Adnan Aziz

Elements of Programming Interviews

Amit, Tsung-Hsien and I have completed "Elements of Programming Interviews"! This book vastly subsumes "Algorithms for Interviews". Buy it from Amazon.com. Here's the chapter on general problem solving techniques.

Have you ever...

Wanted to work at a hot futuristic company?
Struggled with an interview problem that could have been solved in 15 minutes?
Wished you could study computing in the context of real-world problems?

If so, you need to read Elements of Programming Interviews (EPI).
The code of EPI is a collection of 300 problems with detailed solutions, including over 100 figures and 200 tested programs. The problems are challenging, well-motivated, and accessible. They are representative of the questions asked at interviews at the most exciting companies.
The book begins with a summary of patterns for data structure, algorithms, and problem solving that will help you solve the most challenging interview problems. This is followed by chapters on basic and advanced data structures, algorithm design, concurrency, system design, probability and discrete mathematics. Each chapter starts with a brief review of key concepts and results followed by a deep and wide set of questions.
EPI concludes with a summary of the nontechnical aspects of interviewing, including common mistakes, strategies for a great interview, perspectives from across the table, negotiating the best offer, and much more.
Adnan, Amit, and Tsung-Hsien have worked at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Qualcomm, and several startups. They co-developed algorithms and systems that are used by over one billion people everyday. They have extensive experience with interviewing candidates, making hiring decisions, and being interviewed.

Scaligent - self-serve scalable business intelligence

Scaligent will revolutionize the way businesses look at data. It's a Silicon valley start-up founded by my PhD student Amit Prakash, and I'm proud to serve as a technical adviser. Scaligent is looking for very talented developers, specifically for high-performance C++ computing, Java middleware, and UIs. Check out the job openings at Scaligent.com. (Be prepared for some really hard interview problems, Amit's a co-author on Elements of Programming Interviews.)

Mobile apps

Alephus book trading app

I helped Jing-Tang (Keith) Jang develop Alephus, an Android app for trading textbooks, which is now available for free at the Android marketplace.

Here's a blurb about Alephus:

"Cut out the middle man! Effortlessly buy and sell textbooks with your friends! Alephus is designed for university students to economically trade textbooks with their friends and classmates. It uses barcode scanner, camera, instant messaging, maps, and GPS functionality to allow you to effortlessly find nearby items. You can login with your Gmail and Facebook accounts."

The screenshots below should give you an idea of how it works. You can also read the help page. Direct link to app at Google Play.

Sport Mingles sports social network app

Check out Sport Mingles, a beautiful, easy-to-use sports social network app that helps you manage games, teams, and leagues. Its roots are in a class project done by the developer, Frank Huang, in my Advanced Programming Tools class.

All Things Google

I took leave over the 2008-2009 academic year to work at Google, and learned many wondeful things. I've gave a series of talks based on my experiences there to students at UT: What I learned at Google, My favorite google products, How to get into Google, Designing a modern website

Biography

I received my PhD in EECS from UC Berkeley; my undergraduate degree is from IIT Kanpur. I joined The University of Texas in Spring 1996. Click here for my CV, and here for a list of co-authors.

Contact information

Phone: 1 (530) 723-6267 (Google voice - rings all my numbers at the same time. Memonic: 530-7ADNAN7), 1 (512) 475-9774 (work), 1 (512) 471-5532 (fax), 1 (512) 418-8380 (home), 1 (512) 657-3040 (cell), International travel: call 1-866-305-6462 toll-free, and enter 447924451798 at the prompt, or call 44-792-4451798 directly.
Email:
Work: ACE 6.120, The University of Texas, Austin TX, 78712 (Click here for directions)
Home: 8701 Bluegrass Drive, Austin, TX, 78759 (Click here for directions)

Classes

Undergraduate: EE422C Software Design and Implementation (II), EE312 Software Design and Implementation (I), EE461L Software Design Lab, EE316 Logic Design, Computer-aided IC design, Algorithms
Graduate: Advanced Programming Tools VLSI-1, VLSI Communication Systems, The Practice of Programming, The Tools of Programming, Synthesis of Digital Systems, Interconnection Networks, Verification of Digital Systems, Case Studies in CMOS Design, High Performance Processor Design

Representative research

My interests have moved from technology to applications. You can get an idea of what I am excited about these days from MS reports I recently supervised:

SportMingles Sports Social Network for iOS, by Frank Huang (Fall 2012)
Revolver: Synchronized Visual Event Capture Using Mobile Devices and Cloud Services, by Mike Stathopoulos (Fall 2012)
Microprocessor Power Management and a Stand-alone Benchmarking Application for Android Based Platforms, by Hans Yeager (Fall 2011)
Enabling Telemedicine with Smartphones, by Vaidehee Gokhale (Fall 2011)
PlaceMe: A Location-based App for Android, by Aman Singhal (Fall 2010)
TSS: A Trading Strategy System, by Salim Amirdache (Spring 2010)
EtherLux: A Low Power Wireless Display, by Andy Hocker (Fall 2009)
Google AppEngine Case: A Microblogging Site, by Marcos Kajita (Fall 2009)

Articles

Software verification: Sequential circuits for relational analysis. F. Zaraket, A. Aziz, and S. Khurshid. International Conference on Software Engineering, Minneapolis MN, 2007.
On-chip networks: Scheduling traffic matrices on general switch fabrics. X. Wu, A. Prakash, M. Mohiyuddin, and A. Aziz. IEEE Hot Interconnects, Stanford, CA, August 2006.
Verification practise: Constraint-based verification. J. Yuan, C. Pixley, A. Aziz. Springer 2006.
VLSI communication systems: Synthesizing Interconnect-Efficient Low Density Parity Check Codes. M. Mohiyuddin, A. Prakash, A. Aziz and W. Wolf. ACM Design Automation Conference, San Diego, CA. June 2004.
Switch scheduling: A near optimal scheduler for switch-memory-switch routers. A. Aziz, A. Prakash, and V. Ramachandran. ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures, San Diego, CA. June 2003.
Packet classification: A high-performance architecture and BDD-based synthesis methodology for packet classification. A. Prakash, R. Kotla, T. Mandal, and A. Aziz. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design, 22(6), 2003.
Verification theory: Model-checking continuous time Markov chains. A. Aziz, K. Sanwal, V. Singhal, and R. Brayton. ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 1(1), 2000.
Physical design: Simultaneous routing and buffer insertion with restrictions on buffer locations. H. Zhou, D. F. Wong, I. Liu, and A. Aziz. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design, 19(10), 2000.
Combinational logic synthesis: Optimising designs containing black boxes. T. Liu, A. Aziz, and V. Singhal. ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems, 6(4), 2001.
Sequential synthesis: Sequential synthesis using S1S. A. Aziz, F. Balarin, R. Brayton, and A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design, 19(10), 2000.

Software

TSS is a system for writing and evaluating trading strategies written in Java. Downloadable tarball (18 Mbytes, mostly because of the historical quote database included.)
Azinix is a system for monitoring and controlling IP networks - any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
VIS is a system for analyzing the temporal behaviour of systems of interacting finite state machines.
wikisearch is some code I put together for analysing the page structure of Wikipedia.

Advice on research and teaching

10 commandments of teaching, Yale Patt
Thoughts on teaching, Richard Karp
Notes on teaching, John Ousterhout
How to have a bad career in research/academia, Dave Patterson
- Commentary, Mark Hill
Exam taking tips, Adnan Aziz

Good books I'm reading these days

Mathematics: Problems and Theorems in Classical Set Theory. P. Komjath and V. Totik. Springer, 2007.
Natural History: The Ancestor's Tale. R. Dawkins. Phoenix, 2005.
Programming: Effective Java, Second Edition. J. Bloch. Prentice Hall, 2008.
Programming: Java Concurrency In Practice. B. Goetz. Addison Wesley Hall, 2006.

Berkeley course notes

I'm scanning my course notes from Berkeley, starting with my favorite classes.

Berkeley CS Hardware Preliminary Exam, my notes.
Berkeley CS Theory Preliminary Exam
Math 202a, Introduction to Topology, by William Bade, Spring 1992.
CS 170, Algorithms, by Raimund Seidel, Spring 1990. HW.
CS 270, Combinatorial Algorithms, by Richard Karp, Fall 1990.
EE 221, Linear Systems, by Felix Wu, Fall 1989.
Math 125a, Introduction to Logic, by Robert Solovay, Fall 1991.
Math 225b, Recursion Theory, by Robert Solovay, Spring 1992.

Useful tools

General coding tips, VIM reference, Code snippets, Pike on programming, C, gdb, emacs, LaTex, CVS, C++

Calendar

hits since October 1, 2001 (as counted by www.digits.com).