Timothy Good Abbott Tim Abbott, known by many as "tabbott" tabbott@mit.edu (703)-859-1830 Work I was co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Ksplice; after Oracle's acquisition of Ksplice, I ran the Ksplice engineering team at Oracle for a year before starting a second startup, the Zulip group chat, which was acquired by Dropbox in March 2014. I left Dropbox in Spring 2016 and now spend my time running the Zulip open source project.

Open Source Software Projects

• I spent most of 2012-2014 working on Zulip, a group chat product for teams that was acquired by Dropbox. Zulip was open sourced by Dropbox in late 2015, and since then I've been the lead developer of the Zulip open source project.
• I spent most of 2008-2012 working on Ksplice, open source software for updating a running Linux kernel without rebooting, and Ksplice Uptrack, the subscription service that was running on hundreds of thousands of production Linux servers as of the Oracle acquisition in 2011. Ksplice is now the flagship feature of Oracle Linux, but Oracle stopped releasing the open source project after acquiring Ksplice. The Ksplice blog archive contains a bunch of great content produced by the Ksplice engineering team.
• I rewrote all of the Linux kernel's linker scripts to use a set of macros, so that it's much easier to rename sections. Somewhere along the way I also wrote the Linux kernel's binary search implementation.
• I packaged for Debian the Sage mathematics software and 20 of its dependencies. This was a lot of work (I was told that I needed to find 5 or 6 experienced packagers to make this happen), but working with the Sage community was a great experience. Unfortunately delays in the Debian NEW queue followed by my starting Ksplice meant that this never was particularly useful to users; we eventually removed the package from Debian since it got quite out of date. A few years later a new packaging effort started and is progressing well.
• I started and led Debian-Athena, a port of Athena and all its useful software to Debian, with a number of enhancements. Anders Kaseorg and I ran a distribution on top of Debian and Ubuntu installed on hundreds of machines across the MIT campus, and then convinced MIT's official IT organization to adopt it as the new version of Athena.
• Along with Nelson Elhage, I developed the Linerva Project, a secure Linux "dialup" (shell) server at MIT; hundreds of people logged into the system every day to check their email and do important coursework before it was handed off to MIT's official IT organization (years after I retired from the project).
• I maintain config-package-dev, a set of CDBS modules created by Anders Kaseorg and I for efficiently creating Debian configuration packages.
• I started the SIPB Virtual Servers Project. The software, called Invirt, is still in use but AFAIK hasn't been adopted outside MIT.
• Anders Kaseorg and I wrote nss_nonlocal, an NSS module that protects nonlocal accounts from getting access to local credentials.
• I wrote pam_mktemp, a PAM module to create temporary files and set an environment variable to point to them.
• I worked on scripts.mit.edu, A SIPB service providing a secure environment for running CGI scripts out of AFS that now hosts thousands of MIT sites (to this day, MIT's official webservers only support static content).

Organizations

• I contribute to Debian, by submitting bugs and maintaining some packages.
• In 2005 and 2006, I ran the Harvard-MIT Math Tournament, a contest for high school students run by Harvard and MIT students.
• In 2006, I was Technical Director of Maslab, a student-run IAP robotics competition course (6.186) focused on autonomous, vision-based robots navigating an unknown playing area.
• I was Vice Chairman and then Chairman of MIT's Student Information Processing Board, the MIT computer club, in 2006-2007. I instituted a weekly series of technical talks ("Cluedumps") every Fall and approximately-monthly "hackathons" to work on projects, and oversaw a series of cleanups and rearrangements of the SIPB office which resulted in a dramatic increase in its popularity as a workspace.
• In 2005, I was Secretary of the MIT Lecture Series Committee, an organization that shows movies in MIT lecture halls and uses the profits to bring famous people to speak at MIT.
• In 2006, I was the (figurehead) President of the MIT Mystery Hunt.
• During college I lived in Random Hall.

Awards

• Ksplice won the grand prize of the 2009 MIT $100K Business Plan Competition as well as other grants and prizes totaling over $1M.
• The MIT Akamai Presidential Graduate Fellowship
• The 2007 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
• The Machtey Award for Best Student Paper at FOCS 2005
• Tied for 7th place and 9th place on the 2004 and 2006 Putnam exams, respectively
• Honorable Mention (ranked 26-75) on the 2003, 2005 Putnam exams
• A Silver Medal at the 2003 International Olympiad in Informatics
• A Bronze Medal at the 2003 Central European Olympiad in Informatics
• A Silver Award at the 2003 Asian Pacific Math Olympiad
• Honorable Mention (ranked 13-25), USA Math Olympiad 2002, 2003

Publications:

1. Timothy Abbott, Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, Daniel Kane, Stefan Langerman, Jelani Nelson, Vincent Yeung: Dynamic Ham-Sandwich Cuts of Convex Polygons in the Plane. CCCG 2005.
2. Timothy Abbott, Daniel Kane, Paul Valiant: On the Complexity of Two-Player Win-Lose Games. FOCS 2005.
3. Timothy G. Abbott, Kiran S. Kedlaya, David Roe: Bounding Picard numbers of surfaces using p-adic cohomology. To appear in proceedings "Arithmetic, Geometry, and Coding Theory (AGCT-10)"
4. Timothy G. Abbott, Katherine J. Lai, Michael R. Lieberman, Eric C. Price: Browser-Based Attacks on Tor. Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET 2007).
5. Timothy G. Abbott, Zachary Abel, David Charlton, Erik D. Demaine, Martin L. Demaine, Scott D. Kominers: Hinged Dissections Exist. SOCG 2008.
6. Timothy Good Abbott: Generalizations of Kempe's Universality Theorem. Master's thesis version, based on joint work with Reid W. Barton and advised by Erik D. Demaine.
7. Jeff Arnold, Tim Abbott, Waseem Daher, Gregory Price, Nelson Elhage, Geoffrey Thomas, and Anders Kaseorg: Security Impact Ratings Considered Harmful. Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS 2009).

Unpublished research papers

1. Timothy Abbott, Yoyo Zhou: On Dynamic Algorithms for Minimum Cut and Other Source-Sink Problems.
2. Timothy G. Abbott, Erik D. Demaine, Blaise Gassend: An Infinitesimal Carpentar's Rule Theorem for Self-Touching Linkages.

Expository papers

I normally wouldn't bother highlighting these since they were basically class project reports, but enough people found them via Google and then told me they found reading them useful that I'm leaving them up.

1. Timothy G. Abbott: Feynman Diagrams in Quantum Mechanics
2. Tim Abbott and Alex Schwendner: The Complexity of the Permanent and Related Problems

News

I've been mentioned in the Tech, MIT's newspaper, occasionally. Sometimes they even failed to misquote me.

• The Tech incorrectly citing my year when I won Honorable Mention on the Putnam
• My 7th place Putnam performance
• My honorable mention while on the MIT Putnam team.
• My 9th place Putnam performance
• My taking 8 classes, except that my quote was swapped with Aron Walker's first comment, making me sound somewhat crazy.
• My unsuccessful run to be the ultimate manifestation of HardkOre at MIT.
• My Maslab Robot
• A project with Anders Kaseorg that reversed an annoying change to the MIT phone system.

Personal

My wife and our recipes site

My mom's art inspired by Ethiopian icons.

My aunt's apiary selling honey and bee products.

Ancient History

The following are a set of (generally summer) programs that I participated in as a high school student and highly recommend.

• The Ross Summer Mathematics Program, a fantastic and highly rigorous summer experience for people who are (or want to be) hardcore about their mathematics.
• USA Computing Olympiad, a well-run algorithms competition for high school students.
• American Mathematics Competitions.
• Clay Math Institute Research Academy. This seems to now be defunct.
• US Physics Team.

I attended high school at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST, or TJ for short). While there, I benefitted greatly from a community of peers interested in math and science, learning much of what I knew by the end of high school from them.

Academic groups at TJHSST for which I was an officer and highly recommend:

• TJ Varsity Math Team
• TJ Senior Computer Team
• TJ Physics Team
• The TJ USA Mathematical Olympiad training group (TJUSAMO)

My PGP Public Key (which you perhaps shouldn't trust off a website) is also available from pgp.mit.edu.

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