Nick Feamster Assistant Professor Sloan Fellow Presidential Early Career (PECASE) Recipient 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. Bookmarks Twitter CV (January 2009) 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

October 2009.

• Our paper on detecting network neutrality violations will appear in CoNext 2009.
• Our paper on a fast, programmable data plane for virtual networks, implemented on the NetFPGA platform, was the top-ranked paper at the SIGCOMM VISA workshop, and has been fast-tracked to ACM Computer Communications Review.
• I co-organized the inaugural CoC Research Day.

August 2009.

• Our work on network-level spam filtering, SNARE, will appear in the USENIX Security Symposium in Montreal.
  This work is featured on Slashdot and MetaFilter, as well as in Technology Review
• Our work on making network tomography practical and on VLAN dependency analysis will both appear at ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference in October.
• Our work on detecting network neutrality violations will appear at ACM SIGCOMM CoNext in December.
• We have three demos in the ACM SIGCOMM demo session this year, and two papers in the workshops.

June 2009. I helped organize a panel and assemble a document for providing a "data wish list" for security research for the Office of Science and Technology Policy. That document is available here.

April 2009. Our study of online scam hosting infrastructures received the award paper at Passive and Active Measurement 2009. [Data]

March 2009. NANO Released!

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 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]

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

Funding