Muhammad Ali Gulzar

Assistant Professor in Computer Science

I am an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2020. I was also the recipient of Google Ph.D. Fellowship 2017-20.

The vision of my research is to build systems that improve developer productivity through automated debugging and testing for big data analytics. Broadly, I am interested in designing novel tool support for data-centric software development. My approach combines insights from software engineering, distributed systems, and databases. My past work has focused on interactive and automated debugging for Apache Spark, symbolic execution based test generation for dataflow programs, and performance debugging in Apache Spark.

gulzar cs.vt.edu | Google Scholar | Github | LinkedIn

Awards

2019-20 Outstanding Computer Science Graduating Ph.D. Student

2019-20 Northrop Grumman Outstanding Computer Science Graduate Student Research Award

Google PhD Fellowship in Programming Languages and Software Engineering 2017-20

ACM Student Research Competition Winner :trophy: ICSE 2018

NSF I-Corps Grant for Technology Transfer

“The Best of VLDB 2016” Award

Publications

2020

  1. [SOCC 2020] Influence-Based Provenance for Dataflow Applications with Taint Propagation
    Teoh, Jason, Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, and Kim, Miryung
    In The 11th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 2020
    12 Pages. Full Paper. 24.4% Acceptance Rate
  2. [ASE 2020] BigFuzz: Efficient Fuzz Testing for Data Analytics using Framework Abstraction
    Zhang, Qian, Wang, Jiyuan, Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Padhye, Rohan, and Kim, Miryung
    In The 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering 2020
    12 Pages. Full Paper. 22.5% Acceptance Rate
  3. [ESEC/FSE 2020] Is Neuron Coverage a Meaningful Measure for Testing Deep Neural Networks?
    Harel-Canada, Fabrice, Wang, Lingxiao, Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Gu, Quanquan, and Kim, Miryung
    In The 28th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering 2020
    12 Pages. Full Paper. 28.0% Acceptance Rate
  4. [ICSE 2020] HeteroRefactor: Refactoring for Heterogeneous Computing with FPGA
    Lau*, Jason, Sivaraman*, Aishwarya, Zhang*, Qian, Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Cong, Jason, and Kim, Miryung
    In 2020 IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering 2020
    13 Pages. Full Paper. 20.9% Acceptance Rate
  5. [ICSE Demo 2020] BigTest: Symbolic Execution Based Systematic Test Generation Tool for Apache Spark
    Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Musuvathi, Madan, and Kim, Miryung
    In Proceedings of the 2020 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering 2020
    4 Pages. Demonstration Paper. 33.3% Acceptance Rate

2019

  1. [ESEC/FSE 2019] White-box Testing of Big Data Analytics with Complex User-defined Functions
    Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Mardani, Shaghayegh, Musuvathi, Madanlal, and Kim, Miryung
    In Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering 2019
    12 Pages. Full Paper. 24.4% Acceptance Rate
  2. [SoCC 2019] PerfDebug: Performance Debugging of Computation Skew in Dataflow Systems
    Teoh, Jason, Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Xu, Harry, and Kim, Miryung
    In Proceedings of the 2019 Symposium on Cloud Computing 2019
    12 Pages. Full Paper. 24.8% Acceptance Rate
  3. [ICSE SEIP 2019] Perception and Practices of Differential Testing
    Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Zhu, Yongkang, and Han, Xiaofeng
    In Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice 2019
    10 Pages. Full Paper. 22.2% Acceptance Rate

2018

  1. [ICDCS 2018] LogLens: A Real-Time Log Analysis System
    Debnath, Biplob, Solaimani, Mohiuddin, Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Arora, Nipon, Lumezanu, Cristian, Xu, Jianwu, Zong, Bo, Zhang, Hui, Jiang, Guofei, and Khan, Latifur
    In 2018 IEEE 38th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) 2018
    11 Pages. Full Paper. 20.6% Acceptance Rate
  2. [VLDB Journal 2018] Adding Data Provenance Support to Apache Spark
    Interlandi, Matteo, Ekmekji, Ari, Shah, Kshitij, Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Tetali, Sai Deep, Kim, Miryung, Millstein, Todd, and Condie, Tyson
    The VLDB Journal 2018
    21 Pages. VLDB Journal Paper.
  3. [ESEC/FSE Demo 2018] BigSift: Automated Debugging of Big Data Analytics in Data-intensive Scalable Computing
    Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Wang, Siman, and Kim, Miryung
    In Proceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering 2018
    4 Pages. Demonstration Paper. 38.8% Acceptance Rate
  4. [ICSE ACM Student Research Competition 2018] Interactive and Automated Debugging for Big Data Analytics ( ACM Student Research Competition Gold Medal Winner)
    Gulzar, Muhammad Ali
    In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceeedings 2018
    3 Pages. Short Paper.

2017

  1. [SoCC 2017] Automated Debugging in Data-intensive Scalable Computing
    Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Interlandi, Matteo, Han, Xueyuan, Li, Mingda, Condie, Tyson, and Kim, Miryung
    In Proceedings of the 2017 Symposium on Cloud Computing 2017
    15 Pages. Full Paper. 23.6% Acceptance Rate
  2. [SIGMOD Demo 2017] Debugging Big Data Analytics in Spark with BigDebug
    Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Interlandi, Matteo, Condie, Tyson, and Kim, Miryung
    In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Management of Data 2017
    4 Pages. Demonstration Paper. 34% Acceptance Rate

2016

  1. [ICSE 2016] BigDebug: Debugging Primitives for Interactive Big Data Processing in Spark
    Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Interlandi, Matteo, Yoo, Seunghyun, Tetali, Sai, Condie, Tyson, Millstein, Todd, and Kim, Miryung
    In 2016 IEEE/ACM 38th International Conference on Software Engineering 2016
    12 Pages. Full Paper. 19.1% Acceptance Rate
  2. [SoCC 2016] Optimizing Interactive Development of Data-Intensive Applications
    Interlandi, Matteo, Tetali, Sai Deep, Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Noor, Joseph, Condie, Tyson, Kim, Miryung, and Millstein, Todd
    In Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 2016
    13 Pages. Full Paper. 25.1% Acceptance Rate
  3. [VLDB 2016] Titian: Data Provenance Support in Spark ( The "Best of VLDB" Paper)
    Interlandi, Matteo, Shah, Kshitij, Tetali, Sai Deep, Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Yoo, Seunghyun, Kim, Miryung, Millstein, Todd, and Condie, Tyson
    Proc. VLDB Endow. 2016
    12 Pages. Full Paper. 21.2% Acceptance Rate
  4. [HotCloud 2016] Interactive Debugging for Big Data Analytics
    Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Han, Xueyuan, Interlandi, Matteo, Mardani, Shaghayegh, Tetali, Sai Deep, Millstein, Todd, and Kim, Miryung
    In 8th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud 16) 2016
    7 Pages. Workshop Paper. 30.8% Acceptance Rate
  5. [ESEC/FSE Demo 2016] BigDebug: Interactive Debugger for Big Data Analytics in Apache Spark
    Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Interlandi, Matteo, Condie, Tyson, and Kim, Miryung
    In Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering 2016
    5 Pages. Demonstration Paper. 40.1% Acceptance Rate

2015

  1. [PACIS 2015] A Classification Based Framework to Predict Viral Threads
    Sharif, Hashim, Ismail, Saad, Farooqi, Shehroze, Khan, Mohammad Taha, Gulzar, Muhammad Ali, Lakhani, Hasnain, Zaffar, Fareed, and Abbasi, Ahmed
    In The Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) 2015
    13 Pages. Full Paper.

Updates

Aug 9, 2020 I joined the computer science department at Virginia Tech as an assistant professor.
Aug 8, 2020 Our work on influence-based data prpovenance is accepted to SoCC 2020. Congrats Jason!
Aug 4, 2020 Our work on fuzz testing for data analytics is accepted to ASE 2020. Congrats Qian!
May 31, 2020 I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA. Ph.D. Dissertation.
May 31, 2020 I am honored to receive the 2019-20 Outstanding Computer Science Graduating Ph.D. Student from the computer science department at UCLA.
May 31, 2020 I am honored to receive the 2019-20 Northrop Grumman Outstanding Computer Science Graduate Student Research Award from the computer science department at UCLA.
May 31, 2020 Our work on evaluating neuron coverage as a testing criterion for DNNs is accepted to FSE 2020. Congrats Fabrice!
Jan 31, 2020 Our demonstration paper on test generation for big data analytics is accepted to ICSE DEMO 2020.
Dec 31, 2019 Our work on code refactoring for FPGA is accepted to ICSE 2020. Congrats Jason, Aish, and Qian!
Jul 23, 2019 Our work on performance debugging of dataflow applications is accepted to SoCC 2019. Congrats Jason!
Apr 9, 2019 Our work on symbolic-execution based testing of big data analytics is accepted to ESEC/FSE 2019.
Dec 9, 2018 Our paper on practices of Differential Testing at Google got accpeted to ICSE SEIP 2019. I contributed towards this work as an intern at Google in 2018.
Sep 30, 2018 My work on a real time log analysis framework at NEC Labs America got accepted to ICDCS 2018.
Sep 30, 2018 We are awarded $50K NSF I-Corps grant for technology transfer of our interactive and automated debugging work. I am the EL (Entrepreneurial Lead) of this grant.
Jun 20, 2018 I started working at Google Inc. Mountain View as Software Engineer Tools and Infrastructure Intern.
May 31, 2018 Miryung and I demonstrated our tool BigSift at Spark Summit 2018.
May 26, 2018 I received a gold medal at ACM Student Research Competition at ICSE 2018
Jun 5, 2017 Our work on automated debugging in DISC is accepted to SoCC 2017.
Mar 31, 2017 I am honored to be awarded the 2017 Google Ph.D Fellowship in Software Engineering. Thanks Google!
Dec 31, 2016 Our work on automated and interactive debugging in Spark is accepted at SIGMOD 2017 demonstration track
Jun 30, 2016 Our work, BigDebug, for interactive debugging of big data applications is accepted at FSE 2016 demonstration track
Jun 20, 2016 I started working as a Summer Research Assistant at NEC Labs America, Princeton in summer 2016
Apr 30, 2016 Our workshop paper on automated fault localization and debugging in big data applications is accepted to HotCloud 2016
Nov 30, 2015 Our paper on debugging primitives for interactive big data processing is accepted to ICSE 2016
Jun 6, 2015 Our paper on Apache Spark’s Data Provenance is accepted to VLDB 2016