Mohammad Jaffer Iqbal

I am a Master’s student in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, and most of my work sits at the intersection of systems, security, and data. I currently work in the Software Analytics Group Lab, building and analyzing large dependency graphs for Maven Central and PyPI (containing millions of nodes and edges that have to be ingested and queried reliably and efficiently). I have owned the end-to-end pipeline: iterating on design, analytics and performance strategies with my supervisors, deploying the service on lab servers with tests and monitoring to support reliable analysis and generate actionable insights for the open-source community. Before this, I worked in the Security Lab at UWaterloo on an end-to-end pipeline for extracting vendor Android ROMs (with different compression schemes), precisely modeling their call chains and uncovering hidden and vulnerable framework APIs.
I have also worked in intrusion detection: in one project, I reviewed complex open source IDS codebases to surface ML and systems flaws and highlight better implementation practices which lead to a co-authored publication; in another, I extended a DL based detector to improve detection performance on high-volume streams of audit logs. In parallel, I have been interested in handling data reliably at scale: I have implemented the Raft consensus protocol for a distributed key-value store, and worked with Hadoop and Spark on big-data algorithms (and now TA the data-intensive distributed computing course). I have also built several team projects in hackathons and courses, and really enjoy collaborating with others to break problems down, debate tradeoffs, and implement solutions together.