Niklas Carlsson

2022: Come join our team! We are hiring PhD candidates and Postdocs
We are looking for PhD candidates and postdocs to join our team! If you are interested in doing a PhD or Postdoc in our group, please email me your CV and research interest. Current postdoc applications can be done here and PhD applications can be done here.

Nov. 2020: Minh-Ha's publishes his AnonFACES work at WPES@CCS 2020
Congrats to Minh-Ha. Together with colleagues from KTH and Chalmers, we introduce a novel methodology and system implementation, AnonFACES, to quantify, improve and tune the privacy-utility trade-off in image de-identification. All code is shared with the paper.
Further reading: paper, code, video

June 2020: Nikita's CT root store paper
Congrats to Nikita, who just presented his first paper at IFIP Networking. The paper presents the first characterization of the root landscape of certificate transparency logs. The results are based on both active measurements and a survey of all the trusted log operators. We also share the tool developed for data collection, visualization, and analysis of the root stores.
Further reading: paper, tool,

June 2020: Three papers accepted and presented at IFIP Networking 2020
Our papers "Characterizing the Root Landscape of Certificate Transparency Logs", "Optimized Dynamic Cache Instantiation", "Performance Comparison of Messaging Protocols and Serialization Formats for Digital Twins in IoV" were all accepted and presented at IFIP Networking 2020.
Further reading: Nikita's CT roots paper, Dynamic cache instantiation paper, Daniel's digital twin's paper

Apr. 2020: Uncertainties and their effect when caching tiled 360 video paper
Efficient caching of tiled 360 video is complicated by clients adapting the quality of the downloaded tiles based on both the user's expected viewing direction and bandwidth conditions. In our ACM/SPEC ICPE 2020 paper, we presents the first data-driven characterization and evaluation of the caching opportunities seen with different video types, network condition, and other uncertainties that impact the prefetching.
Further reading: ICPE paper, video, longer arXiv version

Dec. 2019: Present two conference papers about client-side encryption in New Zealand and Australia
We are excited to have our two papers about client-side encryption in cloud storage systems published in IEEE/ACM UCC 2019 and IEEE CloudCom 2019. Both papers are based on Eric Henziger's thesis work. The first paper ("The Overhead of Confidentiality and Client-side Encryption in Cloud Storage Systems") empirically characterizes the overheads associated with using client-side encryption and was one of three papers nominated for the best paper award at IEEE/ACM UCC 2019. The second paper ("Delta Encoding Overhead Analysis of Cloud Storage Systems using Client-side Encryption") looks closer at the biggest problem identified in the first paper (i.e., effectively using delta encoding with client-side encryption).
Further reading: IEEE/ACM UCC 2019 paper (pdf}, IEEE CloudCom 2019 paper (pdf)

Nov. 2019: Sports analytics interview in LiU magasin
LiU magasin published an article (in Swedish) on our sports analytics work based on an interview with Patrick Lambrix and myself (Niklas Carlsson). This news have also appeared in LiU news (English, Swedish).
Further reading: For published results, please see our sports analytics papers; for thesis opportunities, please contact myself and Patrick Lambrix; and for our sports analytics course, please see our course website.

Oct. 2019: ACM Multimedia paper on interactive branched video streaming
Thanks to the success of Netflix movie Bandersnatch, interactive branched video have received much attention recently. However, these type of videos have traditionally relied on custom made interfaces (complicating development) and there do not exist any generic playback bar for such video. In our ACM Multimedia 2019 paper "Generalized Playback Bar for Interactive Branched Video", we present the first branched video player with a generalized playback bar that visualizes the tree-like video structure and the buffer levels of the different branches, and we perform a three-phase user study that provides interesting insights into how it and other design customization features may best be integrated into a player.
Further reading: paper

Postdoc position related to cyber security (and/or related areas)
This position is part of a collaborative project related to cybersecurity between reserachers at Linkoping University (LiU), Sweden, and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Within this project we are looking to hire a postdoc here at LiU. The LiU position is within the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP) framework and will include exchange visits to NTU. If you are interested in joining our team, please check the link below and contact Jeff Yan and myself.
Links: Description and information

Sept. 2019: Sports analytics collaboration with LHC featured in the news
Our collaborations with Linkoping Hockey Club (LHC) was recently featured both on their website and in Hockey Sverige. While this work is only a small part of our sports analytics work, as a former hockey player (who since back in Sweden, is having fun playing with LHC's "old timers"), I am very excited about this collaboration and the opportunity to potentially help the local club in their quest to become Swedish champions. Together with Patrick Lambrix, I/we would also like to remind interested students about the opportunity to join our sports analytics team (e.g., as a thesis student or as part of some other project).
Further reading: For published results, please see our sports analytics papers; for thesis opportunities, please contact myself and Patrick Lambrix; and for our sports analytics course, please see our course website.

Sept. 2019: Big congrats Raoufeh!
Raoufehsadat Hashemian (University of Calgary) just successfully defended her PhD thesis, in which she investigates the performance and scalability of software systems. As part of her thesis work, Raoufeh has done some really cool work on multicore Web servers that help improve the utilization of the servers. Joint publications related to her thesis appeared in ACM/SPEC ICPE 2013 (pdf) CCPE 2014 (pdf), ACM/SPEC ICPE 2017 (pdf), IoT 2019 (pdf). Since a few years back, Raoufeh works at a software company in Calgary.
Further reading: ACM/SPEC ICPE 2013, CCPE 2014, ACM/SPEC ICPE 2017, IoT 2019.

Aug. 2019: Fake news project delivers first paper at IEEE/ACM ASONAM 2019
This work was done together with eight excellent students from out IT program. In the work, we present a novel longitudinal measurement framework for measuring the temporal click dynamics for news articles linked on Twitter, and the first analysis of how the number of clicks changes over time. The work is motivated by a desire to better understand spreading of fake news, and provides an important tool for deeper analysis of the temporal click dynamics of news on Twitter. The paper can be found here.
Further reading: Paper

Announcing PhD position within CUGS (deadline: August 30, 2019)
We are currently advertising a PhD in position in Computer Science here at Linkoping University (LiU) on topics related to my research to empower and optimize tomorrow's interactive services delivered over the internet. If you are interested in joining our team and want to do research on topics related to the project (or more broadly, my research profile/interest), please do not hesitate to send me an email and/or apply directly as per the provided links below.
Links: Project description, Official job advertisement (including information how to apply)

Aug. 2019: Hockey research update
As some of you may know, both Patrick Lambrix and I are big hockey enthusiast. We are therefore excited to report the publication of two recent papers related to hockey. First, the paper "Player Impact Measures for Scoring in Ice Hockey" was published in MathSport International Conference (MathSport), and second, a poster paper titled "An Ontology for Ice Hockey" was published at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC). As always, we are of course also actively looking for thesis workers that may be interested in joining our sports analytics team.
Further reading: MathSport 2019 paper, ISWC 2019 poster

Apr. 2019: Erik presents "multi-fractal features" paper at INFOCOM workshop
Our excellent MSc thesis student, Erik Arestrom, presents his paper "Early online classification of encrypted traffic streams using multi-fractal features" at the IEEE INFOCOM workshop on Intelligent Cloud Computing and Networking. The paper demonstrates and evaluates an interesting application of multi-fractal feature extraction based on time series data.
Further reading: paper

Dec. 2018: Minimizing delivery costs in cloud-based caching systems
Cloud services and other third-party infrastructures allow resource scaling based on current demands. Within this context, an important question becomes how an individual content provider best should minimize its delivery costs when storage and bandwidth resources are elastic? In our IFIP Performance 2018 paper, we address this important question.
Further reading: paper

Sept. 2018: Sports analytics papers on player evaluation in both ice hockey and football
Our sports analytics papers "Player Pairs Valuation in Ice Hockey" and "Player Valuation in European Football" appear at the ECML/PKDD workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics (MLSA @ECML/PKDD) in Dublin, Ireland. Recommended read for sports interested! :) Open thesis projects are also available in our sports analytics group.
Further reading: Hockey paper, Football paper, Sports analytics group page

June 2018: MMSys 2018 presentation or 360 video streaming paper
Our 360 video streaming paper "The Prefetch Aggressiveness Tradeoff in 360 Video Streaming", presented at ACM MMSys 2018, presents insights from the optimized prefetch aggressiveness tradeoffs (derived here) for different 360 video categories, taking into account the empirically observed (and here characterized) head movement patters when viewing these videos and that only a limited fraction of the full view is displayed at each point in time.
Further reading: Paper

June 2018: Bandwidth cap with boosting paper presented IEEE/ACM IWQoS 2018
Extremely fun to be back in Calgary and Banff, where I have many great memories and friends. As warmup for Monday's IEEE/ACM IWQoS presentation, I also had a chance to play some ice hockey with my teammate/friend/collaborator Martin Arlitt. Thanks Martin! Ohh, and the paper ... that too is something to be excited about. Nice paper that serves as the final piece of Vengat's thesis work. In this paper, we present (i) a comprehensive study highlighting the benefits and drawbacks of using a fixed rate caps, (ii) a novel cap-based boost framework that consists of network-side boosting and boost-aware client-side rate adaptation algorithms, and (iii) experimental insights from implementing and testing these mechanisms under a wide range of scenarios.
Further reading: Paper

May 2018: Vengat's Graduation Ceremony
Very exciting day as Vengat (Vengatanathan Krishnamoorthi) earned his doctorate hat at this year's graduation ceremony. Congrats Vengat, you made me/us very proud! In honor of Vengat's PhD, I got a chance to wear my own PhD gown (from University of Saskatchewan). In general, it was a big day at ADIT, as also Marcus Bendtsen, Valentina Ivanova, and Zlatan Dragisic got their doctorate hats and Andrei Gurtov was promoted to full Professor. Big congrats to the whole group!
Further reading: Vengat's website, Research description

May 2018: Our Stanley Cup analysis paper accepted and online just before the finals
We are currently in the middle of a very exciting Stanley Cup playoff, awaiting a final between the Vegas Golden Knights and Washington Capitals. Today, many TV viewers use Twitter and other microblogging services to share their opinions and thoughts as these games unfold on TV. Our paper "A Second Screen Journey to the Cup: Twitter Dynamics during the Stanley Cup Playoffs", recently accepted to TMA 2018, presents analysis and insights into the Twitter usage during the end of the National Hockey League (NHL) regular season and the 2015 Stanley Cup playoffs.
Further reading: TMA 2018 paper

Mar. 2018: Congrats Vengat to his PhD
Vengatanathan Krishnamoorthi successfully defended his PhD thesis titled "Efficient HTTP-based Adaptive Streaming of Linear and Interactive Videos" on Mar. 13. The thesis includes highlights from his papers presented in IEEE MASCOTS 2013 (pdf), ACM SIGCOMM workshop FhMN 2013 (pdf), ACM Multimedia 2014 (pdf), ACM Multimedia 2015 (pdf), ACM MMSys 2017 (pdf), and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, July 2017 (pdf). Additional papers, not included in the thesis, include papers at IEEE ICC 2017 (pdf) and ACM MMSys 2018 (pdf).
Further reading: Vengat's website, Research description

Oct. 2017: Video of my 2016 keynote at IEEE WNM @ LCN is now online ...
The keynote gives a high-level overview of some of our work on YouTube popularity dynamics and third-party authentication, as well as some results from our recent IEEE TPDS paper in which we model and analyze the impact of "one-timers" (or "one-hit wonders") on caching.
Further watching (and reading): Video, slides, publications

June-July 2017: Three more journal papers online
We had three journal papers (in IEEE TMM, IEEE TPDS, and Elsevier Computer Networks) and a magazine paper (in IEEE Communications Magazine) published in June/July. These papers spans topics from optimized interactive streaming where users can select their own viewpoint (pdf), an analysis of the popularity dynamics and caching optimizations that are seen on an edge network (pdf), a framework for collaborative detection of BGP routing attacks (doi), and a measurement-driven characterization of the TLS/SSL trust landscape (pdf). Pre-print of all papers are available from my publication list.
Further reading: publication list,

July 2017: Can you trust that your (many) HTTPS connections are secure?
Our society increasingly relies on web-based services like online banking, shopping, and socializing. Many of these services heavily depend on secure end-to-end transactions to transfer personal, financial, and other sensitive information. At the core of ensuring secure transactions are the HTTPS protocol and the "trust" relationships between many involved parties, including users, browsers, servers, domain owners, and the third-party Certification Authorities (CAs) that issue certificates binding ownership of public keys with servers and domains. Our recently published IEEE Communications Magazine article (pdf) published in July 2017 presents an overview of the current trust landscape and provides statistics to illustrate and quantify some of the risks facing typical users.
Further reading: published article (doi link), pre-print,

June 2017: Vengat presents our BUFFEST paper at ACM MMSys 2017
This paper presents a framework that helps network providers ensure that their customers enjoy good playback experiences. In particular, our BUFFEST framework provides a novel and effective approach to network flow classification of both encrypted (HTTPS) and non-encrypted (HTTP) flows that allows operators to identify streaming clients' with low-buffer conditions, so to apply policies that help avoid playback stalls.
Further reading: paper,

Mar. 2017: PAM 2017 paper characterizes how Certificate Transparency (CT) logs are used in practice
Recent events involving large Certificate Authorities (e.g., fraudulent certificates causing Google to gradually removing trust for Symantec certificates and limiting the maximum lifetime for newly issued certificates from Symantec) demonstrate the importance of Certificate Transparency (CT). In our paper "A First Look at the CT Landscape: Certificate Transparency Logs in Practice", we present the first large-scale characterization of the CT landscape. Our characterization highlights similarities and differences in public CT logs, their usage, and the certificates they include.
Further reading: Paper,

Dec. 2016: Congrats to Rahul Hiran, defending his PhD thesis
Rahul Hiran successfully defended his PhD thesis titled "Collaborative Network Security: Targeting Wide-area Routing and Edge-network Attacks" on Dec. 2. In honor of his PhD, we can look back at much of the exciting work that he did in the area of wide-area BGP routing security and the design of collaborative security mechanisms. In particular, his thesis covers a characterization of the China Telecom incident (published at PAM 2013), a distributed alliance framework for collaborative BGP monitoring and prefix-based security, called PrefiSec (ACM WISCS @ CCS 2014), the CrowdSec paper (IEEE CNS 2015), and an evaluation of the scale, size, and locality aspects of a wide range of collaborative BGP security mechanisms (IFIP Networking 2016).
Further reading: Defense slides, Rahul's website, Research description (with paper links)

Nov. 2016: Keynote at IEEE WNM @ LCN
Give keynote about our work on YouTube popularity dynamics and third-party authentication, also including some exciting results from our latest IEEE TPDS paper in which we model and analyze the impact of "one-timers" (or "one-hit wonders") on caching.
Further reading/watching: Talk slides, video, publications

Nov. 2016: Third-party tracking characterization and user action identification in HTTPS traffic @ IEEE LCN
Do you know how tracked you are when surfing the Internet? And, do you think using HTTPS helps protect you from tracking? Our two IEEE LCN papers provides some insights. First, in our paper "Third-party Tracking on the Web: A Swedish Perspective" we characterize the third-party tracking landscape and provides insights into how much tracking coverage different organizations and tracking services may have. We also show that sites implementing HTTPS may in fact use more tracking than other sites. In our second paper, "Identifying User Actions From HTTP(S) Traffic", we instead look at the tracking that an operator may do. Here, we implement and test timing-based classifiers that identifies user actions in HTTP(S) traffic. We also present a rigorous and automated evaluation framework which we use for the evaluation. The classifiers can operate at the HTTP level, on a per-flow level, or using packet-level information. Among other things, this papers therefore provides insights into how much information about user activity can be gained also using network data. This quetsion is motivated by more and more traffic being encrypted and delivered over HTTPS.
Further reading: Tracking paper, User action identification paper

Nov. 2016: Congrats to Vengat who successfully defended his Licentiate
Vengatanathan Krishnamoorthi successfully defended his Licentiate thesis titled "Efficient and Adaptive Content Delivery of Linear and Interactive Branched Videos" on Nov. 4. The thesis includes highlights from his papers presented in IEEE MASCOTS 2013 (pdf), ACM SIGCOMM workshop FhMN 2013 (pdf), and ACM Multimedia 2014 (pdf).
Further reading: Defense slides, Vengat's website, Research description,

Nov. 2016: Grant approved from Swedish Research Council (VR)
My VR grant on "Optimized Protocols for Delivering Tomorrow's Streaming Services" was approved (2017-2020). More news on this project to come.
Further reading: Example papers at ACM Multimedia 2014, ACM Multimedia 2015, ACM SIGCOMM workshop FhMN 2013, and IEEE TPDS.

Sept. 2016: Exciting news and congrats to Anna Vapen, our latest PhD graduate
Anna Vapen successfully defended her PhD thesis titled "Web Authentication using Third-Parties in Untrusted Environments" on Sept 30. In honor of her PhD, we can look back at much of the exciting work that she did in the area of third-party authentication, including her conference papers in PAM 2014 (pdf), IFIP SEC 2015 (pdf), ACM CODASPY 2015 (pdf), UEOP@NDSS 2016 (pdf), and 2016 magazine article in IEEE Internet Computing (pdf).
Further reading: Defense slides, Anna's website, Research description

Sept. 2016: One-timer paper accepted to IEEE TPDS
Our paper "Ephemeral Content Popularity at the Edge and Implications for On-Demand Caching" is accepted to IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (IEEE TPDS). This paper considers the problem that the ephemeral content popularity seen with many content delivery applications can make indiscriminate on-demand caching in edge networks highly inefficient, since many of the content items that are added to the cache will not be requested again from that network. We call these items one-timers (or one-hit wonders), design more selective edge-network caching policies, and demonstrate the need for such policies through an analysis of a dataset recording YouTube video requests from users on an edge network over a 20-month period. We also develop a novel workload modelling approach for such applications, apply it to study the performance of alternative edge caching policies, including indiscriminate caching and cache on k-th request for different k, before finally quantifying and exploring the potential room for improvement from use of other possible predictors of further requests.
Further reading: paper

May. 2016: Does size matter? Scale? Locality?
Our IFIP Networking paper answers the classic question if size matters ... and if locality and scale matter, for that matter! More specifically, we use measurement data to evaluate some promising, previously proposed techniques for preventing and detecting routing attacks in cases where the techniques are implemented by different subsets of Autonomous Systems (AS), and answer questions regarding which ASes need to collaborate, the importance of the locality and size of the participating ASes, and how many ASes are needed to achieve good efficiency when different subsets of ASes collaborate. Our results and answers to the above questions help determine the effectiveness of potential incremental rollouts of different classes of detection/prevention techniques.
Further reading: paper

Mar. 2016: eeeBond (or "Tripple-e Bond") paper runner-up for best research paper award at ICPE 2016
The paper "Optimized eeeBond: Energy Efficiency with non-Proportional Router Network Interfaces" was presented during a special paper award candidate session, but unfortunately fell short to a paper by Giuliano and colleagues. Congrats Weikun, Giuliano, Ajay, and Manoj!
Further reading: paper

Mar. 2016: IEEE Internet Computing article online
Our article "A Look at the Third-Party Identity Management Landscape" is now published. In this article, we provide an overview of third-party identity management's current landscape. Using datasets collected through manual identification and large-scale crawling, we answer questions related to which sites act as Relaying Parties (RPs), which sites are the most successful Identify Providers (IDPs), and how different classes of RPs select their IDPs.
Further reading: article on publisher site

Feb. 2016: SIGMETRICS TPC meeting and workshop
Attending the SIGMETRICS/Performance TPC meeting at Columbia University, NY. The slides for my workshop presentation can be found here. The conference will take place in Antibes Juan-les-Pins, France, in June 2016.
Further reading: workshop slides, conference website

Jan. 2016: Revenue-maximizing and Truthful Online Auctions for Dynamic Spectrum Access
Nice start to the New Year! Two papers at IEEE/IFIP WONS 2016, including our work on revenue-maximizing and truthful online actions for secondary spectrum.
Further reading: paper

Jan. 2016: Bredbandskollen project and crowd-sourced network measurements
Our paper on using crowd-sourced network measurements for performance prediction (e.g., using performance maps) will be presented at IEEE/IFIP WONS 2016. In this work we use a large-scale crowd-sourced dataset from Bredbandskollen, Sweden's primary speedtest service, to evaluate the prediction accuracy and achievable performance improvements with such data.
Further reading: paper

Sept. 2015: HBO to make "interactive branched video" in "choose your own adventure" project with Steven Soderbergh
It looks like interactive and personalized video streaming may be taking another big step towards going mainstream. Based on recent news it appears that Steven Soderbergh is making an interactive "choose your own adventure" project for HBO. In the past other big companies such as BBC have used "interactive branched videos" for interactive news such as Quantum thinking: Cats to computers. Other creative examples can be found on sites such as Interlude. Going mainstream is expected to provide many new use cases for the HTTP-based Adaptive Streaming (HAS) system proposed and optimized in our ACM FhMN@SIGCOMM 2013 best-paper-award paper and ACM Multimedia 2014 paper, respectively. Alternative optimized solutions (for the broadcast or multicast domains) are provided in our IEEE Transactions on Multimedia paper (from 2008).

July 2015: Paper accepted at ACM Multimedia 2015
Internet users are increasingly impatient! In our paper "Bandwidth-aware Prefetching for Proactive Multi-video Preloading and Improved HAS Performance", which was accepted to Proc. ACM Multimedia 2015, we take a big step towards removing stalls and improving the overall video streaming experience of users. The paper includes the design, implementation, and evaluation of an HTTP-based Adaptive Streaming (HAS) solution that provides careful prefetching and buffer management, which reduces the startup times of alternative videos that the user may want to watch next by an order of magnitude, while simultaneously improving the playback quality of the streaming video itself.
Further reading: paper

July 2015: Paper accepted at IEEE CNS 2015
Our paper "Crowd-based Detection of Routing Anomalies on the Internet" was accepted to IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (IEEE CNS) 2015.
Further reading: paper

June 2015: ACM SIGMETRICS election results
I am proud and honored to have been elected to be the ACM SIGMETRICS Secretary-Treasurer, starting on July 1, 2015.
Results: https://www.acm.org/sigs/elections/sigmetrics-2015-results,

June 2015: Available positions as Senior Lecturer
We are looking for new co-workers. Up-to two Senior Lecturer positions in Systems Software and Networking, at the Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Sweden.
More information: See vacancies,

Mar. 2015: Outstanding poster award at ACM CODASPY
Congratulations Anna! Our poster "Information Sharing and User Privacy in the Third-party Identity Management Landscape" received an outstanding poster award at ACM CODASPY 2015. The same week, the full paper (with the same title) is also accepted at IFIP SEC 2015.
Further reading: ACM CODASPY poster paper, IFIP SEC paper

2015: TPC-chair IEEE MASCOTS 2015
I am TPC-chair with Giuliano Casale (Imperial College London, UK) for IEEE MASCOTS 2015, located in Atlanta, GA, October 5-7, 2015. We have a very strong TPC and are looking forward to many interesting paper submission (deadline March 30, 2015).
Conference website: IEEE MASCOTS 2015

Dec. 2014: Positive "Green Domino" Incentive Effects
Internet traffic is routed through a sequence of connected routers. Clearly, the actions taken by one router can affect both the performance and the potential energy savings that neighboring routers can achieve. With high energy costs, operators increasingly often use "green" (or energy saving) adaptive link rate (ALR) policies at their routers to save money. The implementation of such policies therefore raises questions such as what impact one router implementing these policies may have on the potential energy savings that other routers can achieve. In our recent ACM/SPEC ICPE 2015 paper, "Green Domino Incentives: Impact of Energy-aware Adaptive Link Rate Policies in Routers", we investigate this and other related questions, and show that implementation of these policies can have positive cascading ("green domino") incentive effects.
Further reading: paper

July 2014: "Branched video" paper accepted at ACM Multimedia 2014
Interactive branched video (sometimes also called nonlinear or multipath streaming) allows users to select their own paths through the video and provides creative content designers with great personalization opportunities. In our paper "Quality-adaptive Prefetching for Interactive Branched Video using HTTP-based Adaptive Streaming", accepted to Proc. ACM Multimedia 2014, we show how the playback quality for branched video can be optimized using branch-aware prefetching policies, while ensuring ensure seamless playback without playback interruptions.
Further reading: paper

June 2014: "Geographically distributed clouds" paper accepted at IFIP Performance 2014
Our paper "Caching and Optimized Request Routing in Cloud-based Content Delivery Systems", which considers caching and request routing optimization in geographically distributed clouds, is accepted to Proc. IFIP Performance 2014.
Further reading: please see publications

Apr/May 2014: "Dynamic content allocation" paper at IEEE INFOCOM 2014
Present our paper "Dynamic Content Allocation for Cloud-assisted Service of Periodic Workloads" at Proc. IEEE INFOCOM 2014.
Further reading: paper

Apr. 2014: Research trip to Canada (UofS and UofC)

Mar. 2014: "Scalable Multicore" paper in CCPE
Our paper "Characterizing the Scalability of a Web Application on a Multi-core Server" appears in Concurrency and Computation Practice and Experience (CCPE), Wiley. This paper should be of interest to anybody that wants to get the most out of their multicore system.
See publications for paper and details.

Mar. 2014: "Third-party Identity Management" paper at PAM
Anna presented our paper "Third-party Identity Management Usage on the Web" at Proc. PAM 2014.
Further reading: paper

Oct. 2013: PhD defence in the Netherlands
External commitee member at Adele Lu Jia's PhD defence, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands.

Aug 2013: Best Paper Award at ACM FhMN
Our paper "Empowering the Creative User: Personalized HTTP-based Adaptive Streaming of Multi-path Nonlinear Video" is given the Best Paper Award in the ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Future Human-Centric Multimedia Networking (FhMN) 2013 and will appear in a special issue of ACM CCR.
Further reading: paper

Aug. 2013: Three papers accepted and presented at IEEE MASCOTS 2013
Our papers "Helping Hand or Hidden Hurdle: Proxy-assisted HTTP-based Adaptive Streaming Performance", "On Zipf Models for Probabilistic Piece Selection in P2P Stored Media Streaming", and "Revisiting Popularity Characterization and Modeling for User-generated Videos" were all accepted and presented at IEEE MASCOTS 2013.
See publications for papers and details.

July 2013: The right to be forgotten
You have likely heard of the many people suffering from photos they wish never would have been posted online, or maybe even seen the much talked about suicide note video made by a girl that could not remove an online photo she wanted forgotten. Our paper "A Peer-to-Peer Agent Community for Digital Oblivion in Online Social Networks" presents a solution to help these people towards the right to be forgotten. (See publications for details)

June 2013: ACM Greenmetrics 2013
For the fifth straight year I am co-organizing the GreenMetrics workshop collocated and sponsored by ACM SIGMETRICS. The workshop takes place at at CMU, Pittsburgh, PA, on June 17. We will have a great program with very good keynote speakers.
Further reading: workshop page

June 2013: PhD defence in Norway
External examiner at Tomas Kupka's PhD defence, Simula and University of Oslo, Norway.

May 2013: Research visits to NICTA (Australia) and University of Auckland (New Zeeland)

Mar 2013: Multicore paper accepted and presented at ACM/SPEC ICPE
Joint work "Improving the Scalability of a Multi-core Web Server", with Raoufehsadat Hashemian (University of Calgary), Diwakar Krishnamurthy (University of Calgary), and Martin Arlitt (HP Labs) presented at ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE).
Further reading: paper

Mar. 2013: Accepted PAM paper on the much debated China Telecom Incident
Traffic interception using route hijacks is a huge threat to individuals, organizations, and entire countries. Using route hijacks miscreants can intentionally misdirect Internet traffic to take paths through their networks. With much sensitive information being carried over the Internet, this emerging global problem is becoming increasingly important to understand and address. In our paper "Characterizing Large-scale Routing Anomalies: A Case Study of the China Telecom Incident", which appeared in Proc. Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM), March 2013, we characterize and analyze a much debated such event. This work was also recently featured in a Citizen Lab blog post.
Further reading: paper, Citizen Lab blog

Feb 2013: First two community highlights features in IEEE STC-SC newsletter
Dr. Canturk Isci (IBM) and I have been working on a community highlight feature for the IEEE STCSC monthly newsletter. Our first two features highlight the research of Professor Magaret Martonosi (Princeton University) and Dr. Partha Ranganathan (Hewlett Packard Labs).
Further reading February issue

Feb. 2013: Docent lecture
Exciting times, as I present my docent lecture and gets upgraded to Associate Professor (docent).

Feb. 2013: Dynamic swarm management paper accepted and published in IEEE/ACM ToN
Our paper "Centralized and Distributed Protocols for Tracker-based Dynamic Swarm Management" appears in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN). (See publications for details)

Jan/Feb. 2013: Power-law paper accepted and published in IEEE Network
Our paper "A Tale of the Tails: Power-laws in Internet Measurements" in which we look at power-laws in Internet measurements is published in IEEE Network.
(See publications for details)

Jan/Feb. 2013: PC Meeting ACM SIGMETRICS 2013
I recently attended the PC meeting in Pittsburgh, PA. The conference will appear at CMU in June 2013.
Further reading: conference website

Dec. 2012: "Scalable Anonymity Protocols" article published in Performance Evaluation
Overhead and scalability is an issue for many existing anonymity protocols, including Tor. Our most recent Performance Evaluation paper "Performance Modeling of Anonymity Protocols" presents the design and analysis of scalable anonymity protocols.
Further reading: paper

Oct. 2012: Two papers accepted and presented at IEEE LCN 2012
Presented our papers "Dynamic File Bundling for Large-scale Content Distribution" and "Characterizing Cyberlocker Traffic Flows" at IEEE LCN. (See publications for details)

Sept. 2012: Optimized tradeoffs between Cloud, P2P, and Servers
Present our paper "Tradeoffs in Cloud and Peer-assisted Content Delivery Systems" at IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P) 2012.
(See publications for details)

Aug. 2012: Congrats Aniket and Youmna!
Two of the PhD students that I have been working with over last few years recently graduated: Aniket Mahanti (University of Calgary, Canada) and Youmna Borghol (UNSW and NICTA, Australia). Dr. Mahanti has taken a job as an assistant professor at University of Auckland, New Zeeland. Dr. Borghol is now a Data Analytics Manager at MediaCom, Australia.

Aug. 2012: ACM KDD
Present our paper "The Untold Story of the Clones: Content-agnostic Factors that Impact YouTube Video Popularity", at the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), Beijing, China. This work was done during Youmna Borghol's internship at Linkoping University.
Further reading: paper

Aug. 2012: File-hosting paper at IEEE MASCOTS 2012
Aniket presents our paper "Content Sharing Dynamics in the Global File Hosting Landscape" at IEEE MASCOTS. (See publications for details)

July 2012: Research trip to Canada (UofS and UofC)

June 2012: ACM Greenmetrics 2012
For the fourth straight year I am co-organizing the GreenMetrics workshop collocated and sponsored by ACM SIGMETRICS. The workshop takes place at Imperial College, London, England, on June 11. We will have a great program with very good keynote speakers.
Further reading: workshop page

June 2012: Analytic BT-like VoD paper in IEEE/ACM ToN
Our paper "Insights on Media Streaming Progress using BitTorrent-like Protocols for On-Demand Streaming" appears in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN). (See publications for details)

June 2012: Passive Crowd-based Monitoring paper at IEEE ICC 2012
Jerry presents our paper "Passive Crowd-based Monitoring of World Wide Web Infrastructure and its Performance" at IEEE ICC. (See publications for details)

Mar. 2012: Zongpeng Li (University of Calgary, Canada) visits
During his visit, Professor Li gives a talk "The multiple unicast network coding conjecture and a geometric framework for studying it".

Mar 2012: Local and Global BitTorrent Workload Dynamics paper at PAM 2012
Presented our paper "A Longitudinal Characterization of Local and Global BitTorrent Workload Dynamics" at PAM. (See publications for details)

Jan/Feb. 2012: PC Meeting ACM SIGMETRICS 2012
I recently attended the PC meeting in New York, NY. The conference will take place at Imperial College, London, England in June 2012.
Further reading: conference website

Nov/Dec. 2011: Research trip to Canada (UofS and UofC)

Oct. 2011: Two papers at IFIP PERFORMANCE 2011
Our papers "Characterizing and Modeling Popularity of User-generated Videos" and "Characterizing the File Hosting Ecosystem: A View from the Edge" were both accepted and presented at IFIP PERFORMANCE 2011.
Further details: See publications for papers and datasets

Oct. 2011: Bye Youmna!
Youmna Borghol, Ph.D. student (UNSW and NICTA, Australia) finishes up her six month internship (Apr. 2011 - Oct. 2011) with me and heads back to Australia to finish up her PhD thesis. You will be missed Youmna!

Oct. 2011: Sebastien Ardon (NICTA, Australia) visits
During the visit, Dr. Ardon will talk about "Geolocating IP Addresses in Cellular Data Networks" and Youmna Borghol will present our joint paper "Characterizing and Modeling Popularity of User-generated Videos", which will appear in IFIP PERFORMANCE 2011 next week.
Further reading: paper

Sept. 2011: Peer discovery/mixing paper at IEEE P2P 2011
Presented our paper "Efficient and Highly Available Peer Discovery: A Case for Independent Trackers and Gossiping" at IEEE P2P. (See publications for details)

Sept. 2011: Bye Ajay!
Ajay Gopinathan finishes up his Postdoc (July 2011 - Sept 2011) with me and heads of for Google, CA, USA. Good luck with the new job at Google Ayaj!

2011: Intelligence Gathering and Control
Our paper "Characterizing Intelligence Gathering and Control on an Edge Network" appears in ACM TOIT.
(See publications for details)

2011: Journal paper success
During 2011 we have great success with some of our journal submissions. Our two most recent papers "Characterizing Web-based Video Sharing Workloads" and "Characterizing Intelligence Gathering and Control on an Edge Network" appear in ACM TWEB and ACM TOIT, respectively.
(See publications for details)

Jun/Jul. 2011: Research trip to Canada (UofS and UofC)

June 2011: ACM Greenmetrics 2011
For the third straight year I am co-organizing the GreenMetrics workshop collocated and sponsored by ACM SIGMETRICS, both at FCRC 2011. The workshop takes place in San Jose, CA, on June X.
Further reading: workshop page

June 2011: Anirban Mahanti (NICTA, Australia) visits

Mar/Apr. 2011: Research trip to Canada (UofS and UofC)

Mar. 2011: Utilization paper at ACM/SPEC ICPE 2011
Presented our paper "Towards More Effective Utilization of Computer Systems" at ACM/SPEC ICPE. (See publications for details)

Nov-Jan. 2010/2011: Research trip to Canada (UofS and UofC)

Sept. 2010: First day at Linköping University
After 2 great years at University of Calgary, I begin the next chapter in my academic career. First day as an Assistant Professor.

NEWS: General note
I am always looking for new graduate students, as well as students interested in thesis projects and/or general research-oriented projects.
Further reading: positions and projects