About Me
My name is William Jannen and I am a second year Ph.D. student at Stonybrook University in the OSCAR lab. I am generally interested in security/anonymity (probably because I read too much science fiction), and virtualization.
Prior to joining Stonybrook, I have done research in RNA secondary structure prediction at Williams College in the Aalberts lab. The lab webpage can be found here . Projects that I have worked on include: RNAbows, an visualization tool for viewing and comparing RNA secondary structures in thermal equilibrium, and Nestor, a secondary structure prediction utility. Nestor is based on stochastically sampling and clustering individual structures with a new and intuitive distance measure. Manuscripts and software can be provided upon request.
I have also dabbled in privacy and security, developing an attack on the popular Firefox plugin TrackMeNot.
If you are interested in file system benchmarking, I suggest talking a look at Filebench. And if you are working on Linux machine, then you are in luck. The FSL at SBU has created a Linux port, and they manage the official Filebench page hosted at Sourceforge. Here is a patch for version 1.4.8.fsl.0.7 that allows users to specify a target entropy level for all write operations. An unmodified Filebench run performs its writes from a data stream of null bytes, making it pretty tough to do any work on deduplication. Let me know if you find the patch useful, and I can give you pointers to my current work.