About

I'm Isaac Chanin, a Computer Science Ph.D. student at Stony Brook University. I graduated with a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2008. I can be reached at iszxc.chxnin@gmzil.com ( | sed 's/[xz]/a/g' ). I sometimes look like:

Interests

My professional interests tend to stay mostly centered around operating and file systems research. However, as I just started my graduate program in Fall 2008, I do my best to remain open to anything that sounds interesting.

No matter the project, I am uninterested in merely doing research and providing results without also building something concrete. To me, it is one thing to show an algorithm will perform better than an existing algorithm for some application, and something entirely different to take the application, switch in the new algorithm and generate concrete results. Research into the purely theoretical does not interest me unless it can be tied back into something that will be both useful and, hopefully, used. I'm not generally interested in sounding arrogant, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

Projects

WORM

Since early Summer 2008 I have been working in the NSAC Lab under Radu Sion to implement, study and enhance the performance of a Write-Once Read-Many filesystem.

The Effects of Fragmentation on Linux Filesystems

As part of a graduate Operating Systems course I took during my time at WPI some colleagues and I extensively benchmarked the performance of many Linux filesystems under various fragmentation conditions. Unsurprisingly, we found that filesystem fragmentation appears to be a bigger issue than it has traditionally been given credit for within the Linux filesystem community. A paper resulting from this research is soon to be submitted for publication.

Analysis of Phishing Websites

During my participation in the NSF's REU program during Summer 2007 I co-authored a paper detailing trends in phishing websites. Efforts to get the results submitted to any conferences seem to have stalled.

Other Things

I enjoy cycling and squash. I pretend that I can play the piano. I like books about people who escape society or books where society is warped beyond recognition or just some good ol' Dostoevesky. I am an aficionado of wasting time on the internet.