Nick Nick Feamster
Assistant Professor
Sloan Fellow
Networking Group
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.

CV (October 2008)
Publications
Bio

I am 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.
                                      Outside of the lab, Atlanta is a great place for running, cycling, dining, music etc.

News

Improving Internet Availability
Our paper on path splicing appeared at ACM SIGCOMM 2008.
This work was also recently funded by Cisco.

Network Security
Our work on fast monitoring of traffic subpopulations will appear at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2008
Our work on improving Internet accountability appeared at ACM SIGCOMM 2008.
Our work on behavioral blacklisting for spam filtering appeared at ACM CCS 2007.
Our paper on spam received the Best Student Paper award at SIGCOMM 2006.

Network Troubleshooting and Transparency
Our work on detecting network neutrality violations will appear at HotNets 2008 in October.
Our work on evaluating "What-If" scenarios in network configurations appeared at ACM SIGCOMM 2008.
Our paper on network-wide disruption detection appeared at SIGMETRICS 2007.

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.

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.

More details. Please see this research statement (Feb. 2007) for an overview of the research areas where my students and I are most active.
Or, see my Three-Minute Madness Slides (August 17, 2007)

I also serve on the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) Program Committee. Part of my role is to bring interesting networking research to the network operations community (i.e., operators and vendors). If you think that sounds like you, please feel free to contact me.

Projects

I am working with my students on several projects, including:

Papers

Here are some recent papers (complete list):

Students

I'm fortunate to work with some very hard-working and inspiring students.

Ph.D. Students
Sam Burnett
Shuang Hao - spam filtering, inference
Yiyi Huang (with Jim Xu) - Network Monitoring
Maria Konte - Fast-flux Detection
Murtaza Motiwala - VINI, Path Splicing, Data Center Operations
Robert Lychev (with Sasha Boldyreva)
Muhammad Mukarram Bin Tariq (with Mostafa Ammar) - Network Operations
Anirudh Ramachandran - Spam filtering, network monitoring, social networks
Vytautas Valancius - Internet economics

Masters Students
Bilal Anwer
Yogesh Mundada

Alums
Kaushik Bhandankar - Now at Google
Chris Kelly - Now at SugarCRM

Teaching

Fall 2008 - CS 4251: Computer Networking II [Previous terms: Spring 2008]
Fall 2008 - CS 7001: Introduction to Graduate Studies [Previous terms: Fall 2007, Fall 2006]
Spring 2007 - CS 7260: Internet Architectures and Protocols [Previous terms: Spring 2006]
Fall 2006 - CS 8001: Networking Research Seminar

Funding

I gratefully acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, Cisco, IBM, Department of Homeland Security, DARPA, and Yahoo.

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