Jana Toljaga
Portrait
PhD student
Inria Saclay & Télécom SudParis, IP Paris

I am a competitive and dedicated PhD student of computer science who is constantly looking for new challenges and ways to improve. My goal is not to keep up with new changes in technologies, but to be involved in making those changes. My main interests include operating systems, storage and memory management, virtualization and compilers, but I am open to expand that list, finding the bridge with other areas. I am driven by a desire to travel, explore the world and cooperate with people from different cultural and academic backgrounds.

Google Scholar GitHub LinkedIn ORCID
Education
  • Inria Saclay & Télécom SudParis, IP Paris
    Inria Saclay & Télécom SudParis, IP Paris, France
    Sep. 2023 - present
    Benagil team, Samovar laboratory
    Ph.D. Student in computer science
    See my research projects.
  • Institut Polytechnique de Paris
    Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France
    Sep. 2022 - Sep. 2023
    MSc in Parallel and Distributed Systems
    Télécom SudParis | Parallel and Distributed Systems (PDS track) | Master 2 program
    Grade: 18.75/20.0  |  Rank: 1/102
    Coursework: Advanced Programming for Multicore Architectures, Fundamentals of Distributed Systems, Cloud Infrastructures, High Performance Runtimes.
    Research: Disaggregated memory management for a managed runtime, led by Gaël Thomas.
    Scholarships: French Government Scholarship provided by Campus France; “Dositeja” Scholarship for Serbian students abroad.
  • School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade
    School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, Serbia
    Oct. 2018 - Jul. 2022
    Software Engineering
    Grade: 9.85/10.0
    Coursework: Operating Systems, Compiler Construction, System Software, Concurrent and Distributed Programming, Algorithms and Data Structures, Computer Networks, Computer Architecture, Mobile Device Programming, Databases, etc.
    Scholarships: Scholarship for gifted students from the Ministry of Education of Serbia; Scholarship for best-performing students of Belgrade.
    See my undergraduate projects.
Experience
  • Inria Saclay & Télécom SudParis, IP Paris
    Inria Saclay & Télécom SudParis, IP Paris, France
    Sep. 2023 - present
    Ph.D. Candidate
    Research on using virtualization to improve storage systems and memory-intensive applications, focusing on data integrity across crashes and reboots while keeping the system transparent for legacy applications and language runtimes. I also help supervise Master and PhD students on projects stemming from my work, such as cache coherence for disaggregated systems and hardware-optimized key-value stores.
  • École polytechnique (l'X)
    École polytechnique (l'X), France
    Sep. 2025 - Jan. 2026
    Teaching Assistant
    Teaching assistant for the Object-Oriented Programming in C++ course.
  • Télécom SudParis
    Télécom SudParis, France
    Sep. 2023 - Jan. 2024
    Teaching Assistant
    Teaching assistant for Object-Oriented Programming in C++, Algorithms in Java, and Introduction to Operating Systems.
  • Télécom SudParis
    Télécom SudParis, France
    Mar. 2023 - Aug. 2023
    Research Intern
    Built a runtime that uses virtualization to expose a page table to user applications, letting them implement custom memory-management policies entirely in user space. The project is still maintained by our team and actively used for research.
  • École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
    École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
    Jul. 2022 - Sep. 2022
    Research Intern
    In the Distributed Computing Laboratory led by Rachid Guerraoui, I worked on a collaborative project implementing an efficient distributed communication protocol in Rust.
  • Microsoft
    Microsoft, Serbia
    Feb. 2022 - May 2022
    Software Engineer Intern
    In the Maps data team, I developed a full-stack web application for monitoring Open Maps data pipelines and extended the pipelines with requested features.
  • School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade
    School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, Serbia
    Oct. 2020 - Jun. 2022
    Student Teaching Assistant
    Helped professors organize laboratory exams and evaluate students in courses including Operating Systems, Algorithms and Data Structures, Databases, Computer Architecture and Object-Oriented Programming.
Research Projects
  • Leveraging Virtualization to Efficiently Use Low-Latency Storage
    Mar. 2023 - present
    Main PhD topic
    A runtime providing a transparent I/O cache for modern storage (PMEM, NVMe) via a secondary low-latency kernel, implemented as a virtualized, process-like abstraction with direct userland page table access.
  • Optimizing Key-Value Store Performance by Leveraging Userland Page Tables
    Mar. 2024 - present
    Problem definition and design (continuation of my PhD work)
    A key-value store that achieves array-like efficiency for lookups while efficiently supporting range queries, by using the page table managed by the MMU as the store's tree-based structure. This enables hardware-accelerated tree traversal, providing efficient operations and range qsueries while improving scalability and memory efficiency.
  • Intra-Process Isolation of Untrusted Libraries with Userland Page Tables
    Jan. 2026 - present
    Design (continuation of my PhD work)
    Uses the userland page table to isolate untrusted libraries within a process: trusted code runs in ring 0 on supervisor pages, untrusted libraries in ring 3 on user pages, and all shared data goes through a mediated region.
  • Confidential Computing Made Practical with Secure Typing
    Jul. 2023 - Oct. 2023
    Experimental evaluation
    A compiler extending language typing with security annotations to automatically partition legacy applications for Intel SGX, minimizing the trusted computing base.
Undergraduate Projects
  • Contact Tracing Application
    Jul. 2022
    A mobile application using the BLE protocol to exchange messages between clients and a central server, enabling decentralized contact tracing for viruses like COVID-19, with a focus on client data privacy.
    AndroidBLEComputer SecurityJavaMongoDB
  • MicroJava Compiler
    Jan. 2022
    All compilation phases (lexical, syntax and semantic analysis, and bytecode generation) for MicroJava, an object-oriented language combining a subset of Java features (object and elementary types, loops, derivation, polymorphism).
    JavaBytecodeJFlex
  • Assembler, Linker and Emulator for a RISC-like Machine
    Aug. 2021
    A two-pass assembler producing ELF-like relocatable files, a linker producing relocatable or executable hex files, and an emulator that loads and runs programs while emulating the processor, memory and I/O devices.
    C++FlexBisonLinux
  • Election Service
    Jul. 2021
    A web service managing user accounts and election processes, built from multiple containerized components based on Docker image templates.
    PythonFlaskDockerRedisDocker Swarm
  • Travel Journal
    Mar. 2021 - Jun. 2021
    A four-person team project. As team leader, I coordinated development, communicated with other teams and professors, and implemented both the front-end and back-end of travel journal management.
    PHPJavaScriptCodeIgniter 4Ajax
  • Buddy and Slab Allocator for a Kernel
    Jan. 2021
    Kernel memory allocation through a slab allocator with caches for kernel objects and buffers, backed by a buddy allocator for pages.
    CWindows
  • Multi-threading Kernel
    Aug. 2020
    A thread management subsystem with time-sharing for a preemptive kernel on a single CPU: context switching, threads, semaphores, events and signals.
    C++Intel 8086 Assembly