Ian Adams
I'm Ian Adams, a second year computer science grad student at University of California, Santa Cruz. I work with
Professor Ethan Miller in the Storage Systems Research Center (SSRC). My research interests are
in archival storage, and automatic management of distributed and peer-to-peer systems.
I may be contacted at iadams AT soe DOT ucsc DOT edu
Download Resume
Published Work
Ian Adams, Darrell D. E. Long, Ethan L. Miller, Shankar Pasupathy, Mark W. Storer, "Maximizing Efficiency By Trading Storage for Computation", Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud '09), June 2009.
Mark W. Storer, Kevin Greenan, Ian Adams, Ethan L. Miller, Darrell D. E. Long, Kaladhar Voruganti, "Logan: Automatic Management for Evolvable, Large-Scale, Archival Storage," Proceedings of the 2008 Petascale Data Storage Workshop (PDSW 08), November 2008.
Class and Unpublished Work
These are term projects from a variety of areas.
2-Tier Leadership Election
This work was done as a class project for CMPS 221: Advanced Operating Systems
Abstract: Current leadership election algorithms do not explicitly plan for the failure of the leader, and thus must do system wide elections each time a leader fails. To this end we propose
an algorithm that removes the need for system wide elections after a leadership failure. Our technique has an initial system wide election to elect a leader, and after the leader is
confirmed chooses subordinates with which to form a clique. After the failure of the leader a subordinate assumes the leaders position, and a new subordinate is selected to take
the vacated place.We demonstrate the feasibility of this new scheme with a simple message passing simulation and found that our scheme cuts in half the number of messages required
to select and announce a new leader after a leadership failure.
Downlod pdf file of 2-Tier leadership Election
FOP and AOP:Benefits, Pitfalls and Potential for interaction
This work was a class project from CMPS 290G under Jim Whitehead and was done with a fellow grad student, Sigmon Myers.
We examined the FOP and AOP programming paradigms and created a new modeling notation for
combining them. Additionally we created a small example of a combined FOP and AOP program using
the AspectJ and FeatureIDE tools.
Download pdf file of FOP Project Writeup
The Quantum 8-Tile Puzzle: A Variation on the Classic 8 Tile puzzle.
This work was done as a term project for the CMPS 240-Artificial Intelligence course under Robert Levinson.
For this project I examined methods for solving a variation of the 8-Tile puzzle wherein each tile and the space can be broken
up into smaller constituent pieces and swapped in small increments.
Download pdf of AI Project Writeup
Chance and Deception: Attacks That Rely On User Actions
This work was done as a class project for CMPS 223: Advanced Security
There are a variety of attacks that rely heavily on user
actions to succeed and dont require explicit installs or
on the part of the user. We examine 3 basic categories
of such attacks: Autorun attacks utilizing physical media
such as flash drives and CD-Roms, phishing attacks and
web based malware attacks that do drive-by-downloads.
Through surveying users we found the following: First,
many users are vulnerable to autorun based attacks, second,
substituting visually similar but semantically different
characters in hyperlinks provides a particularly effective
way of obfuscating a malicious websites hyperlink,
and third there appears to be an interesting logical disconnect
whereby web links advertised physically, but still of
unknown origin, are deemed more trustworthy than those
from an unknown email source.
We also attempted two simple proof of concept experiments
to demonstrate the feasibility of using physical advertising
through flyers and promotiona CDs as attack
vectors to guide users to malicious websites. Both experiments
failed, with a minimal number of hits to the flyer
advertised website, and none using the CDs.
Download pdf of CMPS 223 term project write-up
And for the interested persons, a little more on me personally...