I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, advised by Khuzaima Daudjee. I am also a member of the Data Systems Group.
Generally, my research interests lie in the intersection of distributed systems, databases, and machine learning. I am particularly interested in building adaptive and distributed data systems.
I received a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from Waterloo in 2016, with a focus on bioinformatics.
Below you can find additional information on my teaching experiences and awards which I have received. My CV is also available.
Projects
Physical Design within Distributed Data Systems: Modern data systems exist within a cluster of servers, with data distributed across the cluster. Therefore, how data is placed and accessed is critical to application performance. My research focuses on building adaptive data systems that make intelligent and dynamic physical design decisions improve performance. I have applied these techniques in distributed database systems (MorphoSys and DynaMast) and erasure coded storage systems (EC-Store).
Publications
2020
MorphoSys: Automatic Physical Design Metamorphosis for Distributed Database SystemsMichael Abebe, Brad Glasbergen, Khuzaima Daudjee Proceedings of the Very Large Databases Endowment (PVLDB) (Tech Report)
DynaMast: Adaptive Dynamic Mastering for Replicated SystemsMichael Abebe, Brad Glasbergen, Khuzaima Daudjee IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) (Tech Report) (Slides) (Talk)
Sentinel: Universal Analysis and Insight for Data Systems Brad Glasbergen, Michael Abebe, Khuzaima Daudjee, Amit Levi Proceedings of the Very Large Databases Endowment (PVLDB) (Tech Report)
ChronoCache: Predictive and Adaptive Mid-Tier Query Result CachingBrad Glasbergen, Kyle Langendoen, Michael Abebe, Khuzaima Daudjee ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD)
Demo: Sentinel: Understanding Data SystemsBrad Glasbergen, Michael Abebe, Khuzaima Daudjee, Daniel Vogel, Jian Zhao ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD) Demo Track (Demo video) BEST DEMO WINNER!
2019
WatDFS: A Project for Understanding Distributed Systems in the Undergraduate CurriculumMichael Abebe, Brad Glasbergen, Khuzaima Daudjee ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) (Slides)
2018
EC-Store: Bridging the Gap Between Storage and Latency in Distributed Erasure Coded SystemsMichael Abebe, Khuzaima Daudjee, Brad Glasbergen, Yuanfeng Tian International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) (Slides)
Tutorial: Adaptive Replication and Partitioning in Data Systems Brad Glasbergen, Michael Abebe, Khuzaima Daudjee ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference (Middleware) (Slides)
Apollo: Learning Query Correlations for Predictive Caching in Geo-Distributed SystemsBrad Glasbergen, Michael Abebe, Khuzaima Daudjee, Scott Foggo and Anil Pacaci Extending Database Technology (EDBT)
2017
Diversity-generating retroelements: natural variation, classification and evolution inferred from a large-scale genomic surveyLi Wu, Mari Gingery, Michael Abebe, Diego Arambula, Elizabeth Czornyj, Sumit Handa, Hamza Khan, Mingshun Liu, Mechthild Pohlschroder, Kharissa L. Shaw, Amy Du, Huatao Guo, Partho Ghosh, Jeff F. Miller and Steven Zimmerly Nucleic Acids Research
2013
A pipeline of programs for collecting and analyzing group II intron retroelement sequences from GenBankMichael Abebe, Manuel A Candales, Adrian Duong, Keyar S Hood, Tony Li, Ryan A E Neufeld, Abat Shakenov, Runda Sun, Li Wu, Ashley M Jarding, Cameron Semper and Steven Zimmerly Mobile DNA
Experience
I worked on two different infrastructure teams during my internships (2015) at Facebook.
On the Data Infrastructure team I worked on the next generation data warehouse system. I helped improve operational workflows by building a custom log search tool for distributed debugging. I additionally worked on a shared memory file transfer between the client interface and the storage interface.
On the Service Infrastructure team I worked on service discovery and the internal ZooKeeper system. My work focused on moving service discovery from a daemon process to a service itself. In the process I modified the Thrift compiler to provide transport level request caching.
Palantir
As a Software Engineering Intern (2014) at Palantir I prototyped a web application that allowed users to collaborate during investigations within the Palantir web applications. The application allowed users to directly share the state of their investigations as a first class citizen. I also worked on the maps application within Palantir.
Awards
I am currently supported by a Facebook Emerging Scholar award and a NSERC CGS-D scholarship. Previously, I have been supported by the NSERC CGS-M scholarship, the David R. Cheriton Graduate Scholarship and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship.
Teaching
I was a TA for CS 454 (Distributed Systems) in the winter of 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and the summer of 2018. In these offerings I gave guest lectures on erasure coded storage systems. I also helped develop a new assignment on distributed file systems, which is described in our WatDFS SIGCSE paper.
Contact
Email: mtabebe@uwaterloo.ca
GitHub: @mtabebe
Office: Davis Centre 2118