Vaastav Anand

Research Projects

Dara : Hybrid Model Checker for Distributed Systems

Golang

A model checker written in Go which combines the benefits of a traditional model checker with that of an implementation level model checker of distributed systems to find Heisenbugs

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Features

A model checker for Distributed Systems which combines the speed of a traditional model checker with the realism of an implementation level model checker.

2 page abstract published at ESEC/FSE'18 in the Student Research Competition Track

GoVector : Vector clock logging library

Golang

A Vector clock logging library which implements the vector clock algorithm and provides feature-rich logging and encoding infrastructure.

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Features

This library can be added to a Go project to generate a ShiViz-compatible vector-clock timestamped log of events in a concurrent or distributed system

This library can also generate TSViz-compatible logs

Maintainer of the library since June 2018

Projects

Battle Tanks

Go

A P2P Distributed Battle Royale game with validation of player actions.

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Features

A Peer-to-peer network architecture

A centralized server for game dsicovery

Flooding protocol for dissemination of all actions

Uses client side prediction to validate every action of every player

Berkeley Algorithm for Clock Synchronization to prevent network congestion by old packets.

Uses Distributed KV store for stat collection

Open-ended class project for CPSC 416

Block Art

Go

A a blockchain based collaborative art project that allows users to contribute pieces of art to a shared canvas

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Features

System API can be found here

Allows users to draw circles, rectangles and paths using svg strings

An embedded web server to replay the history of all the shapes that were added

Deployed on Azure

Class project for CPSC 416

Contractor Database Management System

Java, React

A better system for Coast Capital Savings that eases the management of contractor information, including: maintaining the history of the contractors,automating the management of contractor employment records, visualizing trends, generating ondemand reports to aid the administrative and decision making process and managing future needs of the company.

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Features

Uses jdbc to implement controllers for writing/reading to/from a MySQL database.

Uses React for the frontend

Deployed on AWS

Implemented for Coast Capital Savings Inc as part of CPSC 319

Article Extractor from OCR scans of newspapers

Python

A python application to download the text file versions of OCR scans of old newspapers and extract all articles related to president's annual message.

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Features

Uses Python's response library to download all the OCR scans of the newspapers

Downloaded around ~11.5K newspaper scans ranging from the time period of 1860-1920

Uses levenshtein distance metric to compare words and thus detect the presence of keywords in the article.

Implemented for UBC History Lab course taught by Dr. Heidi Tworek in January 2018.

eTone

Python

a web application and game where a sentence or a word with different tones from a tonal language (eg: Cantonese, Yoruba) is played and people need to try and replicate the tones exactly.

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Features

A language agnostic algorithm to compute the similarity in tones of two different voice recordings.

Uses the similarity in fundamental frequencies to calculate the similarity.

Uses Django to provide the backend for the webapp

Implemented for Interdisciplinary Speech Research Lab

Basic Linux OS

C, Assembly

A 32-bit Linux Operating System with keyboard support

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Features

A memory manager to manage memory allocated by user proceses

A process manager to manage all the processes in the operating system

A signalling system to deliver signals with priority to the user processes

A buffered keyboard driver to provide access to the keyboard

Class Project for CPSC 415

Mini Java Compiler

Java

A compiler written in Java to compile programs written in MiniJava, a subset of Java

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Features

Uses JavaCC to implement a parser with a Lookahead of 2 to parse the MiniJava grammar

The compiler does typechecking, translation to IR, Instruction Generation, Liveness Analysis and Register Allocation

Class Project for CPSC 411

Canadian Football League Predictor

Python

A predictor game for ongoing CFL games which allows users to guess which play will occur next and predicts the outcome of each play.

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Features

Uses Random Forests for training the model to predict the results of future games

Uses Django to host the backend functionality of the game

Utilizes Materialize CSS for an aesthetic frontend

Music Plagiarism Detector

Python

A python application that calculates the similarity rating between any 2 given songs by comparing their lyrics and MIDI representations.

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Features

Implements teh algorithm described in this paper

Uses PyQT for frontend of the desktop application.

Implemented at nwHacks 2016

Fantasy Premier League Manager

Python

A data scraper program that scrapes data using the fantasy premier league API about all the players adn teams who have featured during the current English Premier League season.

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Features

Uses the requests library in conjunction with the json library to obtain all the data from the FPL API.

Scrapes all the FPL data about every single player that has featured during the current English Premier League season

Cleans, Filters and Saves all data in csv files using the csv python library

Vancouver Fruit Gardens

Django, Python

A web application that shows all the fruits gardens in Vancouver and allows the user to save their favorite gardens as well as tweet about them.

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Features

Shows a map of all gardens in Vancouver as well as all the types of fruit trees in each garden.

Allows user to save their favorite gardens.

Plots route from user's current location to a specific garden using Google Routes API

Allows you to tweet about any app using twitter API.

Gets reviews of every garden of twitter on click.

App was deployed on heroku and can be found here

Event Manager

Android, Java

An andorid application aimed at making the jobs of event amnagers easier

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Features

Uses firebase to provide consistent data across all platforms

Developed at the inaugural nwHacks Hackathon in 2015

Restaurant Quiz App

Android, JAVA

The game basically requires the user to guess by clicking on the map where a randomly chosen restaurant is in the city with the ability to use upto a maximum of 3 hints

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Features

Uses JSON parser to parse Yelp restuarant data

Uses Google Maps API to place markers on the map where the user had clicked and to plot the total route between all the clicked points

Uses Google Maps to overlay an arrow in the direction of the reaturant from the user's click in order to provide hints to the user.

Class project for CPSC 210

Monopoly World

C++

Textual Version of the popular board game Monopoly World

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Features

A native Windows application

Allows a maximum of 6 players to play the game at the same time

Captures all aspects of the board game including but not limitied to buying properties, paying rent to other players, random dice rolls, random community chest cards

My first ever CS project!

Project JOKER

Microsoft KINECT + C#

Just One Kool Esoteric Responder a.k.a JOKER was intended to be a futuristic AI with the ability to take commands from the user and perform designated tasks just like JARVIS from The Iron Man.

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Features

Could perform simple math operations on voice commands.

Open basic windows applications on voice commands.

Pong game using gesture recognition

Vaastav Anand. Dara : Hybrid Model Checking of Distributed Systems. In The ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2018, Lake Buena Vista, Florida, USA. (SRC). Pre-Print

The University of British Columbia ▼

Master of Science, Computer Science - Sept. 2018 - current

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science - Sept. 2013 - April 2018

Vancouver Institute of Visual Analytics ▼

Visual Analytics 101 - Tools, Techniques and Theory

Visual Analytics 102 - Applications of Visual Analytics

Online MOOCs ▼

Coursera ▼

Neural Networks and Deep Learning - deeplearning.ai (Certificate)

Statistical Inference - John Hopkins University(Certificate)

Reproducible Research - John Hopkins University(Certificate)

Exploratory Data Analysis - John Hopkins University(Certificate)

Structuring Machine Learning Projects - deeplearning.ai (Certificate)

Getting and Cleaning Data - John Hopkins University(Certificate)

R Programming - John Hopkins Univesrity(Certificate)

The Data Scientist's Toolox - John Hopkins University(Certificate)

Udacity ▼

GT Refresher - Advanced OS -Georgia Tech

CS344 Intro to Parallel Programming - NVIDIA

GW SEAS Open edX ▼

Practical Numerical Methods with Python (Badges)

NVIDIA ▼

Software Engineering Intern, MODS Team, May 2017 - Aug 2017

Implemented memory repair sequences as scripts to repair bad parts of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). This resulted in increasing GPU yield.

Designed, developed and implemented a CUDA based linpack test to stress every bit of memory to weed out GPUs with bad memory in the early stages of production.

Designed and deployed an internal website that reported every release version of the MODS application, the last change in the release and a link to download the release.

Ported CUDA threading stress tests from CUDA teams to MODS.

Software Engineering Intern, MODS Team, May 2016 - Aug 2016

Implemented a synchronization option for CUDA based linpack stress tests in MODS to synchronize CUDA kernel launches within 30µs across multiple GPUs in multi-GPU systems like DGX systems.

Ported MODS code and windows builds to msvc140 from msvc90 to enable C++11.

Thinkbox Software,Inc.▼

Software Developer Intern, Sequoia, Sept 2015 - Apr 2016

Designed, developed and implemented the frontend and backend of the 3D PDF export option in Sequoia which allowed users to export their 3D models in PDF files by implementing a writer class for the U3D file format.

Implemented import options for Lidar point cloud file formats of scanners from Riegl and Zoller + Fröhlich.

Implemented binary string obfuscation making the licensing system more secure.

Ported Unit tests from Boost Test Framework to Google Test Framework.

The University of British Columbia▼

Undergrad Researcher, Network, Systems and Security Lab, May 2018 - current

Worked under Prof. Ivan Beschastnikh and Stewart Grant on Dara

Research Assistant, Interdisciplinary Speech Research Lab, Nov 2017 - Apr 2018

Developed and implemented an algorithm to compute the similarity in tones of two different voice recordings.

Designed and implemented a web application and game where a sentence or a word with different tones from a tonal language (eg: Cantonese, Yoruba) is played and people need to try and replicate the tones exactly.

Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, Computer Science Department, Sep 2014 - Apr 2018

Teaching Assistant for CPSC 121, CPSC 210, CPSC 213, CPSC 313, CPSC 320, CPSC 415

Lab Planner for CPSC 121 for 2015S term.

2nd Place, ESEC/FSE'18 Student Research Competition (Undergrad Track)

SIGSOFT CAPS Award

International Tuition Award

UBC Work Learn International Undergraduate Research Award

UBC Faculty of Science, International Student Award 2015, 2018

ACM ICPC PacNW Regional Contest 2017 Division 2 Champion

UBC Trek Excellence Scholarship 2016-2017, 2017-2018

UBC Dean's Honour List 2014, 2015, 2017

UBC Computer Science Student Service Award 2015

GIIS Global Citizen Scholarship 2011-2013

Letter of Appreciation from Minister of Education, India

Research Projects

Dara : Hybrid Model Checker for Distributed Systems

Features

GoVector : Vector clock logging library

Features

Projects

Battle Tanks

Features

Block Art

Features

Contractor Database Management System

Features

Article Extractor from OCR scans of newspapers

Features

eTone

Features

Basic Linux OS

Features

Mini Java Compiler

Features

Canadian Football League Predictor

Features

Music Plagiarism Detector