Haifeng YU
Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
School of Computing
National University of Singapore

Mailing address:
Block S14, #06-10
3 Science Drive 2
National University of Singapore
Singapore 117543


[Curriculum Vitae] (Accurate as of May 2006)
 

Research Interests

Distributed Systems, Peer-to-Peer Systems, Fault-tolerance, Distributed Computing, and Distributed Systems Security.
 

Research Opportunities (email me to apply)

Opening for Post-doc Researcher: An opening is available for Post-doc Researcher (Ph.D. required) in the general area of distributed algorithms and distributed systems. The duration is expected to be two years. The salary is highly-dependent on qualifications, and is internationally competitive (e.g., compared to Europe and US).

Opening for Research Assistant: Openings are available for Research Assistant (Bachelor's required) in the general area of distributed systems and distributed algorithms. The minimum length is one year, and can be extended.

Opening for SoC Ph.D. students seeking advisors: I am actively recruiting Ph.D. students to collaborate on world-class distributed systems and algorithms research. I automatically offer all my Ph.D. students (subject to satisfying progress) either GSR-ship or RA-ship, which will provide each student an additional and extra ~S$1000 stipend per month above the standard SoC scholarship.
 

Experience

2006 to present: Assistant Professor, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

2003 to 2006: Research Scientist, Intel Research Pittsburgh, USA.

2003 to 2006: Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, USA.

2002 to 2003: Visiting Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, Duke University, USA.

September 2002 Ph.D. Computer Science Department, Duke University, USA.
Ph.D. Thesis: Wide-Area Replication Using Continuous Consistency: Theory and Practice
Nominated for ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

December 1999 M.S. Computer Science Department, Duke University, USA.
M.S. Thesis: DRAM-page Based Prediction and Prefetching

June 1997 B.E. Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, P.R.China.
Undergraduate Thesis: Thread-based Fault-tolerant Distributed Shared Memory
 

Teaching

• AY 2008/2009 Semester 2: CS4231 Parallel and Distributed Algorithms
• AY 2008/2009 Semester 1: CS5223 Distributed Systems
• AY 2007/2008 Semester 2: CS5321 Network Security and Management
• AY 2007/2008 Semester 1: CS5223 Distributed Systems
• AY 2006/2007 Semester 2: CS4231 Parallel and Distributed Algorithms

• ICDCS'09 (International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems)
• ICDE'09 (International Conference on Data Engineering)
• DISC'08 (International Symposium on Distributed Computing)
• SIGMETRICS'08 (International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems)
• DSN'08 (International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks)
• STC'07 (ACM Workshop on Scalable Trusted Computing)
• IPTPS'07 (International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems)
• STC'06 (ACM Workshop on Scalable Trusted Computing)
• PODC'06 (ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing)
• DSN'06 (International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks)
• PODC'05 (ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing)

• Haifeng Yu, Michael Kaminsky, Phillip B. Gibbons, and Abraham Flaxman, "SybilGuard: Defending Against Sybil Attacks via Social Networks." IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), Volume 16, Issue 3, pp. 576-589, June 2008.

• Haifeng Yu, "Defending Against Sybil Attacks via Social Networks." One-hour talk I gave on SybilLimit and SybilGuard in May 2008. [Talk slides]

• Haifeng Yu, Phillip B. Gibbons, Michael Kaminsky, and Feng Xiao, "SybilLimit: A Near-Optimal Social Network Defense against Sybil Attacks." Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland'08), May 2008. (Acceptance rate: 28 out of 249). [PDF]. Full version available as Technical Report [TRA2/08]. [PDF]. [Conference talk slides]

• Haifeng Yu, Phillip B. Gibbons, and Michael Kaminsky, "Brief Announcement: Toward an Optimal Social Network Defense against Sybil Attacks." Proceedings of the 26th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC'07), Auguest 2007. [PDF].

• Haifeng Yu, "Brief Announcement: DoS-Resilient Secure Aggregation Queries in Sensor Networks." Proceedings of the 26th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC'07), August 2007. [PDF].

• Haifeng Yu and Phillip B. Gibbons, "Optimal Inter-Object Correlation When Replicating for Availability." Proceedings of the 26th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC'07), August 2007. (Acceptance rate: 32 out of 204). [PDF]. [Talk Slides].

• Jeffrey Pang, Phillip B. Gibbons, Michael Kaminsky, Srinivasan Seshan, and Haifeng Yu, "Defragmenting DHT-based Distributed File Systems." Proceedings of International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'07), June 2007. (Acceptance rate: 71 out of 528) [PDF]. Full version available as Technical Report [CMU-CS-07-115]. [PDF].

• Amit Manjhi, Phillip B. Gibbons, Anastassia Ailamaki, Charles Garrod, Bruce M. Maggs, Todd C. Mowry, Christopher Olston, Anthony Tomasic, and Haifeng Yu, "Invalidation Clues for Database Scalability Services." Proceedings of International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE'07), April 2007. (Acceptance rate: 122 out of 659) [PDF].

• Haifeng Yu, Michael Kaminsky, Phillip B. Gibbons, and Abraham Flaxman, "SybilGuard: Defending Against Sybil Attacks via Social Networks." Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Conference , September 2006. (Acceptance rate: 37 out of 298) [PDF]. [Talk slides]. Full version available as Technical Report [IRP-TR-06-01]. Paper's SIGCOMM'06 public review by Thomas Anderson. [PDF]. (This paper is fast tracked to Transcations on Networking by SIGCOMM).

• Haifeng Yu, Phillip B. Gibbons, and Suman Nath, "Availability of Multi-Object Operations." Proceedings of the Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'06) , May 2006. Awarded Best Paper. (Acceptance rate: 28 out of 110) [PDF]. Full version available as Technical Report [IRP-TR-05-53]. [PDF].

• Suman Nath, Haifeng Yu, Phillip B. Gibbons, and Srinivasan Seshan, "Subtleties in Tolerating Correlated Failures in Wide-area Storage Systems." Proceedings of the Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'06) , May 2006. (Acceptance rate: 28 out of 110) [PDF]. Full version available as Technical Report [IRP-TR-05-52]. [PDF].

• Scott Garriss, Michael Kaminsky, Michael Freedman, Brad Karp, David Mazieres, and Haifeng Yu, "RE: Reliable Email." Proceedings of the Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'06) , May 2006. (Acceptance rate: 28 out of 110) [PDF].

• Haifeng Yu, "Signed Quorum Systems." Distributed Computing, Volume 18, Number 4 (Special issue for PODC'04), March 2006. [PDF].

• Haifeng Yu and Amin Vahdat, "The Costs and Limits of Availability for Replicated Services." ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), Volume 24, Issue 1, February 2006.

• Haifeng Yu and Amin Vahdat, "Consistent and Automatic Replica Regeneration." ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS), Volume 1, Number 1, February 2005. [PDF].

• Haifeng Yu and Phillip B. Gibbons, "MOAT: A Multi-Object Assignment Toolkit."  OSDI'04 Work in Progress Presentation, December 2004. [PowerPoint]

• Praveen Yalagandula, Suman Nath, Haifeng Yu, Phillip B. Gibbons, and Srinivasan Seshan, "Beyond Availability: Towards a Deeper Understanding of Machine Failure Characteristics in Large Distributed Systems." Proceedings of the Workshop on Real, Large Distributed Systems (WORLDS '04) , December 2004. [PDF]. Full version available as Technical Report [IRP-TR-04-14]. [PDF].

• Haifeng Yu, "Signed Quorum Systems." Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC'04), July 2004. (Acceptance rate: 39 out of 224) [PDF]. Full version available as Technical Report [IRP-TR-04-04]. [PDF].

• Haifeng Yu and Amin Vahdat, "Consistent and Automatic Replica Regeneration." Proceedings of the Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'04) , March 2004. (Acceptance rate: 27 out of 118) [PDF]. Full version available as Technical Report [IRP-TR-04-01]. [PDF]. Presentation slides in NSDI'04 [PDF].

• Haifeng Yu, "Overcoming the Majority Barrier in Large-Scale Systems." Proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC'03) , October 2003. (Acceptance rate: 25 out of 90) [PDF]. Full version available as Technical Report [CS-2003-05]. [PDF].

• Roger Barga, David Lomet, Stelios Paparizos, Haifeng Yu, and Sirish Chandrasekaran, "Persistent Applications via Automatic Recovery." Proceedings of the 17th International Database Engineering and Applications Symposium (IDEAS'03), July 2003.

• Haifeng Yu, " Roadmap of TACT publications ." June 2003. Read this first if you do not know which TACT paper you are looking for.

• Haifeng Yu and Amin Vahdat, "Design and Evaluation of a Conit-based Continuous Consistency Model for Replicated Services. " ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), August 2002. [PDF]. This paper is the extended/combined version of the ICDCS'01 and OSDI'00 papers.

• Haifeng Yu and Amin Vahdat, "Minimal Replication Cost for Availability." Proceedings of the 21st ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC'02), July 2002. [PDF]. Full version available as Technical Report CS-2002-04. [PDF]. This paper discusses replica placement to achieve optimal availability under the TACT continuous consistency model.

• Haifeng Yu and Amin Vahdat, "The Costs and Limits of Availability for Replicated Services." Proceedings of the 18th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'01), October 2001. (Acceptance rate: 17 out of 85) [PDF]. This paper derives the theoretical availability upper bound, and then compares the availability of real protocols against the upper bound. [Full version of the SOSP'01 paper ]. The full version contains all the details on the upper bound theory.

• Haifeng Yu, Kevin Walsh and Amin Vahdat, "Truth in Availability Advertising."  SOSP Poster Session, October 2001. [PDF]

• Haifeng Yu and Amin Vahdat, "Combining Generality and Practicality in a Conit-Based Continuous Consistency Model for Wide-Area Replication." Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'01), April 2001. (Acceptance rate: 72 out of 212) [Postscript], [PDF]. Full version available as Technical Report CS-2000-09. [Postscript], [PDF]. This paper discusses the formal TACT continuous consistency model and its properties.

• Haifeng Yu and Amin Vahdat, "Design and Evaluation of a Continuous Consistency Model for Replicated Services." Proceedings of the Fourth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'00), October 2000. (Acceptance rate: 24 out of 111) [Postscript], [PDF]. This paper discusses the TACT prototype design, implementation and evaluation.

• Haifeng Yu and Amin Vahdat, "Availability of Replicated Internet Services as a Function of Consistency: Theory and Practice."  OSDI Work in Progress Presentation, October 2000. [Powerpoint]

• Haifeng Yu and Amin Vahdat, "Efficient Numerical Error Bounding for Replicated Network Services." 26th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB'00), September 2000. (Acceptance rate: 53 out of 351) [Postscript], [PDF]. Full version available as Technical Report CS-2000-08. [Postscript], [PDF]. This paper proposes practical consistency protocols to bound numerical error in the TACT consistency model.

• Haifeng Yu and Amin Vahdat, "Building Replicated Internet Services Using TACT: A Toolkit for Tunable Availability and Consistency Tradeoffs." Second International Workshop on Advanced Issues of E-Commerce and Web-based Information Systems (WECWIS'00), June 2000.

• Haifeng Yu and Gershon Kedem, "DRAM-Page Based Prediction and Prefetching." International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD'00), September 2000.

• Haifeng Yu and Amin Vahdat, "TACT: Tunable Availability and Consistency Tradeoffs for Replicated Internet Services."  SOSP Work in Progress Presentation, December 1999. [PDF]

• ACM Transactions on Storage

• IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

• IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing

• IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems

• IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man,and Cybernetics, Part A

• Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing

• World Wide Web Journal

• The VLDB Journal

• "Robust Distributed Systems despite Failure Correlation," Invited talk at UC San Diego, November 2005.

• "Availability of Multi-Object Operations," Invited talk at HP Labs, December 2004.

• "Availability of Multi-Object Operations" Invited talk at Intel Research Berkeley, December 2004.

• "Consistent and Automatic Replica Regeneration" Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), March 2004.

• "Consistent and Automatic Replica Regeneration" Invited talk at UT Austin, March 2004.

• "Consistent and Automatic Replica Regeneration" Invited talk at UC San Diego, March 2004.

• "Minimal Replication Cost for Availability." 21st Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), July 2002.

• "Wide-Area Replication Using Continuous Consistency: Theory and Practice." Invited talk at MIT, June 2002.

• "TACT: Continuous Consistency for Wide-Area Replication." Invited talk at University of Texas, Austin, February 2002.

• "The Costs and Limits of Availability for Replicated Services." 18th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), October 2001. [Slides].

• "TACT: Continuous Consistency for Wide-Area Replication." Invited talk at Microsoft Research and University of Washington, Seattle, August 2001.

• "Combining Generality and Practicality in a Conit-Based Continuous Consistency Model for Wide-Area Replication." 21st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, April 2001.

• "Building Replicated Internet Services Using TACT: A Toolkit for Tunable Availability and Consistency Tradeoffs." 2nd International Workshop on Advanced Issues of E-Commerce and Web-based Information Systems, June 2000.