Yang Zhang

About me

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I’m a graduate student working with Prof. Sam Madden in CSAIL at MIT doing research in high-scaling distributed database systems. I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2005 with a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

• Google (Buzz) profile: includes my Google Reader shared items—probably my most popular web property—as well as my blog entries, bookmarks, and tweets
• Blog
• Delicious Bookmarks: Mirrors my Google Bookmarks using gbookmark2delicious. I post articles, software, projects, services, homepages, and anything else of non-transient noteworthiness that I come across.
• Notes Wiki: My pile of notes, mostly on computer science.
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• GPG Key (MIT PKS entry)

Projects

Here are the (non-confidential) projects in which I’ve been involved. More details when I have time!

• Relational Cloud: database as a service that provides transparent scalability and partitioning that maximizes the locality of co-accessed data.
• Hedwig: a topic-based publish-subscribe wide-area messaging system designed as a replication service in distributed systems like Yahoo PNUTS.
• H-Store: a distributed main-memory relational database management system for on-line transaction processing workloads.
• Invirt: SIPB’s virtual machine management system. The name of the MIT instance of this service is XVM.
• Corey: an exokernel operating system for many-core architectures.
• WebTables: web-scale information retrieval over structured data.
• Scalable Resilient Overlay Networks: distributed algorithms and systems to enable RONs to scale to thousands of nodes.
• Collaborative Filtering Techniques for the NetFlix Prize: an exploration of low-rank matrix factorization, and of maximum-likelihood estimation of a flexible mixture model using EM.
• CarTel: vehicular sensor network platform that uses open Wi-Fi networks for data delivery opportunistically.
  • Intermittently Connected Embedded Database (ICEDB): adaptive continuous query processing system for environments with intermittent and highly variable network connectivity.
  • CafNet: delay-tolerant carry-and-forward networking stack that enables mobile data muling and provides reliable transport on intermittently connected networks.
• Guarded Atomic Actions for Haskell: a Haskell implementation of the parallelism paradigm known as guarded atomic actions, a form of transactional memory (used in Bluespec System Verilog).
• Data Triage in the TelegraphCQ stream query processing system: an adaptive architecture for load shedding.
• Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER): communications infrastructure based on delay-tolerant data muling, and spoken and written natural language computer interfaces.
• 802.15.4 Simulation Platform in TinyOS/TOSSIM.
• Recovery-Oriented Computing (ROC).
• Microsoft Search and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server.

Misc Software

These are various other software I’ve worked on, not exclusively associated with any particular project above.

• Assorted Projects: my code dump—find a bunch more programs here
• SRON: scalable resilient overlay system
• gbookmark2delicious: Python script to migrate/sync Google Bookmarks to del.icio.us
• JSamp: a simple sampling profiler for Java
• Simple Publications Manager: publication management web application
• ICFPC 2008 entry: with Byoung Kwon An, Chris Lesniewski-Laas, and Greg Little
• BattleCode 2008 entry: with Greg Little
• ICFPC 2007 entry: with Christophe Poucet, Dmitry Astapov, David Himmelstrup, Per Vognsen, Johannes Ahlmann, and Cale Gibbard

Papers

• David Sontag (MIT), Yang Zhang (MIT), Amar Phanishayee (CMU), David Andersen (CMU), David Karger (MIT). Scaling all-pairs overlay routing to the thousands. CoNEXT 2009.

• Silas Boyd-Wickizer (MIT), Haibo Chen (Fudan University), Rong Chen (Fudan University), Yandong Mao (Fudan University), Frans Kaashoek (MIT), Robert Morris (MIT), Aleksey Pesterev (MIT), Lex Stein (Microsoft Research Asia), Ming Wu (Microsoft Research Asia), Yuehua Dai (Xi’an Jiaotong University), Yang Zhang (MIT), Zheng Zhang (Microsoft Research Asia). Corey: an operating system for many cores. OSDI 2008. PDF

• Michael Cafarella, Alon Halevy, Daisy Wang, Eugene Wu, Yang Zhang. WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web. VLDB 2008. PDF

• Michael Cafarella, Nodira Khoussainova, Daisy Wang, Eugene Wu, Yang Zhang, Alon Halevy. Uncovering the Relational Web. WebDB 2008. PDF

• Yang Zhang. ICEDB: Intermittently-Connected Continuous Query Processing. MS Thesis, January 2008. PDF

• Yang Zhang, Bret Hull, Hari Balakrishnan, Samuel Madden. ICEDB: Intermittently-Connected Continuous Query Processing. ICDE 2007. PDF Slides PPTX

• Bret Hull, Vladimir Bychkovsky, Yang Zhang, Kevin Chen, Michel Goraczko, Allen Miu, Eugene Shih, Hari Balakrishnan, Samuel Madden. CarTel: A Distributed Mobile Sensor Computing System. Sensys 2006. PDF

MIT classes

• 6.829 Computer Networks (fall 2005)
• 6.864 Advanced Natural Language Processing (fall 2005)
• 6.431 Probabilistic Systems Analysis (spring 2006)
• 6.875 Cryptography and Cryptanalysis (spring 2006)
• 6.827 Implicit Parallel Programming (fall 2006)
• 6.867 Machine Learning (fall 2007)

Teaching

• 6.033 Computer Systems Engineering (TA, spring 2007)
• 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science (TA, fall 2008)