About

About me

Note: I am not intending to recruit MSc/PhD students this year.

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 UBC CS department, I am part of both Systopia lab and Software Practices Lab (SPL).

I spent my 2024-2025 sabbatical as a Visiting Researcher with Uber’s Programming Systems Team. I worked on static analysis tools for ensuring reliability of microservice-based systems. I continue to collaborate with Uber's AI-based software engineering tooling team.

I spent my 2019-2020 sabbatical as a visiting professor, hosted by David S. Rosenblum and Abhik Roychoudhury at the National University of Singapore. I worked on a variety of topics, including fuzzing and improving reliability of neural nets in deployment.

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:

• We put together a SIGOPS blog post on our recently published work at ICLR'26 about modeling real-world systems in TLA+ using LLMs. May 2026. Several other blogs covered this paper: Murat's blog, and Jesse's blog.
• Emilie gave a great talk on our FSE 2024 paper on mining/interpreting Issue-PR graphs in GitHub at the Open Source Summit. April 2024.
• Released a co-authored CIFAR AI Insights policy document on Federated Data Access, Towards a Proportionate and Risk-Based Approach to Federated Data Access in Canada. August 2023
• Compiling Distributed System Models Into Implementations with PGo, talk by Finn and Shayan on PGo, presented in the AWS Automated Reasoning Group, February 2022.
• Successfully Publishing your Research (Think about peer review, frequently!), talk at EuroSys Shadow PC meeting, February 2020.
• Compiling Distributed System Models into Implementations with PGo, talk at TLA+ Conference, September 2019.
• Deep Dive Into Erlay and Biscotti, Advance tech podcast, July 2019.
• Comparing Software Repositories Visually with RepoGrams, talk at Visualization Across UBC, April 2019.
• Private and secure distributed ML, FoolsGold and Biscotti (BlockML) projects, 2018.
• Program analysis for distributed systems, Dinv, Dara, and PGo projects, 2018.
• Scalable Constraint-based Virtual Data Center Allocation, talk at UC Louvain, August 2016.
• Mining temporal and data-temporal specifications, Texada and Quarry projects, August 2016.
• Helping developers make sense of distributed systems, Colloquium at Sonoma U., October 2015.
• Making sense of distributed systems, UBC CS FLS talk, January 2014.
• Modeling systems from logs of their behavior, Microsoft Research Redmond, July 2013.

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.

Papers & Code

Research 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.

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:

• Finn Hackett (PhD)
• Yanze Li (PhD, co-supervised with Alex Summers)
• Jiyeon Lim (MSc)
• Jiayin Kralik (PhD-track, co-supervised with Reto Achermann)
• Shayan Mohammadi (PhD-track)

Undergraduate students:

• Minghao Li (Honors thesis'27 with A. Mehta)
• Dylan Medjnoun (Honors thesis'27)
• Naman Miglani (Directed Studies Fall'26)
• Brian Fransis Moniaga (Honors thesis'27 with Y. Wei)
• Soo-Ho Park (Directed Studies Fall'26 with Y. Wei)
• Kezia Rijadi (Directed Studies Fall'26)
• Shubhaankar Sharma (Directed Studies Fall'26 with A. Gujarati)
• Kevin Xiao (Directed Studies Fall'26 with A. Gujarati)

Graduate student alumni:

• Paul Bucci (PhD 2024) → Teleoscope Inc. (startup founder).
• The Computation of Meaning: From Embodied Emotions to Cognitive Schemas [pdf]
• Mishaal Kazmi (MSc 2024, co-supervised with Mathias Lécuyer)
• PANORAMIA: Privacy Auditing of Machine Learning Models without Retraining [pdf]
• 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:

• Cleidson de Souza (Research Associate 2022-2023, co-supervised with Dongwook Yoon)
• Mohamad-Jaafar Nehme (Postdoc 2021, co-supervised with Chen Feng and Victoria Lemieux) → Huawei Research
• Adalberto R. Sampaio Junior (Postdoc 2021) → Huawei Research
• Yanyan Zhuang (Postdoc 2016, co-supervised with Justin Cappos) → Assistant Prof. at U. of Colorado, Colorado Springs
• NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow

Undergraduate UBC/visiting alumni:

• Hugh Coleman (USRA'26, with A. Summers)
• Dennis Gu (WLIUR'26, with A. Summers)
• Dylan Medjnoun (SURE'26)
• Hassaan Mohsin (WLIUR'26)
• Soo-Ho Park (USRA'26, with Y. Wei)
• Sean Donaghy (Directed Studies Winter'26)
• Emilie Ma (Honors thesis'26)
• Honorable mention for the 2025-2026 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award
• Brian Moniaga (Directed Studies Fall'25, Winter'26 with Y. Wei)
• Shubhaankar Sharma (Directed Studies Winter'26 with A. Gujarati)
• Allan Tan (Directed Studies Winter'26 with A. Gujarati)
• Vincent Tu (Directed Studies Winter'26)
• Naufal Wibawa (Directed Studies Winter'26)
• Miranda Yin (Honors thesis'26)
• Yuzhe (Lily) Zhang (Directed Studies Winter'26)
• Ryan Xue (Directed Studies Fall'25)
• Daine Yip (Directed Studies Fall'25)
• Jiayin Kralik (USRA'25)
• Kuter Bora (Directed Studies Winter'25)
• Oliver Oxford (Honors thesis'25)
• Ryan Wang (Directed Studies Fall'24)
• Kuter Bora (Directed Studies Summer'24 term 1)
• Liu (Andrew) Lu (Directed Studies Summer'24 term 1)
• Emilie Ma (Directed Studies Winter'24)
• Armin Talaie (Directed Studies Winter'24)
• Ken Li (Directed Studies Fall'23, Winter'24)
• Leo Foord-Kelcey (COGS 402 Summer'23, Directed Studies Winter'23, Fall'22)
• Kim Dao (Directed Studies Winter'23)
• Emilie Ma (Directed Studies Winter'23 with Dongwook Yoon)
• Aanandi Sidharth (COGS 402 Winter'23)
• Eric Yan (Honors thesis'23, Directed studies Summer'22)
• Qiyu Zhou (Directed Studies Winter'23)
• Kenneth Averna (Directed Studies Fall'22, COGS 402 Summer'22)
• Patrick Lee (Directed Studies Fall'22, Directed Studies Winter'22, COGS 402 Summer'22)
• Jesse Wong (Directed studies Fall'22, co-supervised with Dongwook Yoon)
• Dhruv Khanna (Directed studies Summer'22)
• Sol Lee (Directed Studies'22, Summer'22)
• Yennis Ye (WLIUR'22)
• Konstantin Pandl (Visiting PhD student, Summer'22)
• Crystal Lee (Directed Studies'22)
• Ruchit Palrecha (Directed Studies'22)
• Alamjeet Singh (Directed Studies'21,'22)
• Naveen Sivasankar (Honors thesis'21; with Dongwook Yoon)
• Kadir Mert Barutçuoğlu (Directed Studies'21)
• Vita Chan (Directed Studies'21)
• Prayus Shrestha (Directed Studies'21)
• Florentina Simlinger (Directed Studies'21)
• Haley Li (Directed Studies'20, '21, USRA'21)
• Charlene Nicer (Directed Studies'20, '21x2)
• Ahmed Abdelmoneim (Honors thesis'21; with Aline Talhouk)
• Maximilian Was Damji (Honors thesis'21)
• Chris West (Honors thesis'21)
• Daisy Zhang (Directed Studies'20)
• Wonhu Choi (Directed Studies'20)
• Kalli Leung (Directed Studies'20; with Mathias Lécuyer)
• Julian Mentasti (Directed Studies'20)
• Aditya Chinchure (WLIUR'20, co-supervised with Aline Talhouk)
• Kalli Leung (USRA'20, co-supervised with Aline Talhouk)
• Haley Li (SURE'20)
• Daisy Zhang (SURE'20, co-supervised with Aline Talhouk)
• Stephen Ye (Visiting PhD student from Beihang University, 2018-2019)
• Chris Yoon (USRA'18, USRA'19)
• 2019 CRA honorable mention
• Matheus Stolet (Directed Studies'19, URA'19)
• Marlon Ou (Directed Studies'18, '19)
• Eric Semeniuc (Honors thesis'19)
• Yifan (Tom) Yang (Directed Studies'19)
• Lise Savard (Directed Studies'18)
• Heming Zhang (MITACS Globalink research intern'18)
• Vaastav Anand (WLIUR'18)
• Anny Gakhokidze (Directed Studies'18)
• Finn Hackett (Directed Studies'18, CPSC 490)
• Michael Hou (Directed Studies'18)
• Syed Umair (Directed Studies'18)
• Amy Zhu (USRA'18, Directed Studies'18)
• Brandon Zhang (SURE'17)
• SOSP SRC'17 winner
• Vincent Hui (USRA'16, Directed studies'16, '17)
• Syed Iqbal (USRA'17)
• Jamie Koerner (Directed Studies'17)
• James Liu (Directed Studies'17)
• Stewart Grant (USRA'16, SURE'15, Directed Studies)
• Hendrik Cech (DAAD'16)
• Haoran Yu (USRA'16)
• Graham St-Laurent (USRA'16, Directed Studies)
• Caroline Lemieux (USRA '14, '15, Directed Studies)
  • 2016 CRA finalist
  • 2015 CRA honorable mention
  • ICSE SRC'15 winner
• Patty Wang (USRA'15)
• Albert Xing (USRA'14)
• Kenneth Shen (SURE'14)
• Perry Liu (USRA'14)
• Jodi Spacek (Directed Studies)
• Dennis Park (Directed Studies)
• Alex Crooks (Directed Studies)
• Max Erler (Directed Studies)
• Mike Fink (Directed Studies)
• Gurkaran (Gary) Poonia (Directed Studies)
• Alex Ristich (Directed Studies)
• Bob Yang (Honors thesis)

Undergraduate U. Washington alumni:

• Roykrong Sukkerd (Honors thesis)
• Jenny Abrahamson (MSc, Honors thesis)
  • Google Anita Borg scholarship winner
• Andrew Davies
• Michael Sloan
• Yoong Woo Kim
• Zachary Stein
• Kevin Thai
• Timothy Vega (Honors thesis)
• Katherine Baker
• Vjekoslav Brajkovic
• Maxwell Forbes
• Allison Obourn (Honors thesis)
• Patrick Williams
• Tyler Oshiro
• Sean Ren
• Alper Sarikaya
• Linda Le

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 2027:
CPSC 304: Introduction to Relational Databases. An undergraduate course on relational databases.

Winter 2026:
CPSC 304: Introduction to Relational Databases. An undergraduate course on relational databases.

Fall 2025:
Distributed Systems Abstractions 538B. A graduate course on abstractions in distributed systems.

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:
• 2027: SOSP General co-chair, with Sasha Fedorova
• 2026: ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC) PC co-chair, with Eric Lo
• 2022: ICSE Co-located events co-chair with Christine Julien
• 2020: EuroSys Shadow PC co-chair with Étienne Rivière, NSDI posters co-chair with Ravi Netravali
• 2019: ICSE Student Volunteers co-chair with Shane McIntosh
• 2017: HotOS General co-chair with Rachit Agarwal
• 2017: VISSOFT PC co-chair with Andrea Mocci
• 2015: Middleware Doctoral symposium chair
• Program committee member:
• 2026: ICSE, PLDI, ICDCS posters/demos
• 2025: ATC heavy, ICSE NIER
• 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
• Steering committee member:
• 2023 - 2025: HotOS
• 2017 - 2022: VISSOFT
• Journal/conference boards:
• 2018 - 2023: TSE review board
• Reviewer:
• 2024: TOSEM, TSE
• 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

Funding

Funding

I am fortunate to have my research and education efforts supported by the following generous organizations: NSERC, Amazon (AWS Automated Reasoning Group), Huawei, UBC Designing for People, UBC Data Science Institute, Cascadia Data Alliance, Aquanow, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure, IBM CAS, Shopify, Mitacs, Tasktop, NSF, UBC, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Amazon, Peter Wall Institute.

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.

• June 24, 2024. Our FSE 2024 paper was featured in an article published by thenewstack.io. What GitHub Pull Requests Reveal about Your Team’s Dev Habits. Our work documents developers' work practices from analysis of graphs formed by links between issues and pull requests on GitHub.

• 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.

• November 17, 2020. Clement Fung gave an interview for the Data Skeptic podcast about our work on Sybil Attacks on Federated Learning (RAID 2020 pdf).

• November 5, 2020. Fred Hutch News Stories. New regional collaborations will accelerate innovation in data-intensive medical science. (highlights our LEAP project)

• Erlay: Efficient Transaction Relay for Bitcoin (CCS 2019 pdf)
• August 9, 2019. BitCoin Magazine. How the New Erlay Protocol Could Speed Up the Bitcoin Network
• July 27, 2019. Podcast interview on Advance Tech Podcast. Deep Dive Into Erlay
• June 3, 2019. Coinfomania. Why Erlay Protocol is a Big Deal for Bitcoin
• June 3, 2019. Forklog. Разработчики биткоина представили протокол Erlay для повышения пропускной способности сети
• June 3, 2019. Blockonomi. Full Nodes & Block Size: The Importance of Keeping Validation Costs Low in Bitcoin
• June 2, 2019. Coindesk.Maxwell, Wuille Co-Author Proposal for a Big Boost to Bitcoin’s Bandwidth

• Vulnerability & Blame: Making Sense of Unauthorized Access to Smartphones (CHI 2019 pdf)
• July 2019. Our study is featured on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah.
• June 2019. Bustle. Could Snooping On Your Partner's Phone End Your Relationship? A New Study Says Yes
• June 3, 2019. CBS. Yes, Snooping On Your Partner’s Phone Could End The Relationship, Study Finds
• May 30, 2019. Radio Canada. Would your relationship survive phone spying?
• May 30, 2019. Science Daily. Combing through someone's phone could lead to end of relationship -- or not
• Additional coverage in City News, Black Press Media, ABC 10, and others.

• January 3, 2018. The Abbotsford News. Bitcoin: From the computer to Abbotsford stores.
• January 22, 2017. Podcast interview on Snow Crash Radio. Week in review for January 22, 2017
• November 21, 2017. CBC BC Almanac Radio appearance. Cryptocurrency topics discussion.

• Characterizing Social Insider Attacks on Facebook (CHI 2017 pdf)
• January 27, 2017. CBC News.Beware! Friends, family, secretly snooping on your Facebook account
• Additional coverage in Vancouver Sun, The Times, Yahoo UK, Yahoo Canada, CBC Canada, CBC British Columbia, Metro News, The Province, Voice Online, Daily Mail, Hindustan Times, Daily Hive, Business Tech, and others.