Nick Feamster Assistant Professor Sloan Fellow Presidential Early Career (PECASE) Recipient Network Operations and Internet Security Lab School of Computer Science College of Computing Georgia Tech Klaus Advanced Computing Building Room 3348 feamster - gatech . edu Office: + 1 404 385 1944 I do not check voice mail. Bookmarks Twitter CV (January 2009) Publications Bio

I direct the Network Operations and Internet Security Lab at Georgia Tech.

I am always looking for strong students who are interested in computer networking, particularly network operations.

Please apply to the graduate program if my research sounds interesting to you.
                                     

Lab Overview and Latest News

• Lab Overview
  News
  Students
  Funding
  

Research

My research develops tools, techniques, and protocols to improve the availability and performance of communications networks in the face of failures, misconfiguration, and malice. Simply put, I try to help network operators do their jobs better.

Please see my lab's project web page for a list of current and past projects.

Please see this research statement (Jan. 2009) for an overview of the research areas where my students and I are most active.

Research area. My research focuses on networked computer systems, with a strong emphasis on (1) network operations; (2) network architecture and protocol design; (3) high performance (i.e., high availability, high throughput) wired and wireless networks; and (4) anti-censorship techniques and systems.

Goal. The primary goal of my research is to help network operators run their networks better, and to enable users of these networks to experience high availability and good end-to-end performance. I am strongly interested in tackling practical, real-world problems using a ``first principles'' approach, designing systems based on these principles, and implementing and deploying these systems in practice.

Approach. My research runs "from practice, to theory, back to practice". I look to the real world for inspiration and practical problems. I then design solutions to these problems that have provable properties and solid theoretical backing. Finally, I build and deploy real systems based on these solutions. This first principles approach means that I bring many "tools" to bear, from algorithms to economics to machine learning. I place a strong emphasis on transfer of these results back to practice: the resulting tools and algorithms have been adopted or applied in practice.

Papers

• Detecting Network Neutrality Violations with Causal Inference
  M. Tariq, M. Motiwala, N. Feamster, M. Ammar
  ACM SIGCOMM CoNext,
  Rome, Italy, December 2009. To appear
• Measurement Methods for Fast and Accurate Blackhole Identification with Binary Tomography
  I. Cunha, R. Teixeira, N. Feamster, C. Diot
  ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference,
  Chicago, Illinois, November 2009. To appear.
• Characterizing VLAN-Induced Sharing in a Campus Network
  A. Mansy, M. Tariq, N. Feamster, M. Ammar
  ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference,
  Chicago, Illinois, November 2009. To appear.
• Detecting Spammers with SNARE: Spatio-Temporal Network-Level Automated Reputation Engine
  S. Hao, N. Feamster, A. Gray, N. Syed, S. Krasser
  18th USENIX Security Symposium,
  Montreal, Canada, August 2009. [.pdf]
  
• Resonance: Inference-based Dynamic Access Control for Enterprise Networks
  A. Nayak, A. Reimers, N. Feamster, R. Clark
  ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Research on Enterprise Networks,
  Barcelona, Spain, August 2009. [.pdf]
  
• Building a Fast, Virtualized Data Plane with Programmable Hardware
  B. Anwer, N. Feamster
  ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Virtualized Infastructure Systems and Architectures
  Barcelona, Spain, August 2009. [.pdf]
  Top-Ranked Paper, fast-tracked to ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review
• Dynamics of Online Scam Hosting Infrastructure
  M. Konte, N. Feamster, J. Jung
  Proc. Passive and Actice Measurement Conference (PAM),
  Seoul, Korea, April 2009. [.pdf]
  Award Paper (Data)
• NANO: Network Access Neutrality Observatory
  M. Tariq, M. Motiwala, N. Feamster
  Proc. ACM SIGCOMM HotNets VII,
  Calgary, Alberta, Canada, October 2008. [.pdf]
• Fast Monitoring of Traffic Subpopulations
  A. Ramachandran, S. Seetharaman, N. Feamster, V. Vazirani
  Proc. ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference,
  Vouliagmeni, Greece, October 2008. [.pdf]
• Path Splicing
  M. Motiwala, M. Elmore, N. Feamster, S. Vempala
  Proc. ACM SIGCOMM,
  Seattle, WA, August 2008. [.pdf]
• Answering What-If Deployment and Configuration Questions with WISE
  M. Tariq, A. Zeitoun, V. Valancius, N. Feamster, M. Ammar
  Proc. ACM SIGCOMM,
  Seattle, WA, August 2008. [.pdf]
• Accountable Internet Protocol (AIP)
  D. Andersen, H. Balakrishnan, N. Feamster, T. Koponen, D. Moon, S. Shenker
  Proc. ACM SIGCOMM,
  Seattle, WA, August 2008. [.pdf]

Teaching