Ariel ("Ari") Rabkin Graduate Student Researcher 465 Soda Hall Berkeley CA, 94720.

I'm a fifth year PhD student at Berkeley, working in the AMP lab advised by Randy Katz. I expect to graduate in May 2012. My current research interest is 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, or at eecs.berkeley.edu.

News!

I am moving back to the East Coast over the summer. Currently intending to leave Berkeley at the end of May. Here is the list of what I am selling/giving away.

My dissertation has been filed. It is posted here.

Research

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

• Configuration Debugging
  My dissertation topic is using program analysis to understand software configuration. I'm particularly looking 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.

• Ariel Rabkin, Charles Reiss, Randy Katz, and David Patterson. Experiences Teaching MapReduce in the Clouds. To appear at SIGCSE Technical Symposium (SIGCSE 2012), Raleigh, North Carolina, March 2012.
• Ariel Rabkin and Randy Katz. Precomputing possible configuration error diagnoses. 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. 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

• I represent the CS department at the UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly. If you're interested in succeeding me in this post, please let me know. It's a surprisingly rewarding post. You get to learn how the university works, you get to meet other students outside the department, and you have a chance to hear from and talk to senior UC administrators.
• 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.

Short Biography (usable for talks)

Ariel Rabkin is scheduled to receive his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in May 2012. His dissertation research focuses 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.