Panel: Hot Topics in Networking Ihsan Ayyub Qazi Marinho Barcellos - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Panel: Hot Topics in Networking

Ihsan Ayyub Qazi (Lahore University of Management Sciences) Nate Foster (Cornell University) Marinho Barcellos (UFRGS) Alberto Dainotti (CAIDA/UC San Diego) Georgios Smaragdakis (TU Berlin)

ALBERTO DAINOTTI

Research Scientist CAIDA, UC San Diego

http://www.caida.org/~alberto/ Research Interests:

• Internet Measurement and Security:

Network Outages, DoS, Botnets, Cyber-warfare, BGP Hijacking, …

• Lots of “infrastructure” development:
• https://ioda.caida.org

https://bgpstream.caida.org

SOME IDEAS

1) Old topics can still be hot!

• questions stay the same, the answers change 


E.g., understanding the Internet infrastructure 2) Multidisciplinary studies are both hot and fun

• Joint investigations with social, political, economical scientists
• Increasing funding encouraging multidisciplinary work
• Examples:
• Use of DoS attacks as a mean of either repression or protest in autocracies.
• Internet blackouts ordered by governments (human rights, economic impact)
• Cyberwarfare: how the macroscopic Internet topology in a country can be more/less

susceptible to high-impact targeted attacks by state actors

3) Hot is also helping the others/working with a broader community Thinking bigger than one paper and 2 co-authors.

• Developing an open source tool
• Organizing/participating in a hackathon
• Work on making results easily reproducible

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2017 – today: Professor at TU Berlin, 2017 – today: European Research Council awardee 2014 – today: Research Associate, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory 2017 – today: Visiting Researcher at Akamai Technologies 2017– today: Researcher, MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative 2014 – 2017: Marie Curie Fellow at MIT CSAIL 2011 – 2013: Co-founder of a DT Spin-off in Berlin 2009 – 2014: Senior Researcher at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories and TU Berlin 2008: Internship at Telefonica Research 2003 – 2008: PhD student at Boston University 1998 – 2003: Diploma student at TU Crete

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• Measurements for Regulation and Audit
• Web Privacy
• Internet Resiliency and Cyber-attacks
• Network Infrastructures for Self-driving cars/Drones/UVAs etc.
• Networking Architectures to support AI/ML
• SPACE X and other alternative communication technologies

Tips:

• Avoid Cold Topics (and very crowded topics!); be first and they will follow!
• Do not forget to attend my keynote at the end of the Workshop for a full list of Hot

Topics

Panel: “Hot Topics in Networking”

ACM CoNEXT Student Workshop, 2018

Ihsan Ayyub Qazi LUMS

Cloud Computing & Datacenters ICTD & Wireless Networks Internet Censorship & Privacy

ACM SIGCOMM’14 ACM CoNEXT’16 ACM IMC’14 ACM HotNets’15 ACM IMC’16 IEEE/ACM Trans. on Net.’17 ACM HotNets’16 IEEE INFOCOM’14 IEEE INFOCOM’17 … … … ACM SIGCOMM CCR’18 ACM HotNets’17 ACM CoNEXT 2018 ACM CoNEXT 2018 ACM SIGCOMM’18

Who am I?

Computer Science Professor at LUMS, Pakistan (~7 years)

Google Faculty Award, 2018

Finding “good” research problems

• Impactful research often involves taking risks
• Courage, patience, openness, humility,…
• How do I go about finding problems?
• Observation and experience (e.g., YouTube censorship)
• Making connections across disciplines (e.g., Course at CMU)
• Reading broadly and talking to people (e.g., Facebook Free Basics)
• Keeping an eye on technology (and other) trends (e.g., Slow devices)
• Research tastes
• Working in an active research space – what is my uniqueness?
• Solving “future” problems – will this hold up?
• “Hot Topics in Networking”
• Plenty of ”hot” areas in networking
• Caveat: Gold rush

Connect the dots! Take the plunge! Courage to let go! Find your uniqueness!

• Marinho Barcellos, 53
• PhD Newcastle University, UK 1998
• BT Research Labs,


U Manchester 2003-2004

• UNISINOS University 1999-2008, 


PUCRS University 2008,
 UFRGS - 2010-now - Reader,
 UNAL invited professor

• Head of UFRGS research group
• CNPq - Researcher Level 1
• SIGCOMM diversity & outreach

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some of the collaborations

Marinho Barcellos - marinho@acm.org

KTH - Sweden, LiU - Sweden KAUST - Saudi Arabia University of Waikato - New Zealand

Marinho Barcellos - marinho@acm.org

how to find "hot topics” 
 in networking

• learn how to identify "cold topics" (hard... DC was deemed

cold already in sigcomm 14). 2nd-tier, etc.

• HotNets for green stuff to make you think out of the box
• Jon’s re-heating lessons: extrapolate or invert; drawn

inspiration from other areas (eg sociology); new technology enablers

• new workshops in important conferences. look who's

contributing to the pc and as authors

• follow the pages of groups and people you admire

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Marinho Barcellos - marinho@acm.org

examples of hot areas

• Self-Driving Networks: measure, optimize and control
• AI (Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning) for networking
• Networking to optimize AI (Network Meets AI & ML)
• Network programmability, Softwarized Networks, InT
• Security in Softwarized Networks
• IoT Security and Privacy, Internet measurements for

cybersecurity, large-scale attacks affecting (b)millions

• LEO satellite array to provide low-latency routing through space

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Marinho Barcellos - marinho@acm.org

more examples

• In-network computing, offloading processing to network
• Mobile Edge Communications
• Kernel Bypassing Networks (RDMA, SmartNICS, DPDK)

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Marinho Barcellos - marinho@acm.org

summary

• the most challenging problem is to find

early on the hot topic. should not arrive

• late. write history, not merely read
• look for topics in new workshops

(backed by “reliable" people)

• Self-Driving Networks, AI for networking

& vice-versa, Softwarized Networks, Security, Telemetry, IoT S&P, Internet measurements for cybersecurity, new satellite-based networks

• and don’t forget why you’re doing all

this, so pick a hot topic you will love

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Background

• BA Williams (2001)
• MPhil Cambridge (2008)
• PhD UPenn (2009)
• Postdoc Princeton (2009-2010)
• Faculty Cornell (2010-present)
• Sabbatical Barefoot & Stanford (2016-2017)

Interests Programming language design and implementation Research Highlights

• Bidirectional Languages: every program can be run both forwards, from input to
• utput, and backwards, from output back to input (lenses, Boomerang)
• Network Programming: high-level and declarative languages for programming

network routers and switches (Frenetic, Pyretic, NetKAT, P4 etc.)

Nate Foster