photo

Ivan Beschastnikh

Pronouns: he/him

Associate Professor
Systopia lab, SPL lab
Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia

bestchai@cs.ubc.ca, ICICS 327
My free/busy calendar


Note: I am not recruiting MSc/PhD students this year. About

About me

I have broad research interests that usually touch on systems and software engineering. My current projects span distributed systems, formal methods, networks, privacy, and machine learning. I enjoy building and studying real software systems and tend to be empirical in my research. You can find links to most of the software generated as part of my research on this site.

In the Computer Science department, I am part of both Systopia lab and Software Practices Lab (SPL). I am also part of several other groups across UBC:

I started at UBC in 2013. Before UBC I was working on my PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle. At UW I worked with Tom Anderson, Michael Ernst, and Arvind Krishnamurthy on tools to infer models of complex systems from logs of their behavior, networked testbeds, DHTs, and other fun topics. Prior to UW, I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where I was introduced to research by Pete Beckman.

Here are some recent(ish) talks/interviews/etc:

Here is my research statement (for my tenure review) from 2018 that summarizes my work at UBC from 2013-2018.

If you intend to apply for academic jobs in CS, you may want to see my research and teaching statements (from 2013).

You can also find my profiles on Google Scholar and DBLP.

Projects

Research projects

Recent areas of focus:

  • Using formal methods in systems, particularly distributed systems
  • Developing novel SE tools to support systems developers
  • Program analysis, specifically specification mining
  • New data center designs (e.g., resource disaggregation)
  • Private and secure distributed multi-party ML
  • Physical insider attacks and defences

Research projects sampler:

PGo: source to source compiler from Modular PlusCal into Go lang.

PGo compiles Modular PlusCal formal specifications into Go implementations. PGo is designed to reduce the developer burden of implementing a correct distributed system specification, and increases developers' confidence in the correctness of their implementations. Watch a video in which Finn and Shayan detail PGo.

Teleoscope: a system for exploring large document sets by building machine learning workflows

Teleoscope (from teleology and telescope) helps to discover purpose and meaning. The system is designed with qualitative researchers in mind, but can be used by anyone interested in exploring themes in a large dataset. The tool is publicly deployed. You can also watch a video that overviews the tool.

Private and secure distributed machine learning (ML)

To train multi-party ML models from user-generated data, users must provide and share their training data, which can be expensive or privacy-violating. We are exploring ways to augment state-of-the-art approaches, like federated learning, with better security/privacy (e.g., defences to sybil-based poisoning). And, we are developing brand-new distributed ML approaches that do away with centralization.

LEAP: intersection of health, ML, privacy, ethics, and security

We've teamed up with a group of researchers interested in topics at the intersections of health, machine learning, privacy, ethics, and security. We aspire to build usable privacy-enhancing systems that can be readily deployed in healthcare domains. We pursue a variety of projects and collaborations in different domains.

Dinv: distributed system state invariant detector. (Video!)

Distributed systems are difficult to debug and understand. One reasons for this is distributed state, which is not easily accessible and must be pieced together from the states of the individual nodes. Dinv statically analyzes the node source code to identify distributed state variables and then instruments the system to record these variables at runtime. After system execution Dinv uses dynamic analysis to determine consistent distributed state snapshots and infers likely distributed state invariants.

NetSolver: Scalable Virtual Data Center Allocation

NetSolver is an SMT-based VDC allocation tool for multi-path VDC allocation with end-to-end bandwidth guarantees. It scales to data centers with 1,000 or more servers, and can make allocations quickly enough to be applied in practice, while simultaneously improving data center utilization relative to previous work.

Callback hell in JavaScript.

Callbacks are a popular language features in JavaScript. However, they are also a source of comprehension and maintainability issues. The example on the left illustrates nested, anonymous callbacks, as well as asynchronous callback scheduling. Not much code, but so much complexity! We carried out a study of callbacks across 138 applications, and are developing tools to help developers manage callback hell in their applications. Our analysis code from the study is online.

ShiViz and TSViz: Visualizing distributed/multi-threaded system logs. (Try ShiViz, Try TSViz)

Concurrent systems generate logs that are complex and unwieldy. ShiViz helps developers understand distributed system logs through visualization. ShiViz visualizes a distributed execution that has been instrumented to record vector clock timestamps (e.g., with distributed clock instrumentation library). The visualizations are simple-to-understand and interactive. The user can understand complex system behavior by exploring the log through the visualization, comparing executions side-by-side, searching for specific behavior (by keyword and topology), and much more. TSViz, builds on ShiViz and visualizes multi-threaded logs with vector clocks and physical timestamps.

Repograms: exploring and juxtaposing software repositories.

Repograms is a tool for visualizing the activity in a software repositories (e.g., git). It uses a simple metaphor of multi-coloured blocks of varying sizes to encode different kinds of information about the repository. For example, each unique committer could be assigned to a colour and the sequence of blocks can reveal who works when, and how many commits each person makes.

Texada: general LTL specification mining. (video)

Texada is a temporal specification mining tool for extracting linear temporal logic (LTL) specifications of arbitrary length and complexity. Texada takes a user-defined LTL property type template and a log of program traces as input and outputs a set of instantiations of the property type (i.e., LTL formulas) that are true on the traces in the log. Texada is envisioned as a specification mining engine on top of which new software analyses can be developed.

Perfume: Inferring performance models. (video)

Perfume summarizes a system's logged executions in a performance-aware, behavioural model. Performance metrics present in logs convey vital information about most systems, yet previous model inference work ignores performance data. By leveraging this information, Perfume generates more precise models, which can help developers understand system behavior that depends on metrics like execution time, network traffic, or energy consumption.

NetCheck: Diagnosing networked applications from blackbox traces.

Networked applications can fail for many complex reasons having to do with the network or mis-behavior of a remote end-host. NetCheck uses traces of syscalls calls made by the application and any end-hosts that are pertinent to the application logic (e.g., the user's desktop, an SMTP server, and a DHCP server). Using these traces NetCheck reconstructs a plausible partial order of network communication without any clock synchronization. It then uses a set of rules to diagnose network issues that are apparent in the reconstructed network behavior.

Distributed clocks: Augmenting logs of distributed systems with vector clocks.

A major challenge in debugging distributed systems is analyzing execution logs generated at multiple hosts. The distribute clock libraries transparently add vector timestamps to logs generated by a distributed system in several different programming languages. These vector-timestamped logs capture partial ordering information, which can be used for further analysis and log comprehension. The resulting logs can be visualized with ShiViz.

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.

CSight: Inferring communicating FSM models of distributed systems.

CSight mines a communicating FSM model to represent the distributed system that generated a set of logs. Like Synoptic, CSight 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.

(Show) Older projects

(Show) Even older projects

Publications

Research publications

Time

Pre-prints on Arxiv | Peer-reviewed publications by year:

Compiling Distributed System Models with PGo
Finn Hackett, Shayan Hosseini, Renato Costa, Matthew Do, Ivan Beschastnikh.
ASPLOS 2023.
Distinguished Artifact Award
GlueFL: Reconciling Client Sampling and Model Masking for Bandwidth Efficient Federated Learning
Shiqi He, Qifan Yan, Feijie Wu, Lanjun Wang, Mathias Lécuyer, Ivan Beschastnikh.
To appear in MLSys 2023.
Scaling Blockchain Consensus via a Robust Shared Mempool
Fangyu Gai, Jianyu Niu, Ivan Beschastnikh, Chen Feng, Sheng Wang.
To appear in ICDE 2023.
Mercury: Fast Transaction Broadcast in High Performance Blockchain Systems
Mingxun Zhou, Yilin Han, Liyi Zeng, Peilun Li, Fan Long, Dong Zhou, Ivan Beschastnikh, Ming Wu.
To appear in INFOCOM 2023.
Auto-tuning Elastic Applications in Production
Adalberto R. Sampaio Junior, Ivan Beschastnikh, Daryl Maier, Don Bourne, Vijay Sundaresan.
To appear in ICSE 2023, SEIP track.
XSnare: Application-specific client-side cross-site scripting protection
Jose Carlos Pazos, Jean-Sébastien Légaré, Ivan Beschastnikh.
To appear in Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE) 2023.
CoSpot: A Cooperative VM Allocation Framework for Increased Revenue from Spot Instances
Syed M. Iqbal, Haley Li, Shane Bergsma, Ivan Beschastnikh, Alan J. Hu.
SoCC 2022.
Repairing Failure-inducing Inputs with Input Reflection
Yan Xiao, Yun Lin, Ivan Beschastnikh, Changsheng Sun, David S. Rosenblum, Jin Song Dong.
ASE 2022.
Affective robots need therapy
Paul Bucci, David Marino, Ivan Beschastnikh.
ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI), 2022.
Self-Checking Deep Neural Networks for Anomalies and Adversaries in Deployment
Yan Xiao, Ivan Beschastnikh, Yun Lin, Rajdeep Singh Hundal, Xiaofei Xie, David S. Rosenblum, Jin Song Dong.
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2022.
Linear-time Temporal Logic guided Greybox Fuzzing
Ruijie Meng, Zhen Dong, Jialin Li, Ivan Beschastnikh, Abhik Roychoudhury.
ICSE 2022.
One Bad Apple Spoils the Bunch: Transaction DoS in MimbleWimble Blockchains
Seyed Ali Tabatabaee, Charlene Nicer, Ivan Beschastnikh, Chen Feng.
ICBC 2022.
Fair Decision Making via Automated Repair of Decision Trees
Zhang Jiang, Ivan Beschastnikh, Sergey Mechtaev, Abhik Roychoudhury.
Fairware workshop at ICSE 2022.
"@alex, this fixes #9": Analysis of Referencing Patterns in Pull Request Discussions
Ashish Chopra, Morgan Mo, Samuel Dodson, Ivan Beschastnikh, Sidney Fels, Dongwook Yoon.
CSCW 2021.
Awarded an Impact Recognition
Jumpgate: Automating Integration of Network Connected Accelerators
Craig Mustard, Swati Goswami, Niloofar Gharavi, Joel Nider, Ivan Beschastnikh, Alexandra (Sasha) Fedorova.
SYSTOR 2021.
Dissecting the Performance of Chained-BFT
Fangyu Gai, Ali Farahbakhsh, Jianyu Niu, Chen Feng, Ivan Beschastnikh, Hao Duan.
ICDCS 2021.
Self-Checking Deep Neural Networks in Deployment
Yan Xiao, Ivan Beschastnikh, David S. Rosenblum, Changsheng Sun, Sebastian Elbaum, Yun Lin, Jin Song Dong.
ICSE 2021.
XSnare: Application-specific client-side cross-site scripting protection
Jose Carlos Pazos, Jean-Sébastien Légaré, Ivan Beschastnikh.
SANER 2021.
Blockchain Governance: De Facto (x)or Designed?
Darra Hofman, Quinn DuPont, Angela Walch, Ivan Beschastnikh.
Chapter in Lemieux V.L., Feng C. (eds) Building Decentralized Trust. Springer, Cham.
Biscotti: A Blockchain System for Private and Secure Federated Learning
Muhammad Shayan, Clement Fung, Chris J.M. Yoon, Ivan Beschastnikh.
Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (IEEE TPDS) Special Section on AI/ML/DL 2020.
Parking Packet Payload with P4
Swati Goswami, Nodir Kodirov, Craig Mustard, Ivan Beschastnikh, Margo Seltzer.
CoNEXT 2020
The Limitations of Federated Learning in Sybil Settings
Clement Fung, Chris J.M. Yoon, Ivan Beschastnikh.
RAID 2020
Visualizing Distributed System Executions
Ivan Beschastnikh, Perry Liu, Albert Xing, Patty Wang, Yuriy Brun, Michael D. Ernst.
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) 2020.
Presented at ICSE 2020 Journal First track.
Scalable Constraint-based Virtual Data Center Allocation.
Samuel Bayless, Nodir Kodirov, Syed M. Iqbal, Ivan Beschastnikh, Holger Hoos, Alan Hu.
Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ), January 2020.
Erlay: Efficient Transaction Relay for Bitcoin
Gleb Naumenko, Gregory Maxwell, Pieter Wuille, Alexandra (Sasha) Fedorova, Ivan Beschastnikh.
CCS 2019. [Bitcoin Improvement Proposals 330.]
Brokered Agreements in Multi-Party Machine Learning
Clement Fung, Ivan Beschastnikh.
APSys 2019
Learning to Listen for Design
Elisa Baniassad, Ivan Beschastnikh, Reid Holmes, Gregor Kiczales, Meghan Allen.
SPLASH 2019 Onward! Essays
Jumpgate: In-Network Processing as a Service for Data Analytics
Craig Mustard, Fabian Ruffy, Anny Gakhokidze, Ivan Beschastnikh, Alexandra (Sasha) Fedorova.
HotCloud 2019
Improving Microservice-based Applications with Runtime Placement Adaptation
Adalberto R. Sampaio Junior, Julia Rubin, Ivan Beschastnikh, Nelson Rosa.
Journal of Internet Services and Applications (JISA)
Vulnerability & Blame: Making Sense of Unauthorized Access to Smartphones
Diogo Marques, Tiago Guerreiro, Luis Carriço, Ivan Beschastnikh Konstantin Beznosov.
CHI 2019
Mining Specifications from Documentation Using a Crowd
Peng Sun, Chris Brown, Ivan Beschastnikh, Kathryn Stolee.
SANER 2019
Iroko: A Framework to Prototype Reinforcement Learning for Data Center Traffic Control
Fabian Ruffy, Michael Przystupa, Ivan Beschastnikh.
Workshop on ML for Systems at NIPS 2018.
Performance Comprehension at WiredTiger
Alexandra (Sasha) Fedorova, Craig Mustard, Ivan Beschastnikh, Julia Rubin, Augustine Wong, Svetozar Miucin, Louis Ye
FSE 2018
VNF Chain Allocation and Management at Data Center Scale
Nodir Kodirov, Samuel Bayless, Fabian Ruffy, Ivan Beschastnikh, Holger Hoos, Alan Hu.
ANCS 2018
Inferring and Asserting Distributed System Invariants
Stewart Grant, Hendrik Cech, Ivan Beschastnikh.
ICSE 2018
Tsumiki: A Meta-Platform for Building Your Own Testbed
Justin Cappos, Yanyan Zhuang, Albert Rafetseder, Ivan Beschastnikh.
Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS).
Non-Stranger Danger: Examining the Effectiveness of Smartphone Locks in Preventing Intrusions by Socially-Close Adversaries
Diogo Marques, Tiago Guerreiro, Luis Carriço, Ivan Beschastnikh Konstantin Beznosov
WAY 2018 workshop, co-located with SOUPS 2018.
Tolerating Faults in Disaggregated Datacenters
Amanda Carbonari, Ivan Beschastnikh.
HotNets 2017
Scalable and Fault Tolerant Platform for Distributed Learning on Private Medical Data
Alborz Amir-Khalili, Soheil Kianzad, Rafeef Abugharbieh, Ivan Beschastnikh.
MICCAI MLMI 2017
Supporting Microservice Evolution
Adalberto R. Sampaio Junior, Harshavardhan Kadiyala, Bo Hu, John Steinbacher, Antony W. Erwin, Nelson Rosa, Ivan Beschastnikh, Julia Rubin.
ICSME 2017, NIER track.
Refactoring Asynchrony in JavaScript
Keheliya Gallaba, Quinn Hanam, Ali Mesbah, Ivan Beschastnikh.
ICSME 2017
Scalable Constraint-based Virtual Data Center Allocation
Samuel Bayless, Nodir Kodirov, Ivan Beschastnikh, Holger Hoos, Alan Hu.
IJCAI 2017
Accelerating software engineering research adoption with Analysis Bots
Ivan Beschastnikh, Mircea F. Lungu, Yanyan Zhuang.
ICSE 2017, NIER track.
Studying multi-threaded behavior with TSViz
Matheus Nunes, Harjeet Lalh, Ashaya Sharma, Augustine Wong, Svetozar Miucin, Alexandra (Sasha) Fedorova, Ivan Beschastnikh.
ICSE 2017, Tool demonstration.
Characterizing Social Insider Attacks on Facebook
Wali Usmani, Diogo Marques, Ivan Beschastnikh, Konstantin Beznosov, Tiago Guerreiro, Luis Carriço.
CHI 2017
Visually Reasoning about System and Resource Behavior
Tony Ohmann, Ryan Stanley, Ivan Beschastnikh, Yuriy Brun.
ICSE 2016, Tool demonstration.
Debugging Distributed Systems: Challenges and options for validation and debugging
Ivan Beschastnikh, Patty Wang, Yuriy Brun, Michael D. Ernst.
Communications of the ACM, vol. 59, no. 8, Aug. 2016, pp. 32-37.
ACM Queue, vol. 14, no. 2, March/April 2016, pp. 91-110.
Comparing Repositories Visually with RepoGrams
Daniel Rozenberg, Ivan Beschastnikh, Fabian Kosmale, Valerie Poser, Heiko Becker, Marc Palyart, Gail Murphy.
MSR 2016
Inferring likely data invariants of distributed systems
Stewart Grant Sam Creed, Ivan Beschastnikh.
Poster at SOSP 2015.
General LTL Specification Mining
Caroline Lemieux, Dennis Park, Ivan Beschastnikh.
ASE 2015
Synergizing Specification Miners through Model Fissions and Fusions
Tien-Duy B. Le, Xuan-Bach D. Le, David Lo, Ivan Beschastnikh.
ASE 2015
Investigating Program Behavior Using the Texada LTL Specifications Miner
Caroline Lemieux, Ivan Beschastnikh.
ASE 2015, Tool demonstration.
Don't Call Us, We'll Call You: Characterizing Callbacks in JavaScript
Keheliya Gallaba, Ali Mesbah, Ivan Beschastnikh.
ESEM 2015
Best Full Paper Award
Using declarative specification to improve the understanding, extensibility, and comparison of model-inference algorithms
Ivan Beschastnikh, Yuriy Brun, Jenny Abrahamson, Michael D. Ernst, Arvind Krishnamurthy.
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), in press, 21 pages, April 2015.
(Extended version of the ICSE 2013 paper).
Templated Visualization of Object State with Vebugger
Daniel Rozenberg, Ivan Beschastnikh.
VISSOFT'14, NIER track.
Behavioral Resource-Aware Model Inference
Tony Ohmann, Michael Herzberg, Sebastian Fiss, Armand Halbert, Marc Palyart, Ivan Beschastnikh, Yuriy Brun.
ASE 2014
Inferring Models of Concurrent Systems from Logs of their Behavior with CSight
Ivan Beschastnikh, Yuriy Brun, Michael D. Ernst, Arvind Krishnamurthy.
ICSE 2014
Shedding Light on Distributed System Executions
Jenny Abrahamson, Ivan Beschastnikh, Yuriy Brun, Michael D. Ernst.
Poster at ICSE 2014
NetCheck: Network Diagnoses from Blackbox Traces
Yanyan Zhuang, Eleni Gessiou, Steven Portzer, Fraida Fund, Monzur Muhammad, Ivan Beschastnikh, Justin Cappos.
NSDI 2014
Mining Precise Performance-Aware Behavioral Models from Existing Instrumentation
Tony Ohmann, Kevin Thai, Ivan Beschastnikh Yuriy Brun.
ICSE 2014, NIER track.
Inferring Models of Concurrent Systems from Logs of their Behavior with CSight
Ivan Beschastnikh, Yuriy Brun, Michael D. Ernst, Arvind Krishnamurthy.
UBC, Department of Computer Science, Technical Report, 2014-02-28.
Unifying FSM-inference Algorithms through Declarative Specification
Ivan Beschastnikh, Yuriy Brun, Jenny Abrahamson, Michael D. Ernst, Arvind Krishnamurthy.
ICSE 2013
(Extended version published as a TSE 2015 journal paper).
Understanding Regression Failures through Test-Passing and Test-Failing Code Changes
Roykrong Sukkerd, Ivan Beschastnikh, Jochen Wuttke, Sai Zhang, Yuriy Brun.
ICSE 2013, NIER track.
NetCheck Test Cases: Input Traces and NetCheck Output
Yanyan Zhuang, Ivan Beschastnikh Justin Cappos.
NYU Poly, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Report TR-CSE-2013-03, 10/29/2013.
Unifying FSM-inference Algorithms through Declarative Specification
Ivan Beschastnikh, Yuriy Brun, Jenny Abrahamson, Michael D. Ernst, Arvind Krishnamurthy.
University of Washington CSE technical report UW-CSE-13-03-01, March 2013.
Effects of Centralized and Distributed Version Control on Commit Granularity
Jochen Wuttke, Ivan Beschastnikh, Yuriy Brun
Published in TinyToCS vol. 1, 2012.
Inferring Networked System Models from Behavior Traces
Ivan Beschastnikh
Student Workshop at CoNEXT 2012.
Sonora: A Platform for Continuous Mobile-Cloud Computing
Fan Yang, Zhengping Qian, Xiuwei Chen, Ivan Beschastnikh, Li Zhuang, Lidong Zhou, Guobin Shen.
Microsoft Research technical report MSR-TR-2012-34, March 2012.
Scalable Consistency in Scatter
Lisa Glendenning, Ivan Beschastnikh, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Tom Anderson.
SOSP 2011
Leveraging Existing Instrumentation to Automatically Infer Invariant-Constrained Models
Ivan Beschastnikh, Yuriy Brun, Sigurd Schneider, Michael Sloan, Michael D. Ernst.
ESEC/FSE 2011
Synoptic: Studying Logged Behavior with Inferred Models
Ivan Beschastnikh, Jenny Abrahamson, Yuriy Brun, Michael D. Ernst.
ESEC/FSE 2011, Tool demonstration.
Mining Temporal Invariants from Partially Ordered Logs
Ivan Beschastnikh, Yuriy Brun, Michael D. Ernst, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Tom Anderson.
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, vol. 45, no. 3, December 2011, pp. 39–46.
Initially appeared at SLAML 2011.
Bandsaw: Log-powered test scenario generation for distributed systems
Ivan Beschastnikh, Yuriy Brun, Michael D. Ernst, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Tom Anderson.
Work in Progress at SOSP 2011.
Retaining Sandbox Containment Despite Bugs in Privileged Memory-Safe Code
Justin Cappos, Armon Dadgar, Jeffrey Rasley, Justin Samuel,
Ivan Beschastnikh, Cosmin Barsan, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Tom Anderson.
CCS 2010
Synoptic: Summarizing system logs with refinement
Sigurd Schneider, Ivan Beschastnikh, Slava Chernyak, Michael D. Ernst, Yuriy Brun.
Workshop on Managing Systems via Log Analysis and Machine Learning Techniques, SLAML 2010.
Self-Presentation: Structured and semi-structured user profiles
Linda Le, Ivan Beschastnikh, David W. McDonald.
Studying Online Behaviour Workshop at CHI 2010.
MiST: A Platform for Mobile-Cloud Computing in Streams
Fan Yang, Zhengping Qian, Ivan Beschastnikh, Li Zhuang, Mao Yang, Amre Shakimov, Guobin Shen, Lidong Zhou.
Poster at Microsoft Research Mobile + Cloud Summit, Redmond, 2010.
Teaching networking and distributed systems with Seattle
Justin Cappos, Ivan Beschastnikh.
Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges. Volume 25 Issue 1, October 2009.
Seattle: The Internet as an Educational Testbed
Justin Cappos, Ivan Beschastnikh, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Tom Anderson.
SIGCSE 2009
Promoting Quality in Wikipedia through Enculturation
Ivan Beschastnikh, David W. McDonald, Mark Zachry, Travis Kriplean, Alan Borning.
Approaching 'Amateur' Workshop at GROUP 2009.
System Design for Social Translucence in Socially Mediating Technologies
David W. McDonald, Ivan Beschastnikh, Travis Kriplean, Alan Borning, Mark Zachry.
Socially Mediating Technologies Workshop at CHI 2009.
Designing Mediating Spaces Between Citizens and Government
Travis Kriplean, Ivan Beschastnikh, Alan Borning, David W. McDonald, Mark Zachry.
Socially Mediating Technologies Workshop at CHI 2009.
SatelliteLab: Adding Heterogeneity to Planetary-Scale Testbeds
Marcel Dischinger, Andreas Haeberlen, Ivan Beschastnikh, Krishna P. Gummadi, Stefan Saroiu.
SIGCOMM 2008
Articulations of WikiWork: Uncovering Valued Work in Wikipedia through Barnstars
Travis Kriplean, Ivan Beschastnikh, David W. McDonald.
CSCW 2008
Best Paper Honorable Mention
Wikipedian Self-Governance in Action: Motivating the Policy Lens
Ivan Beschastnikh, Travis Kriplean, David W. McDonald.
ICWSM 2008
ICWSM 2018 10-Year Test of Time honorable mention
Best Paper Award
Community, Consensus, Coercion, Control: CS*W or How Policy Mediates Mass Participation
Travis Kriplean, Ivan Beschastnikh, David W. McDonald, Scott Golder.
GROUP 2007
Building an Infrastructure for Urgent Computing
Pete Beckman, Ivan Beschastnikh, Suman Nadella, Nick Trebon.
Chapter in 'High Performance Computing and Grids in Action' by IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2007
SPRUCE: A System for Supporting Urgent High-Performance Computing
Pete Beckman, Suman Nadella, Nick Trebon, Ivan Beschastnikh
IFIP WoCo9, 2006.
VFER: High-performance Transport in User Space
Stanislav Shalunov, Ivan Beschastnikh
SuperComputing 2006 Bandwidth Challenge Finalist, November 2006.
The Earth Vision Time Machine: A Design for the Collaborative Sharing of Wireless Sensor Data
Pete Beckman, Ivan Beschastnikh, Cameron Cooper, Isaac Wasileski
Workshop on Advanced Collaborative Environments, WACE 2005

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

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

Research team

I am lucky to work with an amazing group of people. One of my research principles is to let my student's interests guide the research. I encourage students to pursue topics that they find personally motivating.


Graduate students:


Undergraduate students:

  • Ken Li
  • Emilie Ma
  • Armin Talaie

Graduate student alumni:

  • Shayan Hosseini (MSc 2024) → Neon
    • Reconciling the Model-Implementation Duality in PGo [pdf]
  • Shiqi He (MSc 2023, co-supervised with Mathias Lécuyer) → PhD at University of Michigan
    • GlueFL: Reconciling Client Sampling and Model Masking for Bandwidth Efficient Federated Learning [pdf]
  • Mayank Tiwary (MSc 2023, co-supervised with Thomas Pasquier) → Salesforce
    • A literature review of parameter tuning within the context of big data processing frameworks [pdf]
  • Faqia Iqbal (MSc 2023)
    • Privacy and Conflicting Identities in the Context of Punjabi Canadians [pdf]
  • Nodir Kodirov (PhD 2021, co-supervised with Alan Hu) → Huawei Research
    • Datacenter Resource Scheduling for Networked Cloud Applications [pdf]
  • Matheus Stolet (MSc 2021, co-supervised with Aline Talhouk) → PhD at MPI-SWS
    • Large Scale Federated Analytics and DP Budget Preservation [pdf]
  • Seyed Ali Tabatabaee (MSc 2021, co-supervised with Chen Feng) → PhD at UBC
    • Attacking Transaction Relay in MimbleWimble Blockchains [pdf]
  • Vaastav Anand (MSc 2020) → PhD at MPI-SWS
    • Dara The Explorer: Coverage Based Exploration for Model Checking of Distributed Systems in Go [pdf]
  • Adam Geller (MSc 2020 co-supervised with William J. Bowman) → PhD at UBC
    • An Indexed Type System for Faster and Safer WebAssembly [pdf]
  • Jose Carlos Pazos (MSc 2019, primary supervisor Bill Aiello) → Wolfram
    • XSnare: Application-specific, Client-side Cross-site Scripting Protection [pdf]
  • Muhammad Shayan (MSc 2019) → KorbitAI
    • Biscotti - A Ledger for Private and Secure Peer to Peer Machine Learning [pdf]
  • Puneet Mehrotra (MSc 2019) → PhD at UBC
    • Cross-device Access Control with Trusted Capsules [pdf]
  • Anand Jayarajan (MSc 2019, primary supervisor Sasha Fedorova) → PhD at UToronto
    • Priority-based Parameter Propagation for Distributed Deep Neural Network Training [pdf]
  • Renato Costa (MSc 2019)
    • Compiling Distributed System Specifications into Implementations [pdf]
  • Matthew (Minh) Do (MSc 2019) → Hopper
    • Corresponding formal specifications with distributed systems [pdf]
  • Gleb Naumenko (MSc 2019, co-supervised with Sasha Fedorova) → Chaincode Labs
    • Erlay: Efficient Transaction Relay in Bitcoin [pdf]
  • Fabian Ruffy (MSc 2019) → PhD at NYU
    • Data-Driven Datacenter Traffic Control [pdf]
  • Jodi Spacek (MSc 2019, CGSM fellowship) → Shopify
    • The Unbalancing Act: Proxy Preservation for Censorship Resistance Systems [pdf, code]
  • Amanda Carbonari (MSc 2018) → Google
    • Inter-processor Communication in Disaggregated Datacenters [pdf]
  • Clement Fung (MSc 2018) → PhD at CMU
    • Dancing in the Dark: Private Multi-Party Machine Learning in an Untrusted Setting [pdf]
  • Stewart Grant (MSc 2018) → PhD at UCSD
    • Inferring and Asserting Distributed Invariants [pdf]
  • Adalberto Júnior (PhD 2018 Federal University of Pernambuco, co-supervised with Nelson Souto Rosa) → Postdoc at UBC/IBM
    • Runtime Adaptation of Microservices [pdf]
  • Peter Chen (MSc 2017) → Arista Networks
    • Cross-platform Data Integrity and Confidentiality with Graduated Access Control [pdf]
  • Wali Usmani (MSc 2017, co-supervised with Konstantin Beznosov) → TwoTallTotems
    • "Not able to resist the urge" : Social Insider Attacks on Facebook [pdf]
  • Keheliya Gallaba (MASc 2015 from ECE, co-supervised with Ali Mesbah) → PhD at McGill U.
    • Characterizing and refactoring asynchronous JavaScript callbacks [pdf]
  • Michael Phan-Ba (MSc 2015)
    • A literature review of failure detection within the context of solving the problem of distributed consensus [pdf]
  • Daniel Rozenberg (MSc 2015) → Google
    • Qualitative Repository Analysis with RepoGrams [pdf]


Postdoctoral fellow and research associate alumni:


Undergraduate UBC/visiting alumni:


Undergraduate U. Washington alumni:

Teaching

Teaching

I believe that the teaching of Computer Science, particularly systems courses, is well-suited to experiential learning, a process of learning that privileges student practice, experience, and reflection. In my teaching I use experiential learning as a base framework and adapt it to the course topic, the size of the class, and the available resources.


Winter 2023:
Introduction to Software Engineering 310. An undergraduate course introducing students to software engineering.

Fall 2022:
Introduction to Software Engineering 310. An undergraduate course introducing students to software engineering.

Winter 2022:
Distributed Systems 416. An undergraduate course covering core concepts in distributed systems.

Fall 2021:
Distributed Systems Abstractions 538B. A graduate course on abstractions in distributed systems.

Winter 2021:
Distributed Systems 416. An undergraduate course covering core concepts in distributed systems.

Fall 2020:
Distributed Systems Abstractions 538B. A graduate course on abstractions in distributed systems.

Winter 2019:
Topics in Distributed Systems 538B. A graduate course on topics in distributed systems.

Fall 2018:
Distributed Systems 416. An undergraduate course covering core concepts in distributed systems.

Winter 2018:
Distributed Systems 416. An undergraduate course covering core concepts in distributed systems.

Fall 2017:
Computer Networks 527. A graduate course focusing on classic and contemporary networks topics.

Winter 2017:
Distributed Systems 416. An undergraduate course covering core concepts in distributed systems.

Fall 2016:
Distributed Systems 538B. A graduate course on distributed systems.

Winter 2016:
Distributed Systems 416. An undergraduate course covering core concepts in distributed systems.

Fall 2015:
Computer Networks 527. A graduate course focusing on classic and contemporary networks topics.

Winter 2015:
Distributed Systems 538B. A graduate topics course covering classic papers in distributed systems.

Winter 2014:
Comprehension and Analysis of Large System 538B. A graduate, project-based, topics course covering a broad range of material, from software engineering to distributed systems.

Fall 2013:
Software Construction 210. An undergraduate second-year course.

Service

Service to my communities

I consider the peer review process a critical component of academic research. Because of the breadth of my research program, I am involved with several different research communities, including systems and software engineering. I contribute in service roles to as many of these communities as I can.

  • Organizer:
    • 2022: ICSE Co-located events co-chair with Christine Julien
    • 2019: ICSE Student Volunteers co-chair with Shane McIntosh
    • 2017: HotOS General co-chair with Rachit Agarwal
    • 2015: Middleware Doctoral symposium chair
  • Program committee member:
    • 2023: ICSE
    • 2022: ASE, EuroSys light, VISSOFT, ICSE Workshops, ResilientFL workshop
    • 2021: EuroSys light, VISSOFT
    • 2020: NSDI light, ASE, HotCloud, VISSOFT
    • 2019: ICDCS, VISSOFT
    • 2018: ICDCS, ESEM, ESEC/FSE NIER, ISSTA Demos
    • 2017: ISSRE, ESEM, ICSE NIER, ICSE SRC, ISSTA Demos
    • 2016: ICSE, ESEM, ICSE Posters, VISSOFT NIER and Demos
    • 2015: SRDS, ICSE Demos, VISSOFT NIER and Demos
    • 2014: ICSE Posters
    • 2013: SOSP Posters
    • 2012: WikiSym
    • 2011: WikiSym
  • PC chair:
    • 2020: EuroSys Shadow PC (co-chair with Étienne Rivière), NSDI posters (co-chair with Ravi Netravali)
    • 2017: VISSOFT (co-chair with Andrea Mocci)
  • Steering committee member:
    • 2023 - 2025: HotOS
    • 2017 - 2022: VISSOFT
  • Journal/conference boards:
    • 2018 - 2023: TSE review board
  • Reviewer:
    • 2019: TSE, IST, JSS
    • 2018: TSE, JSS
    • 2017: CHI, EuroSys, TOSEM
    • 2016: TSE, JSEP, JSPE
    • 2015: TSE, Elsevier ASE, ASE
    • 2014: TSE, VLDB, Elsevier IST
    • 2013: TSE, OSR, ASE
    • 2012: TSE, TOOLS
    • 2011: OOPSLA, NCA
    • 2010: SigMetrics
    • 2009: NSDI, WikiSym
Media coverage

Media coverage

I am always happy to chat with media to showcase research from my group or to discuss and explain recent technology trends.

  • November 4, 2021. An article that describes the work behind our CSCW 2021 paper on references in GitHub pull requests. The paper was awarded an impact recognition.