Hi! I am Anna, a first-year PhD student at
Cornell University, advised by
Sainyam Galhotra.
My research spans a wide range of interests, focused on rigorous testing
and evaluation techniques to ensure the reliability and correctness
of software and AI systems according to their specifications.
Before starting at Cornell, I completed my MS in Computer Science at UIUC,
advised by Tianyin Xu.
There, my research centered around cloud systems reliability.
Work Experience
Research Assistant - xlab, UIUC
Sep. 2022 – May 2024 | USA
- Local Developer Testing and Cloud Emulation
- REST API Analysis of Azure Storage, AWS S3, and DynamoDB
- Breaking down Emulator's Fidelity using Differential Fuzzing
- Tooling for Testing Cloud-based Software in CI/CD Environments
Research Assistant - Networks and Systems Group, LUMS
Jun. 2020 – May 2022 | Pakistan
- Webpage Load Performance Testing on Low-end Devices
- Tooling for Reducing Webpage Complexity
- Lighthouse, Puppeteer, and WebPageTest
Research Intern - dlab, EPFL
Jun. 2021 – Dec. 2021 | Switzerland
- Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- React Web Development
Education
- Cornell University(2024 – Present)Ph.D. in Computer Science
- UIUC(2022 – 2024)MS in Computer Science
- LUMS(2018 – 2022)BS in Computer Science
Publications
Fidelity of Cloud Emulators: The Imitation Game of Testing Cloud-based Software
[pdf] | [bib]
Anna Mazhar, Saad Sher Alam, William Zheng, Yinfang Chen, Suman Nath, and Tianyin Xu
International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) | April 2025.
Selected Projects
- Testing for Machine Unlearning | Pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, SHAP (Sep. 2024 - Present)
Developing a suite to assess unlearning in AI models, evaluating existing metrics for accuracy and limitations. - Verifying AVL in Coq | Coq (Oct. 2024 - Present)
Implementing and formally verifying the operations of AVL tree data structure using Coq proof assistant. - Multi-Writer Multi-Reader Shared Registers | Go, gRPC, Protobuf (Apr. 2023 - May 2023)
Implemented a MWMR Shared Register protocol with fault tolerance and data consistency through quorum-based operations. - Raft | Go (Oct. 2021 – Nov. 2021)
Built a fault-tolerant key-value storage service using the Raft consensus algorithm for log replication and leader election. - QuestSpace | ReactJS, MongoDB, ExpressJS, Node.js, AWS (Feb. 2021 – Apr. 2021)
Developed a MERN-stack web app for hosting competitions with quizzes, rapid-fire, and submission rounds.
Selected Awards
- Erasmus Mundus Scholarship (€49000) - Awarded to 26 applicants out of 735.
- LUMS Merit Scholarship Award (5000 USD) - For academic excellence.
- Dean’s Honor List (LUMS) - Recognized three consecutive times for academic performance.
