1. Home
  2. Announcements
  3. COMSNETS Association
  4. Contact
  5. Archive

Keynote speakers

 

 

Don Towsley

Thursday, 6 January 2011

Title: Towards a Network Measurement Science

Abstract: Network measurements are extremely important for the purpose of managing and configuring a network. They are also essential as part of controlled experiments for the purpose of designing new protocols and architectures. Consequently they are widely taken and used in current network operations and research . Unfortunately, most tools and most studies have been developed/conducted in a mostly ad hoc manner. Quite often, these tools and studies miss or make inefficient use of information contained within the measurements. Often this leads to poor quality, biased, and incorrect conclusions.

Motivated by the above observations, we will argue in this talk for the need of a network measurement science that can deal in a principled way with the issues of measurement efficiency and measurement bias. To deal with measurement efficiency, we advocate the use of Fisher information during the design of measurement experiments and measurement tools. Briefly, Fisher information measures the amount of information that a single measurement provides to the computation of a statistic such as packet loss rate. We illustrate its application to the problem of estimating flow size distribution based on packet sampling, a widely used technique for performing network measurements. In the context of measurement bias, we shift our attention to measurements leading to the characterization of graphs as commonly found in the Internet and on-line social networks. We review several studies where biased measurements have led to flawed (but widely believed) conclusions and then describe how such biases can be easily avoided.

Biography:
Don Towsley received a B.A. degree in physics and a Ph.D. degree in computer science, both from University of Texas. He is currently a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst. Professor Towsley has been a Visiting Scientist at AT&T Labs - Research, IBM Research, INRIA , Microsoft Research Cambridge, and the University of Paris 6.

Dr. Towsley's research interests include network measurement, modeling, and analysis. He serves on the editorial boards of Journal of the ACM and IEEE Journalof Selected Areas in Communications, and has served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking and on numerous editorial boards including those of IEEE Transactions on Communications and Performance Evaluation. He has been active on the program committees for numerous conferences including IEEE Infocom, ACM SIGCOMM, ACM SIGMETRICS, and IFIP Performance conferences for many years, and has served as Technical Program Co-Chair for ACM SIGMETRICS and IEEE INFOCOM, and IFIP Performance conferences. He has also served as Chair of the IFIP Working Group 7.3 on computer performance measurement, modeling, and analysis, and as an officer or advisor of ACM SIGMETRICS and ACM SIGCOMM. He is one of the founders of the Computer Performance Foundation.

Dr. Towsley has received the 2007 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computer and Communications Award , the 2007 ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award, the 2008 ACM SIGCOMM Award, the 1999 IEEE Communications Society William Bennett Award, and several conference and workshop best paper awards. He is also the recipient of the UMass Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity, the University of Massachusetts Chancellor's Medal and an Outstanding Research Award from the College of Natural Science and Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts. He has twice received IBM Faculty Fellowship Awards, and is a Fellow of the IEEE and the ACM.

Link to speaker's homepage

top

 

Jean Bolot

Thursday, 6 January 2011

Title: Mining large-scale cell phone data

Abstract: Cell phones are ubiquitous in modern life and the call records collected by network operators are a powerful tool to study the behavior of cell phone users, and how those users use network resources, at previously impossible-to-achieve scales. In this talk I will describe how the analysis of call records data, and more generally of the data generated by mobile users, is changing business models, marketing, or security. I will first present an overview of the cell phone data mining activities at Sprint Labs, considering in particular two kinds of data, namely social network data (who calls whom, how often, etc) and location data (where cell phones users are and how they move). I will then describe practical examples of insights and services derived from mining that data and will also consider interesting research challenges ahead. I will conclude the talk with a brief description of the research I will be starting at the Technicolor Lab about mining and monetizing other kinds of user data, in particular related to TV and movie activities.

A short paper describing the work is available here.

Biography:
Dr. Jean Bolot runs the Research lab of Sprint located in the San Francisco Bay area. . His research interests center around the measurement, analysis, and economics of the Internet, and in particular of the mobile Internet. Prior to joining Sprint, he was a founding team member of Ensim, a Silicon Valley company in the area of data center automation. Earlier, he did research at INRIA in France on Internet measurement and voice over the Internet. He received his MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1988 and 1991, respectively.

Link to speaker's homepage

 

top

 

Subu Goparaju

Friday, 7 January 2011

Title: Building Tomorrow's Enterprise

Abstract: The talk will center around two main themes: (1) Tomorrow’s enterprises are going to be significantly different from today’s as they are driven by newer business imperatives and they embrace new technologies, and (2) Enterprises need to partner with multiple eco-system partners in their transformational journey.

First of all, enterprises need to be more environment-friendly and be sustainable in the long run, and technologies, such as, real-time monitoring using sensors, real-time processing using edge intelligence, real-time archiving using cloud technologies, and historical analysis using next-gen analytical tools will play a major role in making that happen. Similar arguments would also apply to the domain of healthcare which is in dire need of cost reduction and catering to the largest ever ageing population in the history of the world. Banking industry is also going to undergo a massive change by introducing new commerce and novel services, such as, micro-payment, micro-trading, micro-loans, etc., and reaching out to the digital consumer through the use of technologies, such as, near field communication, digital cash, digital marketing, and so on. In addition, the banking industry is looking to be inclusive by providing ways of banking to the un-banked. Organizations need to embrace the pervasive computing technologies and paradigms, and become lot smarter and nimbler through the use of next generation digital workspace technology.

Given the above transformational need, enterprises cannot do it alone, rather they need to depend on a collaborative eco-system of partners. The partners need to do co-creation, co-innovation, co-development and co-marketing. Infosys, because of its strength in technology and software services, and its relationship with a wide range of enterprises, would be in a perfect situation to orchestrate the eco-system for building tomorrow’s enterprises.

Biography:
Subu Goparaju is Vice President and Head of Software Engineering and Technology Labs (SETLabs) the Technology Research and Innovation arm of Infosys. Subu also heads Infosys's Intellectual Property Cell (IP Cell) and the Product Incubation Engineering unit (PIE).

Subu started his career with Infosys in 1988 and spent more than 10 years in IT services and solutions delivery management. In 2000 he started SETLabs. In 2005 Subu started the Intellectual Property Cell of Infosys and is responsible for the IP protection and commercialization. Most recently Subu has been appointed the head of the Product Incubation and Engineering unit at Infosys and in that role he is responsible for building new technology and business products.

Subu is a member of the ACM India Council, Confederation of Indian Industry, Karnataka’s Innovation Forum and is member of Fraunhofer India's advisory council. He is also on the advisory boards of Global Innovation Center at Marshall School of Business at University of Southern California and Monash University – IIT Bombay Research Academy. Subu is an Electrical and Electronics Engineer from National Institute of Technology, Suratkal one of the leading engineering schools in India.

Link to speaker's homepage

top

 

Pravin Bhagwat

Friday, 7 January 2011

Title: Wireless Tsunami: how to hold on to your enterprise security perimeter

Abstract: Wi-Fi is expanding outside of an enterprise network into Smarphone/PDAs. Likewise, mobile technologies such as 3G & WiMax are making way into enterprise networks. This “convergence” of wireless technologies and mobile devices is creating new pathways for enterprise network intrusion and extrusion.

In this talk, I’ll describe several new threat scenarios involving Wi-Fi Smartphones, Access Points & Laptops. I’ll also discuss:

  • Why enterprise IT should worry about wireless consumerization;
  • What new wireless intrusion and extrusion scenarios are possible due to this unprecedented convergence;
  • What threats matter the most and how to protect against them;
  • New research challenges that need to be tackled.

Biography:
Pravin Bhagwat is an entrepreneur and a wireless security researcher. He is Co-founder and CTO of AirTight Networks where he is responsible for setting technology direction and product strategy. In the past, Pravin has served as adjunct faculty at computer science department, IIT Kanpur and at WINLAB, Rutgers University, New Jersey.

Prior to starting his entrepreneurial career, Pravin was a lead researcher at AT&T Research and IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York where he was a member of MobileIP, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth research projects. Pravin has research papers (with 1000+ citations) and 16 patents to his credit. He is also the recipient of 2005 Global Indus Technovator Award from the India Business Club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For the past two years, Pravin has also been active in several community level green initiatives and social entrepreneurship projects. Pravin has a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur, India and an MS/PhD in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park, USA.

Link to speaker's homepage

 

top

 

Partho Mishra

Saturday, 8 January 2011

Title: "Building Big-Iron Routers in the Era of Facebook"

Abstract: The Internet continues to expand rapidly in its world wide reach and capabilities. In this talk, we will look at the technology trends and the associated user behaviors that are driving the growth of the Internet. We will then enumerate a set of technical problems in networking that need to be solved in order to sustain this rapid expansion. Finally, we will present key technology innovations in network architecture and router platform design that can help create the foundation of the future Internet infrastructure.

Biography:
Dr Partho Mishra is Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Service Provider Business–India. In his current role, he is responsible for R&D activities for a family of Cisco routing and optical switching platforms. He was previously Vice President and General Manager at Marvell Semiconductors, where his technical activities focused on the development of low power wireless products. He has been involved with the creation of the first MIMO Wireless LAN and MIMO Wireless WAN technologies at Airgo Networks and Iospan Wireless, and in core networking research at AT&T Labs-Research and AT&T Bell Labs-Research. He has more than 40 issued US patents. Dr Mishra holds a B.Tech (Hons) degree in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur and MS/PhD degrees in Computer Science from University of Maryland.

top

 

Mike Eisler

Saturday, 8 January 2011

Title: NFSv4.1 and pNFS

Abstract: NFSv4.1 is the latest version of NFS, and incorporate Parallel NFS. This talk will provide an overview of NFSv4.1 and pNFS, and discuss the challenges NFSv4.1 and pNFS are expected to bring to data networks.

Biography:
Mike Eisler is a Senior Technical Director leading NetApp's Content Repository and NFS activities. Mike has authored several papers and standards on data storage, including RFCs 3530 and 5661, the NFSv4.0 and NFSv4.1 standards, respectively.

Link to speaker's homepage

 

top

 

© COMSNETS.ORG, [email protected]
Technical Co-Sponsors
 
In-Cooperation With
DIT, Govt. of India
 
Patrons
CISCO
Infosys
Alcatel Lucent
Intel
sasken
MSR India
IBM Research
netapp
Intellectual Ventures
Datacipher
Qualcomm
 
COMSNETS 2009
 
 
University Partners
University Sponsors
 
 
Community Partners
Mobile India