Alice Zheng Carnegie Mellon University 4720 Forbes Avenue CIC 2220G Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (412) 268-5903 (Office) (412) 268-6779 (Fax) alicez at cmu dot edu

I had a feeling once about mathematics -- that I saw it all. 
Depth beyond depth was revealed to me -- the Byss and the Abyss.  I saw -- 
as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show -- 
a quantity passing through infinity
and changing its sign from plus to minus. 
I saw exactly why it happened and why tergiversation was inevitable -- 
but it was after dinner and I let it go.
                -- Winston Churchill

Research Interests:

I'm interested in developing machine learning algorithms for problems in computer systems and software. Current projects include performance diagnosis in distributed file systems, efficient methods for traffic flow measurement on the internet, and modeling and analysis of social networks. I have also worked on statistical software debugging (locating bug-predicting program predicates using statistical analysis) and failure diagnosis on networked computer systems.

Brief Bio:

I received my bachelor and Ph.D. degrees from U. C. Berkeley; my Ph.D. adviser was Prof. Michael Jordan. For the next two years, I was a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University, working first in the Auton Lab with Andrew Moore, then in the Parallel Data Lab with Greg Ganger. I am now a researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA.

Publications:

• Modeling the relative fitness of storage, Michael Mesnier, Matthew Wachs, Raja R. Sambasivan, Alice Zheng, Gregory R. Ganger. International Conference on Measuremen and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS 2007). San Diego, CA. June 12-14, 2007. ACM. Awarded Best Paper. [pdf]
  
  
• A Generative Model for Dynamic Contextual Friendship Networks, Alice X. Zheng and Anna Goldenberg. CMU tech report, 2006. [pdf]
  
  
• Exploratory Study of a New Model for Evolving Networks, Anna Goldenberg and Alice X. Zheng. To appear in Proceedings of the Workshop on Statistical Network Analysis: Models, Issues, and New Directions at ICML-06. [pdf]
  
  
• Statistical Debugging: Simultaneous Isolation of Multiple Bugs, Alice X. Zheng, Michael I. Jordan, Ben Liblit, Mayur Naik, Alex Aiken. Proceedings of ICML-06. [pdf]
  
  
• Efficient Test Selection in Active Diagnosis via Entropy Approximation, Alice X. Zheng, Irina Rish, Alina Beygelzimer. Proceedings of UAI-05. [pdf] [ps]
  
  
• Scalable Statistical Bug Isolation, Ben Liblit, Mayur Naik, Alice X. Zheng, Alex Aiken, Michael I. Jordan. ACM SIGPLAN 2005 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2005). [pdf] [ps]
  
  
• Entropy Approximation for Active Fault Diagnosis, Alice X. Zheng, Irina Rish, Alina Beygelzimer. IBM Technical Report RC23441, 2004. [pdf]
  
  
• Public Deployment of Cooperative Bug Isolation, Ben Liblit, Mayur Naik, Alice X. Zheng, Alex Aiken, Michael I. Jordan. Workshop on Remote Analysis and Measurement of Software Systems (RAMSS), 2004. [pdf]
  
  
• Failure Diagnosis Using Decision Trees, Mike Chen, Alice X. Zheng, Jim Lloyd, Michael I. Jordan, Eric Brewer. International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC-04), 2004. [pdf][ps]
  
  
• Statistical Debugging of Sampled Programs, Alice X. Zheng, Michael I. Jordan, Ben Liblit, Alex Aiken. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16, 2003. [pdf]
  
  
• Sampling User Executions for Bug Isolation, Ben Liblit, Alex Aiken, Alice X. Zheng, Michael I. Jordan. Workshop on Remote Analysis and Measurement of Software Systems (RAMSS), May 9, 2003. [pdf]
  
  
• Bug Isolation via Remote Program Sampling, Ben Liblit, Alex Aiken, Alice X. Zheng, Michael I. Jordan. ACM SIGPLAN 2003 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2003). [pdf] [ps]
  
  
• Learning a Gaussian Process Prior for Automatically Generating Music Playlists, John C. Platt, Christopher J.C. Burges, Steven Swenson, Christopher Weare, Alice Zheng. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14, 2001. [postscript] [pdf]
  
  
• Link analysis, eigenvectors, and stability, Andrew Y. Ng, Alice X. Zheng, Michael I. Jordan. Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-01), 2001. [postscript]
  
  
• Stable methods for link analysis, Andrew Y. Ng, Alice X. Zheng, Michael I. Jordan. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Internation ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2001) , 2001. [postscript]
  
  
• Fast Multiple Antenna Differential Decoding, Kenneth L. Clarkson, Wim Sweldens, Alice Zheng. IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. 49, Nr. 2, pp. 253-261, 2001. [compressed postscript]
  
  

Miscellaneous Links:

• As a class project for CS294, Statistical Learning Theory, Fall 2000, I applied LLE (Locally Linear Embedding) [Roweis & Saul, 2000] to sequences of human walking video images. Here's a report of my findings: [ps].
• A good linear algebra primer.
• Some pictures (mostly taken by me).
• Excellent quotes.
• A delightful read.
• A 36 hour adrenaline rush.