I'm a member of the Computing Systems Research Department at Bell Labs.

email: mflaster@research.bell-labs.com
phone: 908 582 5641
fax: 908 582 1239

office: Rm. 2C-422
 Bell Laboratories
 600 Mountain Av.
 Murray Hill, NJ 07974-0636

Publications

Information Preserving XML Schema Embedding. Philip Bohannon, Wenfei Fan, Michael Flaster, P.P.S. Narayan. VLDB 2005, August 2005.
A Cost-Based Model and Effective Heuristic for Value-Based Constraint Repair. Philip Bohannon, Wenfei Fan, Michael Flaster, Rajeev Rastogi. SIGMOD 2005, June 2005.
StarFish: highly-available block storage. Eran Gabber, Jeff Fellin, Michael Flaster, Fengrui Gu, Bruce Hillyer, Wee Teck Ng, Banu Ozden, and Elizabeth Shriver, In Proceedings of the FREENIX track of the 2003 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pages 151-163, June 9-14, 2003, San Antonio, TX, Best paper award.

Projects

Snapper

Snapper is an interactive system for automatic data transformation and cleaning. It understands many different data formats (e.g. XML, MIB, CSV), and allows the user to graphically describe the relationship between multiple data models. It includes an efficient plan generation and execution engine for transforming the data, as well as preliminary automatic schema matching functionality.

Reggie

Reggie is a Regular Expression Interactive Editor. Using the Minium Description Length (MDL) principle, it automatically determines "good" regular expressions (including disjunctions) from arbitrary text input. Furthermore, it is graphical and interactive, allowing the user to provide feedback about the desired patterns. It automatically extracts variable portions of the pattern, which can be named. It can then generate a corresponding perl script. Reggie incorporates some extremely efficient heuristics.

Here is the Reggie home page (internal only).

MDGW

A platform to allow value-added services to be delivered to cell phones, solely through an e-mail interface. Features include:

carrier-specific media transformations (to allow pictures and audio to be sent between carriers)
access to proprietary databases (such as company directories) from cell phones
whitelist-based spam blocking.

The Qube Binary Parser

A system for parsing and processing binary data, ideally for insertion into a database.
See the Qube Project page (internal only).

BlinkBrowser

A tool for interactively distplaying graphs, based on Touchgraph
(written by Alex Shapiro).
For more details, see the BlinkBrowser page (internal only).

Database repair

How can you fix constraint violations in databases by value modification? See a demonstration of a repair.

StarFish

A block-level system for geographic replication of data, based on commodity hardware.

"StarFish: highly-available block storage" - Best paper award , 2003 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, FREENIX track , San Antonio, TX, June 9--14, 2003, pp. 151-163. Eran Gabber, Jeff Fellin, Michael Flaster, Fengrui Gu, Bruce Hillyer, Wee Teck Ng, Banu Özden, and Elizabeth Shriver.
The paper (PDF) [185KB] .
Visit the external StarFish project page.
StarFish power point presentation (456KB) presented at Freenix.
"StarFish: a system for transparent, geographically replicated storage " - Lucent Internal Document ITD-01-41707J . Eran Gabber, Jeff Fellin, Michael Flaster, Fengrui Gu, Bruce Hillyer, Wee Teck Ng, Banu Özden, and Elizabeth Shriver.

EWS

The Embedded Web Server. An extremely small, highly portable web server supporting basic scripting through eNITL, as well as tight integration with an embedded software system.

Power point presentation (141KB)

Meta4

A high-level language and runtime system for automatic, efficient data synchronization of two related sets of objects.

Meta4 (internal only)

Qix

A system for efficient execution of XPath-like queries on a hierarchical data set.