Systems, Networking, and Cybersecurity
Ph.D. Qualifier Exam
Spring 2021
Examining Faculty
Dr. Bimal Viswanath (Chair)
Dr. Bo Ji
Dr. Xun (Steve) Jian
Registered Students
Send email to vbimal@cs.vt.edu to be registered. Your participation in the survey did not register you,
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List of students taking the exam:
- Miles Frantz
- Muhammad Laghari
- Redwan Ibne Seraj Khan
- Gregory Kildow
- Wenjia Song
Early Withdrawal Policy
Once students have notified the Computer Science Department of their
intention to take the Systems and Networking Ph.D. Qualifier Exam, they
may withdraw from taking the exam at any point prior to the public
release of the exam questions. Once the exam questions are released,
the exam is considered "in progress" and withdrawal is prohibited.
Students with questions about this policy should contact the exam chair
directly.
Academic Integrity
Discussions among students of the papers identified for the System's
Qualifier are reasonable up until the date the exam is released
publicly. Once the exam questions are released, we expect all such
discussions will cease as students are required to conduct their own
work entirely to answer the qualifier questions. This examination is
conducted under the University's
Graduate Honor System Code . Students are encouraged to draw from
other papers than those listed in the exam to the extent that this
strengthens their arguments. However, the answers submitted must
represent the sole and complete work of the student submitting the
answers. Material substantially derived from other works, whether
published in print or found on the web, must be explicitly and fully
cited. Note that your grade will be more strongly influenced by
arguments you make rather than arguments you quote or cite.
Exam Schedule
11/20/2020: this web page created.
12/01/2020: release of reading list
12/07/2020: deadline for students to commit to exams
01/06/2021: release of written exam
01/20/2021 (11:59PM): student solutions to written exam due
End of Jan/Beginning of Feb: oral exams.
Reading List
Motivation for and Evaluation of the First Tensor Processing Unit,
N. Jouppi, C. Young, N. Patil and D. Patterson.
IEEE Micro, 2018.
A Hardware Accelerator for Tracing Garbage Collection,
M. Maas, K. Asanović and J. Kubiatowicz.
ISCA, 2018.
MicroScope: enabling microarchitectural replay attacks,
Dimitrios Skarlatos, Mengjia Yan, Bhargava Gopireddy, Read Sprabery, Josep Torrellas, and Christopher W. Fletcher.
ISCA, 2019.
Fresher content or smoother playback? a brownian-approximation framework for scheduling real-time wireless video streams,
Ping-Chun Hsieh, Xi Liu, and I-Hong Hou.
ACM MobiHoc, 2020.
On the Power of Randomization for Scheduling Real-Time Traffic in Wireless Networks.,
Christos Tsanikidis and Javad Ghaderi.
IEEE INFOCOM, 2020.
Rateless Codes for Near-Perfect Load Balancing in Distributed Matrix-Vector Multiplication,
Ankur Mallick, Malhar Chaudhari, Utsav Sheth, Ganesh Palanikumar, and Gauri Joshi.
ACM SIGMETRICS, 2020.
TESSERACT: Eliminating Experimental Bias in Malware Classification across Space and Time,
Feargus Pendlebury, Fabio Pierazzi, Roberto Jordaney, Johannes Kinder, and Lorenzo Cavallaro.
USENIX Security, 2019.
High Precision Open-World Website Fingerprinting,
Tao Wang.
IEEE S&P, 2020.
Using GANs for sharing networked timeseries data: Challenges, Initial Promise, and Open Questions,
Zinan Lin, Alankar Jain, Chen Wang, Giulia Fanti, and Vyas Sekar.
IMC, 2020.
Written Questions
Each year, the Systems, Networking, and Cybersecurity faculty
publishes a reading list of papers by the end of the fall semester and
a list of integrative research questions to answer within a 10--14 day
period. The deadline for students to provide written answers to the
research questions is usually within first few weeks of the spring
semester. The goal of the written exam is to evaluate the
student’s ability to creatively integrate content from the
constituent systems research areas.
2021 Exam Questions
(released on: January 6, 2021)
Please email your solutions document (in PDF format) to Dr. Viswanath by January 20, 11:59PM ET.
Oral Exam
The written exam will be followed by an oral exam, where the student is
expected to defend his/her solutions. Unless specifically requested,
the student is not expected to make a formal presentation. In the oral
exams, faculty may ask questions about any paper in the reading list to
assess the student’s understanding of the subject. Oral exams
will be scheduled individually for each student.
Assessment
After the oral examination, the examining faculty will determine the
student's score for the examination process. The score is between 0
– 3 points, depending on the student's performance on both the
written and oral components. These points may be applied toward the
total score of 6 points necessary to qualify for the Ph.D. The
assessment criteria, as defined by GPC, are as follows:
- 3: Excellent performance, beyond that normally expected or
required for a PhD student.
- 2: Performance appropriate for PhD-level work. Prime factors for
assessment include being able to distinguish good work from poor work,
and explain why; being able to synthesize the body of work into an
assessment of the state-of-the-art on a problem (as indicated by the
collection of papers); being able to identify open problems and suggest
future work.
- 1: While the student adequately understands the content of the
work, the student is deficient in one or more of the factors listed for
assessment under score value of 2. A score of 1 is the minimum
necessary for an MS-level pass.
- 0: Student's performance is such that the committee considers the
student unable to do PhD-level work in Computer Science.
Past Exams
Spring 2020 exam
Spring 2019 exam
Spring 2017 exam
Spring 2016 exam
Spring 2015 exam
Spring 2014 exam
Spring
2013 exam
Spring 2012
exam
Spring 2011
exam
Spring 2010 exam
Spring 2009
exam
Spring 2008
exam
Spring
2007 exam
Spring
2006 exam