Brian Zuzga's Serious WWW Page

(boring old page for public consumption)

Brian Zuzga

Brian is off in the San Francisco bay area working for Okta. He helps them secure the internet with identity mangagement, single sign-on, user lifecycle management, OAuth, federation, workflow automation, etc. "Identity is the new perimeter."

He was a graduate student in the EECS department and also was a student at Switzerland (Project MAC).

A More Lighthearted and Comprehensive Page on Me

Other Zuzgas


Patents

The value of many software patents to society is debatable. However, my day jobs use them in a defensive manner in the meanwhile.

Papers

Lots of rejects, but a little that did make it
M. Blair, N. Cohen, D. LaMacchia, B. Zuzga, ``MIT SchMUSE: Class-Based Remote Delegation in a Capricious Distributed Environment'', accepted for publication, Proceedings of the Lisp Users and Vendors Conference, Cambridge, MA, August 1995; also to be available as Technical Memo AIM-1547, MIT AI-Lab, February 1992.
MIT SchMUSE (pronounced ``shmooz'') is a concurrent, distributed, delegation-based object-oriented interactive environment with persistent storage. It is designed to run in a ``capricious'' network environment, where servers can migrate from site to site and can regularly become unavailable. Our design introduces a new form of unique identifiers called ``globally unique tickets'' that provide globally unique time/space stamps for objects and classes without being location specific. Object location is achieved by a distributed hierarchical lazy lookup mechanism that we call ``realm resolution.'' We also introduce a novel mechanism called ``message deferral'' for enhanced reliability in the face of remote delegation. We conclude with a comparison to related work and a projection of future work on MIT SchMUSE.

My master of engineering thesis:

Projects (in chronological order)

SchMUSE
The Scheme Multi-User Simulation Environment.

The SchMUSE is an attempt to create a MUSE (Multi User Simulation Environment) using Scheme, and to fix some of the traditional problems with MUSEs. One thing is particular that we noticed is that the scripting languages in most MUSEs were not well designed and lacked a lot of the functionality of a real programming language. So for this system we gave the users access to the full power of Scheme for their scripts.

TCFS File System
This project was originally conceived and nurtured by Alan Bawden <alan@ai.mit.edu>. Below is the abstract from "Tape Archiving Using the Time Capsule File System".

MIT has been generating data on digital media in significant quantities since the 1960's. The rate at which new bits are produced is steadily increasing, and the knowledge needed to decipher the old bits is vanishing. All of our older media are beginning to deteriorate, and valuable data is being lost every day. The Time Capsule File System (TCFS) project was developed to address the problem of preserving this information, for use now and in the future.

Specifically, TCFS is intended to be a single universal format to which we can migrate all our old files, thus simplifying the problem of dealing with a myriad specialized formats. TCFS is also designed to be simple enough to re-engineer without any previous understanding of it, which reduces the risk that data will become ``stranded''.

Using TCFS, Dr. Alan Bawden and I developed a framework using TCFS to preserve our archives in a durable and easy to use fashion. Pandora Berman and I showed this framework to be viable by using it to rescue data from backup tapes written on the Incompatible Timeshare System (ITS). To this end, I developed specialized tools to translate the data from these tapes into the more general TCFS format. Simultaneously, I developed other tools to categorize, index, and search the large set of TCFS archives that were created.

The Unofficial Course 6 Underground Guide Stats Web Page
The Course 6 Underground Guide is a publication produced by Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) , the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Honor Society, at the end of every term. This guide evaluates all of the classes taught in Course 6 and the instructors teaching them. Very recently, the entire archive of these guides was made avaiable to everyone online.

This mini-project takes all this public data and manipulates it so that you can produce nifty graphs showing the ratings of various courses over the years.


Other Stuff

Perry N. Finley Foundation, Ltd. -- Member of the Board of Directors
The Perry N. Finley Foundation is a not-for-profit charitable organization formed in 1995 to continue Perry's work after his death, dealing with the publication of complex scientific text on the net, freedom of speech issues and concerns relating to privacy rights that might limit those freedoms.
Some photos that I have taken.
Random pictures. It's under construction, but hopefully you'll find it enjoyable.
fnord!

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Brian Zuzga<brian@zuzga.com>