Dr Thuan Yew Edward Chuah

Biography

Dr. Edward Chuah is a Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor in the US) in the Computing Science Department, University of Aberdeen.  He received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Warwick (His PhD supervisor was Dr. Arshad Jhumka).  Before his PhD, he worked in Singapore as a research engineer, software engineer and lecturer (1.5 years in software engineering, 8 years in R&D and 2 years in teaching).  After his PhD, he continued his research in failure diagnosis and developed new research in network security as a post-doc at Lancaster University (His advisor was Prof. Neeraj Suri).  He also taught at the University of Exeter.  His current research focus is in High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems failure diagnosis and identifying attacks in large networks.  He has been working on the topic of failure diagnosis since 2010.  His work involves processing large volumes of real data to generate new insights into a distributed system and to improve its reliability and security.

Research topics: Large-scale systems dependability, Network security (attacks identification, detection and prediction), HPC reliability (failure diagnosis, failure prediction, error propagation and error detection), Data analysis.

Prospective research students:  If you are interested in studying for a PhD in one of the aforementioned research topics, email your CV, academic transcripts and proposal to thuan.chuah@abdn.ac.uk for an informal discussion.

Service to the community:

2023: Reviewer for Expert Systems with Applications, IEEE Transactions on Big Data.

2022: Reviewer for the Latin American Journal of Computing, ACM Computing Surveys.

2021: PC member for the 2nd International Conference on Information and Software Technologies (ICI2ST).

2020: Reviewer for the 2nd International Conference on Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems (MLIS).

2019: Reviewer for IEEE Access.

2018: Reviewer for ACM Computing Surveys, Software: Practice and Experience.

Prizes and Awards

• J. Tinsley Oden Faculty Fellowship, The Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, USA. September 2011.  The Fellowship was to collaborate with the late Prof. Emeritus James C. Browne on research in HPC health monitoring and fault management.
• The Alan Turing Institute Doctoral Studentship, UK. September 2016 to March 2020. Link

Research Overview

Research interests:

My main research interest is in large-scale systems dependability.  My initial research interest is focused on reliability [1-5], one of the attributes of dependability.  Currently, my focus is on the security aspect of dependability, where I am investigating security in large networks [6].  I also have a general interest in machine learning, anomaly detection, causal inference and data poisoning.

Expertise:

My expertise is in system failure diagnostics and system logs analysis.  I am the developer of FDiag, a system log-based failure diagnostics toolkit [5].  FDiag have been used by HPC systems administrators at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to uncover previously unknown causes of compute node soft lockups.  I have also developed: (a) ANCOR, a novel anomaly-correlation approach that linked system resource usage anomalies with system failures [4], and (b) CORRMEXT, a new workflow that identified patterns of error propagation on large supercomputer systems [2].  FDiag and CORRMEXT are available on GitHub.

System log-based diagnostics tools

Selected publications:

1. E. Chuah, A. Jhumka, S. Alt, R.T. Evans, N. Suri, Failure Diagnosis for Cluster Systems Using Partial Correlations, in Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications (ISPA), 2021.
2. E. Chuah, A. Jhumka, S. Alt, D.B.-Thomert, J.C. Browne, M. Parashar, Towards Comprehensive Dependability-Driven Resource Use and Message Log-Analysis for Cluster Systems Diagnosis, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 2019.
3. E. Chuah, A. Jhumka, J.C. Browne, N. Gurumdimma, S. Narasimhamurthy, B. Barth, Using Message Logs and Resource Use Data for Cluster Failure Diagnosis, in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on High-Performance Computing, Data and Analytics (HiPC), 2016.
4. E. Chuah, A. Jhumka, S. Narasimhamurthy, J. Hammond, J.C. Browne, B. Barth, Linking Resource Usage Anomalies with System Failures from Cluster Log Data, in Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), 2013.
5. E. Chuah, S. Kuo, P. Hiew, W.C. Tjhi, G. Lee, J. Hammond, M.T. Michalewicz, T. Hung, J.C. Browne, Diagnosing the Root-Causes of Failures from Cluster Log-Files, in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on High-Performance Computing (HiPC), 2010.
6. E. Chuah, N. Suri, A. Jhumka, S. Alt, Challenges in Identifying Network Attacks Using NetFlow Data, in Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA), 2021.

Teaching Responsibilities

I taught various courses ranging from Learning from Data to Software Engineering and Algorithm Analysis to undergraduate and postgraduate students.