Alumni

(This list only includes students for whom I was a primary or co-advisor, not students on whose committees I served as non-advisor.)

PhD and Postdoc Alumni (* = co-advisor but not primary)

  1. Nate (Weinman) Gainsboro, PhD 2021, now at Figma. Improving Instruction of Programming Patterns with Faded Parsons Problems.
  2. Michael Driscoll, PhD 2018, now at Tesla, with Prof. Kathy Yelick. Domain-specific Optimization Techniques for Fast, Portable Image Reconstruction.
  3. Kristin Stephens-Martinez, PhD 2017, now Professor of the Practice at Duke University. Serving CS Formative Feedback on Assessments Using Simple and Practical Teacher-Bootstrapped Error Models.
  4. Kristal Curtis, PhD 2015, with Prof. Dave Patterson. Leveraging similar regions to improve genome data processing
  5. Erin Carson, PhD 2015, now faculty at NYU/Courant Institute, with Prof. Jim Demmel. Communication-avoiding Krylov subspace methods in theory and practice.*
  6. Beth Trushkowsky, PhD 2013, with Prof. Mike Franklin, now faculty at Harvey Mudd College.  Collecting data with the crowd.
  7. Michael Armbrust, PhD 2012, with Prof. Mike Franklin, now at DataBricks. Scale-Independent Relational Query Processing.
  8. Charles Sutton, postdoc 2012, now faculty at the University of Edinburgh
  9. Shoaib Kamil, PhD 2012, with Prof. Kathy Yelick, now Research Scientist at MIT CSAIL. Productive High Performance Parallel Programming with Auto-tuned Domain-Specific Embedded Languages
  10. Wei Xu, PhD 2010, with Prof. Dave Patterson, now Associate Professor and Assistant Dean of the “Yao Class” at Tsinghua University. Detecting Large Scale System Problems by Mining Console Logs
  11. Archana Ganapathi, PhD 2010, with Prof. Dave Patterson, now at Splunk. Predicting and Optimizing System Utilization and Performance via Statistical Machine Learning. Lead author of ”10-Year Influential Paper” at ICDE 2019  Predicting Multiple Metrics for Queries: Better Decisions Enabled by Machine Learning with co-authors from UC Berkeley and HP Labs.
  12. Peter Bodík, PhD 2010, now at Microsoft Research. Automating Datacenter Operations Using Machine Learning.
  13. *Rean Griffith, postdoc 2010, now at Illumio
  14. Steve Zhang, PhD 2007 (Stanford), now at Splunk. Capturing, Indexing and Retrieving System History
  15. Andy Huang, PhD 2005 (Stanford), now Dir. of Engineering for Google Maps. Design principles and techniques for enabling reboot-based administration in a persistent state storage system.
  16. Benjamin Ling, PhD 2005 (Stanford), now principal at Bling Capital. Manageability as a First Class Objective in Enterprise State Stores.
  17. Shankar Ponnekanti, PhD 2005 (Stanford), now at Google. Interoperation With Network Services.
  18. Emre Kıcıman, PhD 2005 (Stanford), now at Microsoft Research Redmond. Using Statistical Monitoring to Detect Failures in Internet Services. (This is one of the projects that inspired the creation of the RAD Lab.)
  19. James Cutler, PhD 2005 (Stanford),  now Associate Professor at University of Michigan. A framework for recovery-oriented, COTS-based ground station networks. 
  20. George Candea, PhD 2005 (Stanford), now Associate Professor at EPFL, Information Sciences Dept., and recipient of the first ACM SIGOPS Jochen Liedtke Memorial Award.  Crash-Only Software and Microreboot: A Design and Technique for Achieving High Availability in Frequently-Failing Software Systems

Masters’ Alumni

Academic Grandchildren

My first graduating Ph.D. student, George Candea, is now a Professor at EPFL running the Dependable Systems Lab (DSLAB). This photo was taken by Tonia Fox at the July 2018 DSLAB BBQ, where I got to meet many of my academic “grandchildren”.

Back row (L to R):

  1. Petr Zankov, software engineer at Cyberhaven
  2. Volodymyr (Vova) Kuznetsov (PhD 2016, CEO at Cyberhaven)
  3. Horatiu Jula (PhD 2011, Software Dev Tech Lead at Qnective, soon to be at Goldman Sachs)
  4. Loïc Gardiol, PocketCampus co-founder
  5. Silviu Andrica (PhD 2013, Area Product Owner at AdNovum)
  6. Rishabh Iyer (1st year PhD student)

Front & middle (L to R):

  1. Matteo Rizzo (MS student) [linkedin]
  2. Cristian (Cristi) Zamfir [linkedin ] (PhD 2013, COO at Cyberhaven) … with PhD Penguin
  3. Radu Banabic (PhD 2015, Head of Engineering at Cyberhaven) 
  4. George & Armando
  5. Arseniy Zaostrovnykh (4th year PhD student, co-advised with Katerina Argyraki)
  6. Jonas Wagner (PhD 2017, Software Engineer at Google)
  7. Solal Pirelli (1st year PhD student)

Missing from photo:

My academic genealogy

Armando Fox (UC Berkeley 2000)
 Eric Brewer (MIT 1994)
  William Weihl (MIT)
   Barbara Liskov (Stanford)
    John McCarthy (Princeton)
     Solomon Lefschetz (Clark University)
      William Story (U. Leipzig)
       C. Felix Klein (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-U. Bonn)
        Rudolf Lipschitz (U. Berlin)
         Gustav P.L. Dirichlet (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-U. Bonn)
          Simeon Poisson & Jean-Baptiste Fourier (co-advisors; École Polytechnique)
           Joseph Louis Lagrange [no dissertation, no advisor]
            Leonhard Euler (U. Basel)
             Johann Bernoulli (U. Basel)
              Jacob Bernoulli (U. Basel)
               Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (U. Altdorf 1666)
                Erhard Weigel (U. Leipzig 1650)
                 Phillip Müller (U. Leipzig 1604)
                  Christoph Meurer (U. Leipzig 1582)
                    Moritz Valentin Steinmetz (U. Leipzig 1550, 1567)
                     Georg Joachim von Leuchen Rheticus (Martin-Luther-U. Halle-Wittenberg 1535)
                      Nicolaus (Mikołaj Kopernik) Copernicus (U. di Bologna, U. degli Studi di Padova, U. Jagielloński, U. degli Studi di Ferrara 1499)