About

About

I'm a final year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Washington. Prior to UW, I received a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago.

For my PhD thesis I am developing techniques and tools to infer models of complex systems from logs of their behavior. These models can then be used by developers to better understand the design of (and defects in) their systems. The inferred models also provide a compact representation of the input logs and can be used as a summary of multiple system executions. My thesis consists of three projects:

• Synoptic : inferring FSM models from totally-ordered traces
• Dynoptic : inferring communicating FSM models from partially-ordered traces
• InvariMint : declaratively specifying FSM inference algorithms

Feel free to download and try out implementations of any of the above projects.

My thesis lies within the software engineering and systems research areas. However, I have previously worked on and continue to be interested in networks, distributed systems, security, and online communities.

This website overviews my academic activities. If you would like to know more about any of my projects or have questions, please do not hesitate to contact me by email. You can also find my profiles on DBLP, and Google Scholar.

Projects

Projects

	Synoptic: Inferring FSM models from logs of sequential executions Systems are often difficult to debug and to understand. A typical way of gaining insight into system behavior is by inspecting execution logs. Manual inspection of logs, however, is an arduous process. This project helps this problem by designing Synoptic, a tool to produce summary model of a system log. Two features distinguish Synoptic from other tools. First, Synoptic's models preserve key invariants mined from the log, making them more accurate. Second, Synoptic uses refinement to derive the model, which is more efficient than traditional coarsening algorithms.
	Dynoptic: Inferring communicating FSM models of distributed systems Dynoptic mines a communicating FSM model to represent the distributed system that generated a set of logs. Like Synoptic, Dynoptic mines models that preserve temporal properties of the system. Engineers can use the inferred models to understand complex behavior, detect anomalies, debug, and increase confidence in the correctness of their implementations.
	InvariMint: Declaratively specifying model inference algorithms InvariMint is an approach to express FSM model inference algorithms in a common framework. The key idea is to encode properties of an algorithms as finite state machines. These properties can then be instantiated for a specific input log of observations and combined to generate/infer a model that describes the observations. InvariMint (1) leads to new fundamental insights and better understanding of existing algorithms, (2) simplifies creation of new algorithms, including hybrids that extend existing algorithms, and (3) makes it easy to compare and contrast previously published algorithms.
	Scatter: A scalable, consistent, data store A DHT (Distributed Hash Table) is distributed key-value storage system. Although DHTs have been thoroughly researched, they are in dire need of applications. One of the reasons for this is their typically abysmal performance, loose consistency and lack of availability guarantees. This project aims to design and implement a DHT that has strict data consistency guarantees. This project is an evolution of prior work by the systems community on improving performance of DHTs, and prior work by the theory of distributed systems community on the efficiency of distributed consistency algorithms such as Paxos and its variants.
	Seattle: open peer-to-peer computing Seattle is a platform for networking and distributed systems research. It's free, community-driven, and offers a large deployment of computers spread across the world. Seattle works by operating on resources donated by users and institutions. The global distribution of the Seattle network provides users the ability to use Seattle in application contexts that include cloud computing, peer-to-peer networking, ubiquitous/mobile computing, and distributed systems. It has been used in educational settings for teaching networking and distributed systems classes.
	Social practices in Wikipedia I am also interested in analysis of social networks. This includes both quantitative analysis (e.g. member graph structures, activity patterns) as well as qualitative analysis (e.g. intensive study of activity samples, interviews). I am nourishing this interest by studying Wikipedia's policy mechanism and the interactions between wikipedia editors on discussion pages as they employ policies to arrive at consensus and make progress in their work. Our more recent work studies the span of valued work in Wikipedia by leveraging the Wikipedia Barnstars practice in which tokens of appreciation are exchanged between Wikipedia editors.
	Mobile devices meet cloud computing I spent six months (Summer and Fall of 2009) at MSR Asia in Beijing working as an intern in the Systems Research group under the direction of Lidong Zhou. I worked on a few projects in the mobile space. My primary project focused on designing and developing a platform called Sonora, which allows mobile applications to take advantage of cloud resources. I have also developed a simple system to demonstrate the utility of reusing older mobile phones. As powerful mobile devices have become ubiquitous and have high turn over rates, it is important to find ways to extend mobile device lifetimes and find alternative uses for older devices.
	SatelliteLab: A heterogeneous network testbed Over Summer 2007 I interned at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany and worked with Krishna Gummadi. I helped build SatelliteLab, which improves the heterogeneity of existing internet testbeds (e.g. PlanetLab) by including internet edge-nodes. Nodes in edge-networks (e.g. residential networks) are typically unreliable, cover a wide range of software and hardware configurations, and have widely varying network connectivity. This heterogeneity is especially important for accurate testing of distributed system prototypes. Today such prototypes are developed in highly homogeneous testbed environments that hinder their readiness for realistic deployment. SatelliteLab makes it easier to evaluate, debug, and explain the observed performance of distributed systems in the wild.

(Show) Undergraduate projects

Publications

Publications

Presentations

	Seattle: A Python-based Platform for Easy Development and Deployment of Networked Systems and Applications Ivan Beschastnikh, Justin Samuel, Justin Cappos, Presentation at PyCon 2010, Atlanta, GA, February 2010
	Teaching networking and distributed systems with Seattle Ivan Beschastnikh, Justin Cappos, Tutorial at CCSC Central Plains 2010
	Teaching networking and distributed systems with Seattle Justin Cappos, Ivan Beschastnikh, Tutorial at CCSC Northwest 2009

Unpublished Material

pdf	Liberating Mobile Phones from their Primary Use Case. Ivan Beschastnikh, Yuan Zhang, Zhengping Qian, Lidong Zhou.
pdf	Integration of Static Instruction Analysis with Dynamic Information Flow Tracking. Ivan Beschastnikh, Ian Post, Joshua Schwartz, Benedict Singer.
pdf	Machine Learning for Automatic Physical DBMS Tuning. Ivan Beschastnikh and Andrew Guillory.

Mentoring

Mentoring

One of my passions is mentoring and working with students. I find it extremely rewarding to introduce younger students to research, and to work alongside students on challenging research questions.

I've worked closely with over a dozen UW undergraduates and have informally advised/supervised a few of them on their undergraduate honors theses.

If you are a current student at UW and are interested in exploring a research topic in computer science, then email me!

I'm currently working with the following terrific students:

• Synoptic
• Jenny Abrahamson (Honors thesis, Anita Borg scholarship winner)
• Andrew Davies
• Kevin Thai
• Timothy Vega (Honors thesis)
• Bug localization, and Dynoptic
• Roykrong Sukkerd (Honors thesis)

I've also had the wonderful opportunity of mentoring the following students in the past:

• Synoptic
• Michael Sloan
• Yoong Woo Kim
• Zachary Stein
• Scatter
• Katherine Baker
• Vjekoslav Brajkovic
• Maxwell Forbes
• Allison Obourn (Honors thesis)
• Patrick Williams
• Mining software repositories
• Tyler Oshiro
• Seattle
• Sean Ren
• Alper Sarikaya
• Wikipedia
• Linda Le

Service

Service

I consider the peer review process a critical component of academic research and help out with reviewing and organizing duties as time allows.

• Program committee member: WikiSym 2012, WikiSym 2011
• Sub-reviewer: TSE 2012, TOOLS 2012, OOPSALA 2011, NCA 2011, SigMetrics 2010, NSDI 2009, WikiSym 2009