Alice Zheng Microsoft Research One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 Tel: (425) 707-6603 Fax: (425) 936-7329 alicez at microsoft dot com

Bio

I am a researcher in the Knowledge Tools Group at Microsoft Research Redmond. Before joining Microsoft, I was a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University's Auton Lab and the Parallel Data Lab. I received my B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from U. C. Berkeley.

Research Interests

I'm interested in developing machine learning algorithms to aid systems administration and software development. Specific examples include performance and failure diagnosis for large systems and using statistical methods to automatically debug software.

Publications

• Heat-ray: Combating identity snowball attacks using machine learning, combinatorial optimization and attack graphs. John Dunagan, Alice X. Zheng, Daniel R. Simon. To appear in SOSP, 2009.
  
  
• Categorizing and Differencing System Behaviours. Raja R. Sambasivan, Alice X. Zheng, Eno Thereska, Gregory R. Ganger. Second Workshop on Hot Topics in Autonomic Computing. June 15, 2007. Jacksonville, FL. [pdf]
  
  
• 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. 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]
  
  
• Statistical Software Debugging, Alice X. Zheng. Doctoral dissertation, U.C. Berkeley, 2006. [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]
  
  
• 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. [ps] [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. [ps]
  
  
• 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. [ps]
  
  
• 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]
  
  
  [Bio] -- [Interests] -- [Publications]

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  Last modified: Tue Jan 22 17:01:09 PST 2008 Alice Zheng

  
  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