As a research full professor at the University of Southern California’s Computer Science Department. I work with graduate students and teach classes. My research is described on its own page.
For students interested in working with me or entering USC or with questions about classes I teach please see my advice page. (Or, in semesters when I’m teaching and on campus, feel free to drop by my regular office hours, or see my graduate networking class FAQ or some academic policies.)
Student Advising
The best thing about working at ISI is the opportunity to collaborate with some really great students. Current PhD students:
- Shefali Tushar Kulkarni
- Kicho Yu
- Xiao Song
- Asma Enayet
Current undergraduates:
- Sandeep Muthu, undergraduate researcher, from National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, India
- Erica Stutz, remote undergraduate researcher, from Swarthmore College
(Our blog has some group photos: June 2021, December 2018, March 2016, August 2015, and December 2013.)
Graduated Students
And, better still are the several doctoral students worked with me and graduated (see also genealogy). (Warning: current affiliations are not always up-to-date, but please let me know about corrections.)
- A.S.M. Rizvi: PhD 2024 (USC), member of technical staff at Akamai
- Guillermo Baltra: PhD 2023 (USC), currently serving in the Chilean navy
- Basileal Imana (co-advised with Aleksandra Korolova): PhD 2023 (USC), current postdoctoral scholar at Princeton Unversity
- Abdul Qadeer: PhD 2021 (USC), member of technical staff at Educative
- Lan Wei: PhD 2020 (USC), member of technical staff at Roblox
- Calvin Ardi: PhD 2020 (USC), member of research staff at USC/ISI
- Hang Guo: PhD 2020 (USC), member of technical staff at Microsoft
- Liang Zhu: PhD 2018 (USC), member of technical staff at Microsoft
- Xun Fan: Phd 2015 (USC, jointly advised with Ramesh Govindan and Ethan-Katz Basset), member of technical staff at Microsoft
- Lin Quan: PhD 2014 (USC), member technical staff at Bank of China
- Xue Cai: PhD 2013 (USC), member technical staff at Dropbox
- Chengjie Zhang: PhD 2013 (USC), member technical staff at QualComm
- Unkyu Park: PhD 2011 (USC), member technical staff at Huyundai
- Genevieve Bartlett (co-advised with Christos Papadopoulos): PhD 2010 (USC), member research staff at USC/ISI
- Affan Syed (co-advised with Wei Ye): PhD 2009 (USC), faculty at National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Islamabad, Pakistan
- Dongjin Son (co-advised with Bhaskar Krishnamachari): PhD 2008 (USC EE Dept.), member of technical staff at Dreamworks Animation
- Rishi Sinha (co-advised with with Christos Papadopoulos): PhD 2006 (USC), member technical staff at Brocade Networks
- Athanasios (Thanos) Stathopoulos (co-advised with Deborah Estrin, at UCLA): PhD 2006 (UCLA), member of technical staff at Bell Labs
- Xinming He (co-advised with Christos Papadopoulos, at CSU): PhD 2006 (USC), member technical staff at Cisco
- Fred Stann: PhD 2006 (USC), member of technical staff at Amgen
- Alefiya Hussain (co-advised with Christos Papadopoulos): PhD 2005 (USC), member research staff at ISI
- Di-fa Chang (co-advised with Ramesh Govindan): PhD 2005 (USC), member technical staff at Google
- Deepak Ganesan (co-advised with Deborah Estrin): PhD 2004 (UCLA), faculty at U. Mass. Ahmerst (CAREER award recipient)
- Debojyoti Dutta (co-advised with Ashish Goel): PhD 2004 (USC), member of technical staff at Cisco
- Xuan Chen: PhD 2004 (USC), member of technical staff at Microsoft
- Kun-Chan Lan: PhD 2003 (USC), faculty at National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan
- Ya Xu (co-advised with Deborah Estrin): PhD 2002 (USC), member of technical staff at Cisco Systems
- Nirupama Bulusu (co-advised with Deborah Estrin): PhD 2002 (UCLA), faculty at Portland State University (CAREER award recipient)
- Chalermek Intanagonwiwat (co-advised with Deborah Estrin and Ramesh Govindan): PhD 2002 (USC), member technical staff at Cisco (previously faculty at Chulalongkorn Unversity, Bangkok, Thailand
- Polly Huang (co-advised with Deborah Estrin): PhD 1999 (USC), faculty at National Taiwan University
And graduated masters students who worked with me for an extended time:
- Aqib Nisar: MS (2018, co-advised with Ethan Katz-Bassett), member of technical staff at Google
- Zi Hu: MS (2014, and on leave from PhD program), member of technical staff at Amazon
- Muhammad Omar Khan: MS 2008 (USC, EE Dept.), member of technical staff at Cenzic, Inc.
- Ram Ramani: MS 2005 (USC, EE Dept.), member of technical staff at Dialogic
- Abhishek Rajgarhia: MS 2004 (USC), member of technical staff at Kyocera Wireless
- Hyun-ah Park: MS 2000 (USC), member of technical staff at Lucent
- Vikram Visweswariah: MS 1999 (USC), member of technical staff at Ericsson
Graduated undergraduates who worked with me for an extended time:
- Tarang Saluja, BS from Swarthmore College (2023); currently in the PhD program for economics at U Mass Amherst
- Ryan Bogutz, BS (expected) 2021 from The College of New Jersey, and summer intern at USC/ISI in 2019
- Andy Gu: BS 2018 (USC), current member technical staff at Spotify
- S. Tyler McHenry: BS 2006 (USC), member technical staff at Google
(Although I’m always glad to know where my former students are, the list of positions above is obviously not complete.)
Teaching Classes
In Spring 2025 I will be teaching DSci599, Machine Learning for a Secure Internet.
In Fall 2025 I plan to each a joint section of CSci551/651, Advanced Computer Communications (the Fall 2024 materials are available). The CSci551 section is for MS students only, while the CSci651 section is for PhD students and has a different project.
In Fall 2023 I taught CSci652, Internet Measurement. This course is taught infrequently, but e-mail me if you’re interested. This PhD-level course will problems, techniques, results, and challenges that arise in measuring the Internet, including what measurements tell us about the Internet and how to improve Internet services. A prerequesite is CSci551 or CSci651. Masters students may take CSci652 on reques, please talk to me.
Starting in Fall 2015 USC has split the beginning graduate-level networking course, CSci551, Computer Communications, into two course numbers: CSci551 and CSci651. CSci651 is targeted at PhD students, but MS students are allowed to attend with instructor permission and the expectation that class will move very quickly. MS students with speciaization in networking will be accepted, provided they are interested in a PhD-level class. The project in CSci651 will be individualized and research-focused. CSci551 is targeted at MS students and will feature a common, class-wide project that is more practical. Both courses have a similar syllabus, although CSci651 is 4 units and CSci551 is 3 units. In general, we expect CSci651 to be offered once a year and CSci551 once a semester, although not always (in FA2015 only CSci651 is offered, for example). Prior syllibi for CS551 and CS651 are (or will be) available. When we have joint CSci551/CSci651 sessions, there will be a common lecture but separate project requirements.
From Spring 2002 to Spring 2010, and Fall 2011 to Fall 2014, and in Spring 2018, I tought teaching CSci551, Computer Communications. From 1997 to 2001 I taught CSci555, Advanced Operating Systems in the Spring semester.
Prior Undergraduate Directed Research
Several undergraduates have done prior directed research with me, usually over summers:
- Sandeep Mutu (Summer 2023, co-supervised with Yuri Pradkin), examined security questions around network tunneling protocols. Part of the ISI Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, visiting ISI from National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nida, India.
- Tarang Saluja (Summer 2022, co-supervised with Yuri Pradkin), worked on comparing IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity in RIPE Atlas. Part of the ISI Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, visiting ISI from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
- Erica Stutz (Summer 2021, co-supervised with Xiao Song and Yuri Pradkin), worked on visualizing Covid-19 Work-From-Home. Part of the ISI Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, visiting ISI from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
- Ryan Bogutz (Summer 2019, co-supervised with Yuri Pradkin), worked on Internet outage reporting and analysis. Part of the ISI Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, visiting ISI from The College of New Jersey.
- Christopher Morales Ramos (Summer 2018, co-supervised with Yuri Pradkin). Worked on efficient, estimation of RTTs to many targets. Part of the ISI Research Experiences for Undergraduates program, visiting ISI from University of Puerto Rico.
- Jocelyn Rodriguez (Summer 2017, co-supervised with Calvin Ardi): browser control of anti-phishing tool, part of the USC SURE Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (a summer intern visiting from Pomona College in Pomona, California.
- Romello Goodwin (Summer 2015): crawling the reverse DNS tree, part of the USC SURE Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (a summer intern visiting from Cal Lutheran in Thousand Oaks, California.
- Qian Kun (Summer 2013): hitlist usage evaluation by darknet analysis, part of the USC/Tsinghau Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates program (a summer intern visiting from Tinsghua, Beijing, China)
- David González Huerta (Summer 2012, co-supervised with Lin Quan): evaluation of spam by country, part of the USC/UNAM Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates program.
Directed Graduate-level Research
I occasionally do directed research (short-term research projects, usually for course credit or as part of a summer internship) with promising students, usually USC masters students, but sometimes PhD students. (Undergraduates are listed above.)
- Xiao Song (Spring 2020, co-supervised with Guillermo Baltra): evaluation of IPv4 address usage
- Nguyen Tran (Spring 2015): parallel algorithms to identify network outages in large datasets
- Ziang Zhu (Spring 2015): a T-DNS version of dnssec-trigger
- Rayner Pais (Spring 2014): moving target defense for ssh
- Nikita Somaiya (Spring 2013, co-supervised with Liang Zhu): DNS over TLS
- Aditya Chawla (Spring 2012): DHCP address reuse
- Jingchun Qian (Spring 2012, co-supervised with Lin Quan): analysis of IPv4 census anomolies
- Sneha Somayaji (Spring 2012): openflow use in class and at home
- Liang Zhu (Spring 2012): secure calendar sharing
- Vikram Dixit (Fall 2010, co-supervised with Yuri Pradkin): resource-aware load balancing of Hadoop
- Anshul Pundir (Fall 2010, co-supervised with Ted Faber): coarse-grain parallelism of Unix tools
- Aniruddh Rao (Fall 2010, co-supervised with Xue Cai): video visualization of the IPv4 address space
- Andrew Goodney (Summer 2009, co-supervised with Young Cho): underwater testbed experiments
- Vimarsh Puneet (Summer 2009, co-supervised with Affan Syed): protocol stack changes for the v3 SNUSE modem and investigation of TinyOS 2
- Shu-Fen Li (Fall 2008, co-supervised with Young Cho): underwater testbed construction
- Zhihan (Sam) Lu (Fall 2008): GPS accuracy evaluation
- Prajakta Joshi (Fall 2008, co-supervised with Genevieve Bartlett): RSS traffic analysis
- Smitesh Pawar (Summer 2008, co-supervised with Xue Cai): Hadoop performance evaluation
- Abdul Qadeer (Summer 2008, co-supervised with Yuri Pradkin): bzip2 compression in Hadoop
- Muhammad Ali Amer (Spring/Summer 2007): evaluated sensornets for building evacuation
- Asif Pathan (Fall 2006, co-supervised with Fabio Silva): improved network initialization code for SCP-MAC
- Muhammad Murtaza (Fall 2005, co-supervised with Wei Ye): improved timers in S-MAC
- Clarence Chung (Summer 2005, co-supervised with Fabio Silva): diffusion over IP and IP over diffusion
- Muhammad Murtaza (Summer 2005, co-supervised with Fred Stann): correlation of radio propagation
- Affan Syed (Fall 2004): time synchronization in high-latency networks
- Rajesh Shroff (Summer 2004): reliable broadcast
- Aditi Kapoor (Fall 2003, co-supervised with Padma Haldar): 802.11 extensions in ns-2
- Aman Kapoor (Summer 2003, co-supervised with Aliefya Hussain): validation of 100Mb/s Ethernet simulation models
- Yuan Li (Summer 2003, co-supervised with Wei Ye): S-MAC schedule manipulation
- Abhishek Rajgarhia (Summer 2003, co-supervised with Fred Stann): spatio-temporal search in a sensor network
- Sushmita Aggarwal Singal (Summer 2003, co-supervised with Xuan Chen): visualization of wireless newtork protocols
- Xi Wang (Summer 2003, co-supervised with Fabio Silva): GPSR in the filter framework
- Srikanth Sundarrajan (Summer 2002): visualization of multicast protocol differences
- Yutaka Mori (Spring 2002): experimental evaluation of Geographic Adaptive Fidelity
- Bharath Krishne Gowda (Fall 2001): link-layer effects on communication
- Joon-sang Park (Summer 2000): bandwidth discovery
- Alefyia Hussain (Summer 2000): detail in Ethernet network simulation
- Art Mena (1999): understanding real audio traffic
- Deepak Ganesan (Fall 1999): network packet characterization
- Hyun-ah Park (Summer 1999): network algorithm visualization
- Eddie Hsu (Summer 1999): sensor network cluster formation
- Paul Lee (Summer 1998): distributed automatic gain control for vat
- Wen-hui Zhao (Summer 1998): web rendezvous
- Vikram Visweswariah (1998): rate-based pacing for TCP
- Dhaval Shah (Summer 1997): context-triggered activities with lcron
Some of these student’s work has resulted in published papers, and a few of these students have gone on to do PhDs with me. See my list of papers for details.