I am a graduate student in the Fifth-year Master's in Computer Science program at Carnegie Mellon University. I recently completed my Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, with an additional major in Economics.

My research advisor is Prof. Priya Narasimhan, whom I worked with for my Senior Honors Thesis for my Bachelor's in Computer Science.

Problem Diagnosis in Distributed Systems (Jun '07 - Present)

Distributed systems have become ubiquitous in today's Internet-enabled world. With the growing scale of distributed systems, problems in these increasingly large systems have also become increasingly difficult to detect. We focus on two aspects of problem diagnosis: fault localization--identifying nodes in a distrbuted system which failed, and root-cause diagnosis, which seeks to find the cause of the failure.

We are interested in using available information that can be readily extracted from running systems in production environments that do not require invasive code modification nor instrumentation, and which do not impose expensive performance penalties and overheads on the operation of the system.

Dynamic Upgrades in Distributed Systems (Jan '07 - Jun'07)

Software upgrades are a significant source of planned downtimes in enterprise distributed systems. Many software upgrades overrun time and cost budgets, and even leave software systems in unusable states after the upgrade. A key contributing factor to the complication of upgrades is the complexity of the dependencies amongst multiple components in a large distributed system.

The goal of this work is to devise a method of carrying out an upgrade of a software system from one software to a different software system with possibly completely different semantics in a dependency-agnostic fashion, while keeping both the old and the new systems operating concurrently. Our aim was to minimize the downtime and dependency-induced mistakes associated with software upgrades.

J. Tan, and P. Narasimhan. RAMS and BlackSheep: Inferring white-box application behavior using black-box techniques. Technical Report CMU-PDL-08-103, Carnegie Mellon University Parallel Data Laboratory, May 2008.

T. Dumitras, J. Tan, Z. Gho and P. Narasimhan. No More HotDependencies: Toward Dependency-Agnostic Upgrades in Distributed Systems. In Workshop on Hot Topics in System Dependability (HotDep), Edinburgh, Scotland, Jun 2007.

I was Senior Staff Photographer at The Tartan, Carnegie Mellon's student-run weekly broadsheet newspaper with a circulation of 5000, from August 2005 to August 2007. Here are some of the photos I have taken while on staff at The Tartan.

Currently, I am on the Photo Staff of The Thistle, Carnegie Mellon's student-run, student-published yearbook.

I also drop by on the many fun activities organised by the Singapore Students' Association, and catch up with fellow Singaporeans.

Jiaqi Tan
Office: CIC 2224C
4720 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Email: jiaqit AT andrew DOT cmu DOT edu
Tel: (412) 268-9380