I did research in the Programming Systems and Intrusion Detection Systems labs under Gail Kaiser and Sal Stolfo, respectively, for about 10 years: first as an undergraduate, then a M.S. GRA ("graduate research assistant"), and finally as a Ph.D. student. During that time, my research interests varied, but were generally focused on distributed computing.

As a Ph.D. student, my research focused on event systems. Event systems, in a distributed computing context, are built around the notion of a discrete data element called an event, which generally refers to some occurrence at a particular time but can be generalized to mean any arbitrary piece of data.

There are numerous problems that exist in this sphere. I'm particularly interested in dealing with sequences of events intelligently in complex distributed systems. This research falls under a number of different categories, including event-based workflow, event processing, data mining, network security, and often has applications in system monitoring and intrusion detection.

Thesis

1. Thesis Defense: Privacy-Preserving Distributed Event Corroboration, presented on March 23rd, 2007.
2. Thesis Proposal: Privacy-Preserving Distributed Event Correlation, presented on November 21st, 2005.
3. Candidacy Exam: Event Semantics in Asynchronous Distributed Event Middleware, presented on May 5th, 2003.

Submitted Papers

1. Parekh, J.J., Wang, K., and Stolfo, S.J., Privacy-Preserving Payload-Based Correlation for Accurate Malicious Traffic Detection, in Computer Science Technical Reports. 2006, Columbia University: New York, NY
2. Wang, K., Parekh, J.J., and Stolfo, S.J., Anagram: A Content Anomaly Detector Resistant to Mimicry Attack, in Computer Science Technical Reports. 2006, Columbia University: New York, NY.

Published Papers

1. Parekh, J.J., Kaiser, G., Gross, P., and Valetto, G., Retrofitting Autonomic Capabilities onto Legacy Systems. Journal on Cluster Computing, 2006. 9(2): p. 141-159.
2. Cretu, G., Parekh, J.J., Wang, K., and Stolfo, S.J. Intrusion and Anomaly Detection Model Exchange for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks. in IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference. 2006. Las Vegas, NV.
3. Locasto, M.E., Parekh, J.J., Keromytis, A.D., and Stolfo, S.J. Towards Collaborative Security and P2P Intrusion Detection. in IEEE Information Assurance Workshop. 2005. West Point, NY.
4. Gross, P., Parekh, J.J., and Kaiser, G. Secure "Selecticast" for Collaborative Intrusion Detection Systems. in International Workshop on Distributed Event-Based Systems. 2004. Edinburgh, UK.
5. Keromytis, A.D., Parekh, J.J., Gross, P., Kaiser, G., Misra, V., Nieh, J., Rubenstein, D., and Stolfo, S.J. A Holistic Approach to Service Survivability. in ACM Workshop on Survivable and Self-Regenerative Systems. 2003. Fairfax, VA.
6. Kaiser, G., Parekh, J.J., Gross, P., and Valetto, G. Kinesthetics eXtreme: An External Infrastructure for Monitoring Distributed Legacy Systems. in Autonomic Computing Workshop. 2003. Seattle, WA.
7. Kaiser, G., Gross, P., Kc, G.S., Parekh, J.J., and Valetto, G. An Approach to Autonomizing Legacy Systems. in Workshop on Self-Healing, Adaptive and Self-MANaged Systems. 2002. New York, NY.
8. Gross, P., Gupta, S., Kaiser, G., Kc, G.S., and Parekh, J.J. An Active Events Model for Systems Monitoring. in Working Conference on Complex and Dynamic Systems Architectures. 2001. Brisbane, Australia.

Posters

1. Parekh, J.J. Worminator (poster). in Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection. 2005. Seattle, WA.

Technical Reports

1. Locasto, M.E., Parekh, J.J., Stolfo, S.J., Keromytis, A.D., Malkin, T., and Misra, V., Collaborative Distributed Intrusion Detection, in Computer Science Technical Reports. 2004, Columbia University: New York, NY

I was also interested in events at this time, but for a completely different application: collaborative environments. That is, I was interested in capturing and processing events that summarized human interactions in a workgroup.

• Thesis preproposal (DOC, PDF)
• Thesis proposal (DOC, PDF)
• Thesis proposal slides (PPT 2000)

Halfway through this research, I segued into my current Ph.D. research via the DARPA DASADA project ("Dynamic Assembly for Systems Adaptability, Dependability, and Assurance"). My research became part of PSL's KX ("Kinesthetics eXtreme") project, and you can download the code here.

As part of my undergraduate work, I focused on two different areas: instant messaging and handheld information management. For the former, I developed an RVP (RezendeVous Protocol) client for instant messaging purposes years ago in Java. For the latter, I developed a primitive hyperlinking system for Palm devices. While working on the latter, I applied for and won honorable mention for CRA's Outstanding Undergraduate Award Program, and was also a recipient of Columbia Computer Science's Theodore Bashkow award for "excellent" undergraduate research.

The code is, sadly, no longer maintained and not currently available.