Feng Zhou

Contact Info:
Feng Zhou, Ph.D.
Email:

Welcome. This site is mostly an adaptation of my old Berkeley homepage. I will post new stuff now and then. If you read Chinese, check out my blog. It's more up-to-date.

Current Projects

Youdao.com

I'm CEO of youdao.com, a subsidiary of NetEase Inc.(NASDAQ: NTES) developing mobile education and productivity apps. Youdao Dictionary (iOS, Android, Web) is the No.1 online dictionary in China. Youdao Cloudnote (iOS, Android) is the No.1 note taking app in China.

Past Projects at UC Berkeley

I received my Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley. Here is a partial list of projects that I was involved in while at Berkeley, from 2002 to 2007. My research area is operating systems, programming systems and networking. My advisor is Prof. Eric Brewer.

SafeDrive	This is my thesis project. SafeDrive improves reliability of Linux device drivers. It brings fine-grained memory safety to drivers written in C using a source-to-source transformation tool and light dependent-type annotations. SafeDrive also employs a light-weight recovery system that restores kernel invariants when a driver fails, so that the system can continue to work in the face of driver failures. Read SafeDrive OSDI'06 paper, or visit SafeDrive project site
Autolocker	As microprocessors move to multi-core designs, we need easier ways to program concurrent applications. Autolocker is a program analysis tool providing atomic sections as an easy-to-use concurrent programming abstraction. Atomic sections in Autolocker are implemented mainly with locks. The programmer provides specification of locks and Autolocker generates locking/unlocking code. With correct specification, Autolocker guarrantees atomicity and deadlock freedom. Read more.
AMP	The goal of the Adaptive Multi-Policy caching is to exploit consistent patterns of file accesses from the same contexts of applications to improve file system caching performance. We developed ways to detect these patterns and a buffer cache structure to use the detection results. Check out AMP project page for paper and detailed tech report.
Capriccio	The Capriccio project aims to create tools to ease the burden on programmers who develop high-performance systems software. I'm involved in developing the threading system in Capriccio, which aims to be pthread-compatible and scalable to 10K threads. Capriccio achieves these properties with the help of novel compiler support and run-time profiling. Read more.
SpamWatch(2003)	In this project we present a scheme for locating documents approximately in P2P networks, using the technique of text fingerprinting. Upon this scheme, we build a practical and scalable system for collaborative filtering of spam emails. Read our ACM Middleware 2003 paper

Refereed Papers

Beyond Bug-Finding: Sound Program Analysis for Linux
Zachary Anderson, Eric Brewer, Jeremy Condit, Rob Ennals, David Gay, Matthew Harren, George Necula, and Feng Zhou
HotOS 2007, San Diego, CA, May 2007. PDF
SafeDrive: Safe and Recoverable Extensions Using Language-Based Techniques
Feng Zhou, Jeremy Condit, Zachary Anderson, Ilya Bagrak, Rob Ennals, Matthew Harren, George Necula, Eric Brewer
OSDI 2006, PDF
Autolocker: Synchronization Inference for Atomic Sections
Bill McCloskey, Feng Zhou, David Gay and Eric Brewer
Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, Charleston, South Carolina, January 2006. PDF
Keyboard Acoustic Emanations Revisited
Li Zhuang, Feng Zhou, J. D. Tygar
Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Alexandria, VA, November 2005. PDF
Thirty Years is Long Enough: Getting Beyond C
Eric Brewer, Jeremy Condit, Bill McCloskey and Feng Zhou
HotOS X, Santa Fe, NM, June 2005. PDF
Cashmere: Resilient Anonymous Routing
Li Zhuang, Feng Zhou, Ben Y. Zhao and Antony Rowstron
Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Boston, MA, May 2005. PDF
AMP: Program Context Specific Buffer Caching
Feng Zhou, Rob von Behren, and Eric Brewer
Proceedings of the Usenix Technical Conference 2005, Anaheim, CA, April 2005. PDF
Capriccio: Scalable Threads for Internet Services
Rob von Behren, Jeremy Condit, Feng Zhou, George C. Necula, and Eric Brewer,
Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems, 2003 PDF(reformatted for better viewing and with page #), PDF(original version)
Approximate Object Location and Spam Filtering on Peer-to-peer Systems
Feng Zhou, Li Zhuang, Ben Y. Zhao, Ling Huang, Anthony D. Joseph and John Kubiatowicz
ACM Middleware 2003. PDF, PS
TODS: Cluster Object Storage Platform Designed for Scalable Services
Feng Zhou, Chao Jin, Yinghui Wu, Weimin Zheng
The 5th International Conference on Algorithms and Architecture for Parallel Processing, Beijing, Oct 2002. Fulltext(PDF)
Extended version appeared in Future Generation Computer Systems special issue on "Tools and Middleware for Clusters, Grid, and the Internet", 2003. Fulltext(PDF)
Disk Logging Algorithms and Performance Analysis Based on Petri Net Models
Feng Zhou, Chuang Lin, Wei-min Zheng
Chinese Journal of Software, 2002. Abstract(HTML), Fulltext(PDF, Chinese)

Older stuff

Talks

SafeDrive: Safe and Recoverable Extensions Using Language-Based Techniques, 7th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (11/6/06). Slides: PDF PPT
AMP: Program Context Specific Buffer Caching, Usenix Technical Conference 2005 (4/14/05). Slides: PDF
Program Context Specific Buffer Caching, Berkeley CS System Lunch (11/4/04). Slides: PDF, PPT
XML as a Boxwood Data Structure, intern talk at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Lab (8/20/04). Slides: PDF, PPT

Reports

Program Context Specific Buffer Caching with AMP, Feng Zhou, Rob von Behren, and Eric Brewer, UCB Technical Report UCB//CSD-05-1379, April 2005. PDF
Understanding Chord Performance and Topology-aware Overlay Construction for Chord, cs268 course project, 2003, PDF
Survey: Race Detection and Atomicity Checking, cs263 course project, 2003, PDF, talk slides PPT
Resource Constrained Cache-Affinity Scheduling, cs270 course project, 2003, PDF

Software bits

ID3iconv - Tool to convert international ID3 tags in MP3 files from native encoding to Unicode so that they display OK under Linux (and maybe elsewhere).
AMP - Linux prototype of Adaptive Multi-Policy buffer caching, along with a general caching algorithm simulator.
Flex - a set of patches for Linux 2.6, unifying AIO and Epoll (delivering Epoll over AIO event queue), faster lockless AIO event delivering, and more.
EZelect - A minimalistic PHP script for conducting Web-based elections for small organizations. Requires no database and easily customizable.
SpamWatch - Prototype of a content-similarity-based, peer-to-peer collaborative spam filtering

Courses

Spring 2005	CS264 - Program Analysis
Fall 2004	CS281A - statistical Learning Theory
Spring 2004	CS262B - Advanced Topics in Computer Systems Paper summaries
Fall 2003	CS263 - Design and Analysis of Programming Languages Stat 205A - Probability Theory Stat 243 - Introduction to Statistical Computing
Spring 2003	CS268 - Graduate Computer Networks Paper reviews Class project: Understanding Chord Performance PDF CS270 - Combinatorial Algorithms and Data Structures
Fall 2002	CS262a - Advanced Topics in Computer Systems Course project: P2P spam filtering, Paper summaries CS267- Applications of Parallel Processing Assignments and project

Last modified: 2015/7/26