URCS system group consists of professor Chen Ding, Sandhya Dwarkadas, Michael Scott (ACM Fellow), and Kai Shen, plus a dozen of grad students. We are small in term of size but we are active in academia and have publications on top system conferences like ASPLOS, SOSP, PLDI, ISCA and USENIX etc..
My research generally fall into system area, with focus on Operating System. I have been playing Linux Kernel and Processor Counters for years, they are my basic research tools. You are recommended to read following papers to see how they act in system research.
Kai Shen, Ming Zhong, Sandhya Dwarkadas, Chuanpeng Li, Chris Stewart and Xiao Zhang
Hardware Counter Driven On-the-Fly Request Signatures (ASPLOS 2008)Xiao Zhang, Sandhya Dwarkadas, Girts Folkmanis and Kai Shen
Processor Hardware Counter Statistics As A First-Class System Resource (HotOS 2007)