Tran Dinh Nguyen

Nguyen Tran

(in Vietnamese: Trần Đình Nguyên)

 

 

715 Broadway Room 705

New York, NY 10003

Phone: 212-998-3181

Email:

[ Publications | Work Experience | CV ]

 

 

 

I graduated and joined Google in August 2012. This page is my old academic website.

My research interests are in networked systems with a focus on securities. I have worked on distributed systems, security and privacy, storage systems, and databases. I am fortunated to be advised by Jinyang Li and Lakshminarayanan Subramanian. Previously, I got a B.S. in Computer Science (1st class honor) with a Minor degree in Mathematics from National University of Singapore in 2005. I worked with professor Y.C. Tay and professor T.S. Tan in some system projects.

 

I am currently supported by the 2010 Google PhD fellowship in Distributed Systems.

 

Research

SumUp A Sybil-resilient mechanism for collecting user votes in online content voting system.
Online voting system likes Diggs, YouTube, eBay, Amazon, ets are known to be susceptible to Sybil attack in which the attacker creates many accounts to cast bogus votes for an object. SumUp leverages social network underline the accounts to defend against such attack. By using a novel capacity assignment on the social links and collecting votes in an approximate max-flow fashion, SumUp can successfully limits the number of bogus votes casted by the attacker to the number of attack edges (e_A) with high probability. SumUp also leverage users' feedback to further reduce the number of bogus votes casted by the attacker if the attacker keeps doing that for different objects. Using SumUp on Digg voting trace, we found evidences of Sybil attacks in real world.
Friendstore A P2P backup and file sharing system that use social network as resource to improve reliablity and availability.
Building backup system using traditional P2P model is difficult, if not infeasible, due to churn. To address this issue, Friendstore leverages real social relationships between nodes. Friendstore's argument is that real social relationship provides sufficient incentive for nodes to stay in the system and keep data for other nodes, which is crucial to backup application. In Friendstore, a node only stores data on its trusted peers which are its trusted friends in real life. We formulate the amount of data a node can backup and help other nodes to backup base on its uplink capacity. Our simulation shows that, under wide area network condition, a node in Friendstore can backup 300GB safely over a long period, i.e. 5 years. We also develop a coding scheme XOR(1,2) that helps nodes, that have redundant bandwidth, to trade bandwidth for additional storage capacity. Try it out!

 

Teaching & Working

Summer & Fall 2011 UC Berkeley (Visiting Scholar). Worked with Dawn Song and her group.
Fall 2010 Distributed Systems [TA]
Summer 2009 Microsoft Research-Silicon Valley (Research Internship). Worked with Marcos K. Aguilera and Mahesh Balakrishnan.
Spring 2009 Operating Systems [TA]
Summer 2007 Google Inc. (Software Engineering Internship). Worked with Frank Dabek and Wilson Hsieh.
Spring 2007 Distributed Storage Systems [TA]
Fall 2006 Data Communications & Networks [TA]
2005-06 National University of Singapore (Research Assistant). Worked with Y.C.Tay and Wei Tsang Ooi.

 

Publications

Efficient cooperative backup with decentralized trust management [PDF|BibTeX]
Nguyen Tran, Frank Chiang, Jinyang Li
ACM Transaction on Storage (TOS), Vol. 8, No. 3, 2012.

Online migration for geo-distributed storage systems [PDF|BibTeX]
Nguyen Tran, Marcos K. Aguilera, Mahesh Balakrishnan
In Proceedings of USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC), Portland, June 2011.

Optimal Sybil-resilient Node Admission Control [PDF|BibTeX]
Nguyen Tran, Jinyang Li, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, Sherman S.M. Chow
In Proceedings of the 30th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), Shanghai, China, April 2011.

Collusion-resilient Credit-based Reputations for Peer-to-peer Content Distribution [PDF|BibTeX]
Nguyen Tran, Jinyang Li, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian
In Proceedings of Workshop on the Economics of Networks, Systems, and Computation (NetEcon), Vancouver, October 2010.

Brief Announcement: Improving Social-Network-based Sybil-resilient Node Admission Control [PDF|BibTeX]
Nguyen Tran, Jinyang Li, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, Sherman S.M. Chow
In Proceedings of the 29th Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), Zurich, July 2010.

Sybil-Resilient Online Content Voting [PDF|BibTeX]
Nguyen Tran, Bonan Min, Jinyang Li, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian
In Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), Boston, April 2009.

Equilibrium analysis through separation of user and network behavior [PDF|BibTeX]
Y.C. Tay, Dinh Nguyen Tran, Eric Yi Liu, Wei Tsang Ooi, and Robert Morris
Elsevier Computer Networks Journal 3405-3420, December 2008.

Friendstore: Cooperative Online Backup Using Trusted Nodes [PDF|BibTeX]
Dinh Nguyen Tran, Frank Chiang, and Jinyang Li
Workshop on Social Network Systems (colocated with EuroSys) , Glasgow, April 2008.

A new approach to dynamic self-tuning of database buffers [PDF|BibTeX]
Dinh Nguyen Tran, Phung Chinh Huynh, Y.C. Tay, and Anthony K.H. Tung
ACM Transaction on Storage (TOS), Vol. 4, No. 1, Article 3, 2008.

SAX: A Tool for Studying Congestion-induced Surfer Behavior [PDF|BibTeX]
Dinh Nguyen Tran, Wei Tsang Ooi, and Y.C. Tay
In Proceedings of Passive and Active Measurement conference (PAM), Adelaide, March 2006.

Analyzing Pre-fetching in Large-scale Visual Simulation [PDF|BibTeX]
Chu-Ming Ng, Cam-Thach Nguyen, Dinh-Nguyen Tran, Tiow-Seng Tan, Shin-We Yeow
In Proceedings of Computer Graphic International Conference (CGI), New York, June 2005.

 

Posters

BlockParty: Cooperative Offsite Backup Among Friends
Dinh Nguyen Tran and Jinyang Li
Networked and Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI) 2007, Cambridge, MA.

Prefetching in Visual Simulation
Chu-Ming Ng, Cam-Thach Nguyen, Dinh-Nguyen Tran, Shin-We Yeow and Tiow-Seng Tan
IEEE Visualization 2003, Seattle.

 

Other interests

I enjoy playing badminton with the NYU Badminton Club. I also play soccer and swim.