M-Lab Research Fellows - Spring 2022
M-Lab is pleased to share our selection of Research Fellows for Spring 2022, generously supported by Internet Society. The fellows were selected for the merit, rigor, and feasibility of their proposed project as well as their research’s relevance to improvement for end-user Internet performance. Read below for more information about the fellows and their proposed projects:
Control-Plane-Triggered Traffic Performance Degradation Detection | Mingwei Zhang
Mingwei Zhang, Ph.D. is an independent researcher working on developing data analysis tools for Inter-domain routing data. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Oregon in 2019, with his dissertation topic on the mitigation of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. He also worked on several projects on the security of inter-domain routing protocol and published papers on top conferences and journals such as IEEE Transactions Networking. He joined the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), UCSD as Internet Data Scientist in 2018, and worked on several open-source data analysis tools as well as inter-domain routing research projects. He is currently the solo founder of BGPKIT.com, a software consulting company that develops open-source solutions for BGP data analysis.
As an M-Lab fellow, Zhang will study control-plane-triggered traffic performance degradation by correlating anomalous NDT traffic data with BGP information. Read the full project proposal.
Localizing Neutrality Violations | Led by Zeinab Shmeis, supported by Muhammad Abdullah and Pavlos Nikolopoulos
Zeinab Shmeis is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the Network Architecture Lab, EPFL. She is working under the supervision of Prof. Katerina Argyraki on detecting and localizing neutrality violations on the Internet. She holds a M.Sc. in computer science from the American University of Beirut (AUB), and a B.Sc. in computer science from Lebanese Public University. Along with research, she acquired industry experience by working full time and as an intern at different companies such as Murex Systems and Google. Her current research interest includes: Internet measurements, neutrality, network tomography, and statistical inferences.
Muhammad Abdullah is a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at EPFL working with Professor Katerina Argyraki. Prior to joining EPFL, he completed his undergrad in Electrical Engineering from NUST, Pakistan in 2018 followed by a master’s in Computer Science from LUMS, Pakistan in 2021. During his undergrad, he spent a summer at CERN Openlab where he developed an event-driven network automation framework for datacenter switches. His research interests lie primarily in the field of computer networking; aiming to make the Internet more transparent, fair, and accessible for everyone. His recent work on a radically new approach for rethinking Web design for affordability and inclusion appeared in HotNets 2021. His current research focuses on inferring network neutrality violations by leveraging network tomography.
Pavlos Nikolopoulos is a postdoctoral researcher working with the Network Architecture Lab (NAL) at EPFL and the Algorithmic Research in Network Information flow lab (ARNI) at UCLA. He received his PhD from EPFL under the supervision of Prof. Katerina Argyraki, and his MSc from the University of Athens, Greece. Before that, he had worked for several years as a communications engineer for the Greek Air Force. His research interests lie at the intersection of network security, system design and statistics, with a focus on network measurements, neutrality and transparency. For the past year, he has worked on group testing algorithms.
During the fellowship, Shmeis and her team will extend the Wehe application to not only detect traffic differentiation practices but localize them as well. Read the full project proposal.
Inferring QoE from active and passive measurements | Sanjay Chandrasekaran
Sanjay Chandrasekaran is a 3rd year PhD candidate advised by Arpit Gupta at University of California Santa Barbara. He earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was advised by Vyas Sekar.
As an M-Lab fellow, Chandrasekaran will be focused on understanding the relationship between QoE and the metrics we can collect through active and passive measurements. Read the full project proposal.