankar, Abdelrahman Baba, Samer Al-Kiswany
    (Middleware'24). [pdf]

  • The Impact of Low-Entropy on Chunking Techniques for Data Deduplication

    Mu'men Al-Jarrah, Sreeharsha Udayashankar, Abdelrahman Baba, Samer Al-Kiswany
    (CLOUD'24) [pdf]

  • DedupBench: A Benchmarking Tool for Data Chunking Techniques

    Alan Liu, Abdelrahman Baba, Sreeharsha Udayashankar, Samer Al-Kiswany
    (IEEE CCECE'23) [pdf]

Patents

  • Systems and methods for vectorized word-sized data chunking

    Sreeharsha Udayashankar, Abdelrahman Baba, Samer Al-Kiswany, Serg Bell and Stanislav Protasov
    US Patent and Trademark Office, April 2026

  • Systems and methods for accelerating data chunking with vector instructions

    Sreeharsha Udayashankar, Abdelrahman Baba, Samer Al-Kiswany, Serg Bell and Stanislav Protasov
    US Patent and Trademark Office, June 2025

  • Systems and methods for sequence-based data chunking for deduplication

    Sreeharsha Udayashankar, Abdelrahman Baba, Samer Al-Kiswany, Serg Bell and Stanislav Protasov
    US Patent and Trademark Office, December 2023 [Link]

  • Systems and methods for executing jump-based content-defined chunking

    Abdelrahman Baba, Sreeharsha Udayashankar, Samer Al-Kiswany, Serg Bell and Stanislav Protasov
    US Patent and Trademark Office, September 2023 [Link]

  • Systems and methods of secure deduplication for encrypted content

    Samer Al-Kiswany, Sreeharsha Udayashankar, Abdelrahman Baba, Serg Bell and Stanislav Protasov
    US Patent and Trademark Office, June 2023 [Link]