Ariel ("Ari") Rabkin Postdoctoral Researcher CS Department 35 Olden st Princeton, NJ 08540-5233.

I have recently started as a postdoctoral researcher working with Mike Freedman. Currently my time is devoted to a project on wide area streaming data mangagement.

I recently finished my PhD at Berkeley, working in the AMP lab advised by Randy Katz. I graduated in May 2012. My dissertation is posted here.

I am also interested in the software engineering and administration challenges of big-data systems. I am particularly interested in applying program analysis techniques to tasks like log analysis and configuration debugging.

The best way to reach me is probably email to asrabkin at gmail.com

Research

This is an annotated list of things I've worked on, with links to papers. For a straight-up publication list, see below.

• Stream Processing
  I and the folks in Mike Freedman's group at Princeton are planning to build a system called JetStream, for wide-area stream processing. The vision is to build a practical useful system for this new and emerging area. An abstract about the system appeared at LADIS 2012. A workshop paper about the overall vision appeared at HotOS '13.

• Socio-PLT
  Fellow Berkeleyan Leo Meyerovich and I have been looking at social influences on programming language adoption. Most of the visualizations and associated materials are available here. A vision paper appeared at ONWARD 2012 (the "new ideas" track associated with SPLASH/OOPSLA). Our results will be published at OOPSLA 2013. We described our methodological challenges at PLATEAU 2012.

• Configuration Debugging
  My dissertation studied using program analysis to understand software configuration. I particularly looked at two major applications: explaining errors in terms of configuration, and "configuration spellcheck". Error explanation is the problem of finding the option that most usefully explains a failure, given a program and an error message. Configuration spellcheck is the problem of catching configuration errors before the program ever runs.

  A paper about automatically finding and classifying options (and hence Configuration Spellcheck) appeared at ICSE 2011. A followup paper about inferring the root cause of error messages appeared at ASE 2011

  This work is built on top of JChord, a program analysis framework being primarily developed by Mayur Naik, formerly of Intel Research Berkeley and now of Georgia Tech. If you're interested in using the Configuration Spellchecker, you should check out the JChord SVN repository and look in the conf_spellcheck directory.

• Log collection
  I'm one of the lead developers for Chukwa, an open-source log collection annd monitoring system. Chukwa was first started while I was working at Yahoo! It's currently an Apache Software Foundation incubation project. It's in use at several companies, including CBS Interactive and Selective Media.

  We published a short paper on Chukwa at CCA '08. A longer version appeared at LISA 2010.

• Log analysis
  I've also done some work on the question of what to log. I published a paper about graphical representation for log structure at SLAML 2010, the workshop on managing systems via system log analysis and machine learning.

• Cloud Computing
  I was a coauthor of Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing. This was a white paper written by the RAD Lab faculty and a number of the systems graduate students. It's gotten a great deal of response, and on the whole, we've been very happy with it. A version of this paper later appeared in CACM.

• Security Questions
  Some while back, I did some work on bank security questions. The paper, published at SOUPS '08, is available here. The tagged data supporting the paper is available [in a gzipped archive] here. Slides for my conference talk are available as PDFs and also in Power Point format.

  This work received a fair bit of media attention -- I got interviewed by TIME and by an MSNBC blog.

Teaching

I have a total of 8 semesters of TA experience (6 at Cornell as an undergraduate and master's student, 2 at UC Berkeley. I helped teach operating systems at Cornell, and algorithms and machine organization at Berkeley.

As a teaching assistant, I helped with the overhaul of UC Berkeley's lower-division computer organization course (CS 61c) to refocus it on parallelism. A paper about the MapReduce unit of the course appeared at SIGCSE 2012, with a longer version appearing in ACM Transactions on Computing Education.

• Leo A. Meyerovich and Ariel Rabkin. Empirical Analysis of Programming Language Adoption. To appear at SPLASH/OOPSLA 2013, Indianapolis, IN, October 2013.
• Ariel Rabkin and Randy Katz. How Hadoop Clusters Break. IEEE Software Magazine, July/August 2013.
• Ariel Rabkin, Matvey Arye, Siddhartha Sen, Vivek Pai, and Michael J. Freedman. Making Every Bit Count in Wide-Area Analytics. At 14th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS), Santa Ana Pueblo, NM, May 2013.
• Ariel Rabkin, Charles Reiss, Randy Katz, David Patterson. "Using clouds for MapReduce measurement assignments." ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE) Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2013.
• Leo A. Meyerovich and Ariel Rabkin. How Not to Survey Developers and Repositories: Experiences Analyzing Language Adoption. At Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2012), Tuscon, AZ, October 2012.
• Leo A. Meyerovich and Ariel Rabkin. Socio-PLT: Principles for Programming Language Adoption. At ONWARD 2012, Tuscon, AZ, October 2012.
• Ariel Rabkin, Charles Reiss, Randy Katz, and David Patterson. Experiences Teaching MapReduce in the Clouds. SIGCSE Technical Symposium (SIGCSE 2012), Raleigh, North Carolina, March 2012.
• Ariel Rabkin and Randy Katz. Precomputing possible configuration error diagnoses. At ASE 2011, the ACM/IEEE conference on Automated Software Engineering, November 2011.
• Ariel Rabkin and Randy Katz. Static Extraction of Program Configuration Options At ICSE 2011, the International Conference on Software Engineering. Honolulu, Hawaii, May 2011.
• Ariel Rabkin and Randy Katz. Chukwa: A System for Reliable Large-Scale Log Collection. At LISA 2010, the USENIX conference on Large Installation System Administration. San Jose CA, November 2010.
• Ariel Rabkin, Wei Xu, Avani Wildani, Armando Fox, David Patterson, and Randy Katz. A Graphical Representation for Identifier Structure in Logs. At SLAML 2010, Vancouver, Canada, October 2010.
• Michael Armbrust, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Andrew Konwinski, Gunho Lee, David Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica, and Matei Zaharia. A View of Cloud Computing. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 53 No. 4, Pages 50-58.
• Michael Armbrust, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Andrew Konwinski, Gunho Lee, David Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica and Matei Zaharia. Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing. UC Berkeley Tech report 2009-28. February 2009.
• Jerome Boulon, Andy Konwinski, Runping Qi, Ariel Rabkin Eric Yang, and Mac Yang. Chukwa: A large-scale monitoring system. At Cloud Computing and Applications (CCA '08), Chicago IL, October 2008.
• Ariel Rabkin. Personal Knowledge Questions for Fallback Authentication: Security Questions in the Era of Facebook. In SOUPS 2008: Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security. Pittsburgh, PA, July 2008

Other activities

• As a grad student, I represented the CS department at the UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly.
• I have done a little current-affairs and public policy writing. My father and I jointly wrote an op-ed piece about responses to Iranian Internet censorship that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. We also put together a paper about the possible legal and policy framework for cyber-conflict.

Short Biography (usable for talks)

Ariel Rabkin is a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in May 2012. His dissertation research focused on making software systems easier to configure and manage. He is also professionally interested in security and cloud computing. He is formerly from Cornell University (AB 2006, MEng 2007). He is a contributor to several open source projects, including Hadoop, the Chukwa log collection framework, and the JChord program analysis toolset.