Summer School on Networking

Talk Title: Special Topics in Wireless Systems Design

Victor Bahl (opens in new tab) is a Principal Researcher and founding Manager of the Networking Research Group (opens in new tab) in Microsoft Research Redmond (opens in new tab). He is responsible for directing research activities that push the state-of-art in the networking of devices and systems. He and his group build proof-of-concept systems, engage with academia, publish papers in prestigious conferences and journals, publish software for the research community, and work with product groups to influence Microsoft’s products. His personal research interests span a variety of topics in wireless systems design, mobile networking, and network management. He has built and deployed several seminal and highly cited networked systems, with total of over 6000 citations; he has authored over 80 papers and 100 patent applications, 60 of which have issued;he has delivered over a dozen keynote talks; he is the founder and past Chairperson of ACM SIGMOBILE (opens in new tab); the founder and past Editor-in-Chief of ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review (opens in new tab), and the founder and steering committee chair of the Mobile Systems Conference (opens in new tab); He has served as the General Chair of SIGCOMM (opens in new tab) and MobiCom, and is serving on the steering committees of six IEEE & ACM conferences; he is served on the board of over half-a-dozen journals; on several NSF and NRC panels, and on over six dozen program committees. Dr. Bahl received Digital’s Doctoral Engineering Fellowship Award in 1995 and SIGMOBILE’s Distinguished Service Award (opens in new tab) in 2001. In 2004, Microsoft nominated him for the innovator of the year award. He became an ACM Fellow (opens in new tab) in 2003 and an IEEE Fellow (opens in new tab) in 2008. More on him here (opens in new tab).

Talk Title: Understanding Wireless Local Area Network Performance via Stochastic Models

Anurag Kumar (opens in new tab) obtained his B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and the PhD degree from Cornell University, both in Electrical Engineering. He was then with Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, N.J., for over 6 years. Since 1988 he has been with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, in the Dept. of Electrical Communication Engineering, where he is now a Professor, and is also the Chairman of the Electrical Sciences Division. From 1988 to 2003 he was the Coordinator at IISc of the Education and Research Network Project (ERNET), India’s first wide-area packet switching network. His area of research is communication networking, specifically, modeling, analysis, control and optimization problems arising in communication networks and distributed systems. Recently his research has focused primarily on wireless networking. He has been elected Fellow of the IEEE, and the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), both from 2006, and has been a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) since 1998. He received the IISc Alumni Award for Excellence in Engineering Research for 2008. He was an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Networking, and of IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. He is a coauthor of the postgraduate text-books “Communication Networking: An Analytical Approach,” (published in 2004) and “Wireless Networking” (published in March 2008), both by Kumar, Manjunath and Kuri, and published by Morgan-Kaufman/Elsevier.

Talk Title: Detecting And Defending Against Internet Attacks

Vern Paxson (opens in new tab) is an Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Senior Scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, also in Berkeley. He codirects the NSF-sponsored Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses, which pursues a variety of research efforts in detecting and blocking network-borne attacks. He is an ACM Fellow and recipient of the 2008 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work on Internet measurement.

Data Center Networks: Transport Mechanisms, Buffering Algorithms, Measurement

Balaji Prabhakar (opens in new tab) is on the faculty of the EE and CS Departments at Stanford. He is interested in network algorithms and has worked extensively on switching routing, bandwidth partitioning, traffic measurement and load balancing algorithms. He has recently been involved in developing a congestion control algorithm as part of the IEEE 802.1Qau Data Center Ethernet standard. He has contributed to stochastic network theory and to the application of probability in networking, coding and compression. He has received the Terman Fellowship at Stanford, the NSF Career award, the Alfred Sloan Fellowship, the Erlang Prize and the Rollo Davidson Prize. He is a co-recipient of best paper awards at Hot Interconnects 2002, Infocom 2004 and ACM Sigmetrics 2008.

Talk Title: Where PHY Layer is heading in 4G cellular systems

Bhaskar Ramamurthi (opens in new tab) got his B.Tech in Electronics from IIT Madras in 1980, and his M.S. and Ph.D is Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara, in 1982 and 1985 respectively. After working at AT&T Bell Laboratories for a couple of years, he joined the faculty of IIT Madras in 1986, where he is currently Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department, and Dean of Planning for the Institute.

His areas of specialisation are Communications and Signal Processing. His research work is in Wireless Networks, Modulation and Coding, and Audio and Video Compression. He is a founding member of the TeNeT group of IIT Madras, active in developing telecom and networking technologies, and incubating companies to develop and market products based on these.

He is currently Honorary Director of the Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology, a public-private initiative to make India a wireless technology leader. CEWiT works on 4G wireless technology, in partnership with Indian industry, and participates actively in international 4G standardization.

Talk Title: Internet Routing

Jennifer Rexford (opens in new tab) is a Professor in the Computer Science department at Princeton University. From 1996-2004, she was a member of the Network Management and Performance department at AT&T Labs–Research. Jennifer is co-author of the book “Web Protocols and Practice” (Addison-Wesley, May 2001). She served as the chair of ACM SIGCOMM from 2003 to 2007, and has also served on the CRA Board of Directors and the ACM Council. Jennifer received her BSE degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1991, and her MSE and PhD degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1993 and 1996, respectively. She was the 2004 winner of ACM’s Grace Murray Hopper Award for outstanding young computer professional.

Talk Title: Structured and not so structured overlays

Antony Rowstron (opens in new tab) is a senior researcher and co-leader of the systems and networking team at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK. He received an MEng degree in Computer Systems and Software Engineering (1993) and a DPhil in Computer Science (1996) from the University of York, UK. From 1996 to 1999 he worked at Cambridge University, UK, first in the Computer Laboratory and in the Engineering Department. In 1999 he moved to Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK. His research interests are broad, covering the spectrum of systems and networking. He is best known for his work on overlays, in particular for his work on structured overlays (Distributed Hash Tables) and the applications that exploit them.

Talk Title: Network Algorithmics: How to design efficient algorithms for routers and servers

George Varghese (opens in new tab) obtained his Ph.D in 1992 from MIT. He has been a professor at UCSD since 1999. Some of the algorithms he has helped develop have found their way into commercial systems including Linux (timing wheels), the Cisco GSR (DRR), and Microsoft Windows (IP lookups). He was elected to be a Fellow of the ACM in 2002. His book on building fast router and endnode implementations called “Network Algorithmics” was published in December 2004 by Morgan-Kaufman. He co-founded a company called NetSift Inc in 2004 which was acquired by Cisco in 2005.