Welcome! My name is Joel Wolfrath; I am a Computer Science Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota and a member of the Distributed Computing Systems Group. Prior to my doctoral work, I completed an MS in Statistics at Texas A&M University.

My academic research focuses on the impact of non-IID data in distributed analytics systems. Data generated and persisted in distinct geographical locations have very different statistical properties, which can affect the results of queries and other analytical tasks. My work seeks to mitigate the negative effects of data heterogeneity and, in some cases, exploit these differences to improve system efficiency.