Systems and Networking News
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2024

Alan Turing Memorial Scholarship October 22— Each year, the Center for Networked Systems (CNS) awards the Alan Turing Memorial Scholarship and the Alan Turing Memorial Teradata Scholarship to one or more students for their academic commitment, particularly in networked systems, and their ongoing support for the LGBTQ community. This year the scholarship was awarded to Jonathan Ty for his academic achievements and his community engagement and leadership efforts. Congrats Jonathan!

October 3— Yiying Zhang became one of the first-ever Google Academic Research Award (GARA) winners for her project, "Learned Tiered Memory System: Optimizing Tiered Memory Performance with ML-Based Memory Access Pattern Prediction". Congratulations Yiying! Yiying Zhang

Katherine Izhikevich September 9— We just learned that Katherine Izhikevich has been named to this year's class of UCSD ACRS Scholars. Congrats Katherine!

May 23— Congratulations to Rajdeep Das for defending his dissertation, "Multiprocessing and Runtime Programmability on Virtualized RMT Switches". After a well-deserved vacation, Rajdeep will be starting at Microsoft Azure where he will be working on advanced networking devices. Congrats Rajdeep! Rajdeep Das

Yibo Guo July 18— Today Yibo Guo defended his dissertation, "Towards Leaner Data Centers: Energy Efficiency and Carbon Savings through Network Optimization". Yibo is going to be joining Google where he'll contribute to solving their systems and networking challenges. We're proud of you Yibo!

July 15— Today Anil Yelam defended his dissertation, "Flexible, Application-Guided Paging for Far Memory". After a brief, well-deserved break, Anil will be (re-)joining Google full time to improve the efficiency of their AI Hypercomputer--or something like that. Great job, Anil! Anil Yelam

BLE obfuscation July 10— Congratulations to Hadi Givehchian, Nishant Bhaskar, Alexander Redding, Han Zhao, Aaron Schulman, and Dinesh Bharadia for their 2024 IEEE Security & Privacy paper on obfuscating BLE fingerprints. The paper describes a practical approach for preventing attackers from tracking mobile users, effectively fixing a vulnerability they identified in previous work.

Amy Ousterhout June 27— Congrats to Amy Ousterhout and Sysnet affiliate Earlence Fernandes for winning Google Research Scholar awards! Earlence Fernandes

Alex Bellon Alisha Ukani June 7— Sysnet represents for the second year in a row! Congrats to Alex Bellon and Alisha Ukani for sweeping the "Service and Leadership" category of the CSE Doctoral awards and Katherine Izhikevich for winning the Research category for CSE Masters awards (Katherine is joining us a Ph.D. student starting this fall so she's set a high bar to start). Congrats everyone! Katherine Izhikevich

May 23— Congratulations to Stewart Grant for defending his dissertation, "Disaggregated Data Structures: Sharing and contention with RDMA and Programmable Networks". Stew is moving on to Roblox, where he will apply his talents to scaling their virutal environment. Congrats Stew! Stewart Grant

USENIX February 1— Sysnet members have a long history with USENIX. Many of us remember when the only USENIX Conferences were "Winter" and "Summer", and several of us were there at the first OSDI and the first NSDI, as USENIX became a dominant academic publisher in our field. Thus, we could not be more proud that our own George Porter has been elected to the USENIX board. Keep the flame burning George! George Porter

Stefan Savage January 31— Congrats to Stefan Savage, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick (and Geoff Voelker, the application form only allowed two names) and their students for receiving one of the first Google "Trust and Safety" Research Awards for their work focused on using Large Language Models in scam honeypots. And we hear they wrote the proposal without any help from AI! Taylor Berg-Kirkpatick

Pat Pannuto January 17— Each year the Jacbos School offers awards for faculty demonstrating exceptional Teaching or Mentorship. We were not surprised to learn that Pat Pannuto received the Outstanding Graduate Mentor award (Aaron Schulman having won just last year!) nor that Geoff Voelker received the sole award for "Outstanding Faculty Mentor". We were not surprised, but we are proud! Contrats folks! Geoff Voelker
2023

Christian Dameff and Jeff Tully October 2— The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) has announced a $9.5 million dollar award to UC San Diego to develop new ways to mitigate ransomware attacks on hospitals. This effort, led by Christian Dameff and Jeff Tully, is joint between UCSD Health and the UCSD School of Engineering (notably our own Aaron Schulman, Geoff Voelker, and Stefan Savage) and is just the latest to come out of a long standing collaboration in this space. Congrats everyone!

September 11— Congrats to Rajdeep Das and Alex Snoeren for their paper Memory Management in ActiveRMT: Towards Runtime-programmable Switches, which received the Best Paper award at ACM SIGCOMM! Rajdeep Das

Aaron Schulman August 29— Congrats to our own Aaron Schulman for his recent NSF CAREER grant and for his promotion to tenured associate professor. Congrats!

July 24— Congratulations to Nishant Bhaskar for defending his dissertation, "An Empirical Approach to Securing Wireless Access Links in Urban Areas". Nishant's unique research had him driving across Souther California and brought him in touch with both industry and government (special thanks to the folks from USSS who attended the defense). He'll next be doing crazy wireless things at MQ Prime. Congrats Nishant! Nishant Bhaskar

Euro Security and Privacy award for July 4— Congratulations to Enze "Alex" Liu (and co-authors) for winning the Best Paper award at the 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Euro S&P) for their work on insecurities in e-mail forwarding frameworks and implimentations. UCSD put out a nice summary of the work here.

June 9— Sysnet represents! Congrats to Ben Du and Audrey Randall for dominating the doctoral component of the CSE department'ss Award Ceremony tonight. Audrey received the department's "Doctoral Award for Excellence in Research" and Ben the "Doctoral Award for Excellence in Teaching" and the "Doctoral Award for Excellence in Service and Leadership". Congrats, you both make us proud! Audrey Randall And Ben Du

Grant Ho May 26— Congratulations to Grant Ho for his appointment as Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Grant was part of the inaugural class of the CSE Fellows postdoctoral program and was a joy to work with these last few years. Congrats and best of luck!

Evan Johnson at Oakland May 22— Congrats to Evan Johnson (and co-authors) for winning the IEEE S&P Distinguished Paper Award for WaVe: a verificable secure WebAssembly sandboxing runtime further shrinking the trusted computing base for Wasm! Evan Johnson at Oakland2

May 18— Congratulations to Audrey Randall who defended her dissertation today, "Names to Conjure With: Measuring and Combating Online Adversaries by Studying Their Use of Naming System". As one of many firsts during her time with us, Audrey premiered as post-defense music video reflecting on her time at UCSD. Audrey will bring her talents to Google and we wish her the best. Congrats! Audrey Randall

Ariana Mirian April 21— Congratulations to Ariana Mirian who gave a spirited defense of her dissertation, "Prioritizing Security Practices via Large-Scale Measurement of User Behavior". This was quite an event, filling room 1242 and with well-wishers from four different universities and a gaggle of companies online for the festivities. Ariana will be joining Censys in the Fall and we are looking forward to seeing what she does next. Congrats!

April 11— Congratulations to Katherine Izhikevich for receiving the 2023 Stephen L. Squires SWSIS Scholarship for Women Studying Information Security administered by Applied Computer Security Associates (ACSA) and the CRA. Katherine Izhikevich

Stefan Savage February 7— Congratulations to Stefan Savage for his election to the National Academy of Engineering!
2022

December 1— Congratulations to Audrey Randall (and her co-authors) for winning the Best Student Paper award at the 2022 APWG eCrime Symposium for her work examining the issues around malware use of blockchain naming systems. Audrey Randall

August 23— The Internet Measurement Conference results came out today and once again, UC San Diego was well-represented --- with authors on 7 of the 56 papers papers (and alumns on another 3). Congrats to Ben Du, Audrey Randall, Alisha Ukani, kc Claffy, Stefan Savage, Aaron Schulman, Alex Snoeren and Geoff Voelker on their hard work and good luck, and a special congratulations to Gautam Akiwate who hit the IMC jackpot with five of his papers accepted!

Sam Crow July 8— Congrats to Sam Crow who successfully defended his thesis today, "Security Testing Tools for Complex Cyber-Physical Systems". No doubt the only Ph.D. we've seen that involved significant chunks of a 737 in their home. Sam's next projects will have him working with Meta. Congrats!

June 1— Congrats to Gautam Akiwate who successfully defended his thesis today, "Identifying DNS Infrastructure Hijacks using Large Scale Measurements". Gautam will be starting a Postdoc with Zakir Durumeric at Stanford. Gautam has been a force for good in the department for longer than he will admit -- supporting Chez Bob, the holiday parties, sysnet outings, etc -- and we will all miss him. Gautam Akiwate

May 23— Eleven years ago, UCSD alumns Kirill Levchenko, Andreas Pitsillidis, Neha Chachra, Brandon Enright, Tristan Halvorson, Chris Kanich, He Liu, and Damon McCoy, along with UCSD faculty Geoff Voelker, Stefan Savage and their colleagues from Berkeley and Budapest, Mark Felegyhazi, Chris Grier, Christian Kreibich, Nicholas Weaver and Vern Paxson, published a comprehensive analysis of the spam criminal value chain. Today that paper, Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain and its impact was celebrated with the Test-of-Time award, presented at the 2022 IEEE Security and Privacy conference. Congrats all!

YY Zhou April 13— Fourteen years after publishing their 2008 ASPLOS paper "Learning from Mistakes -- A Comprehensive Study on Real World Concurrency Bug Characteristics", YY Zhou and her co-authors have received this year's "Most Influential Paper" award from ASPLOS for this work. Congrats to YY, Shan, Soyeon and Eunsoo!

April 4— The results of this year's NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program are out and we are delighted to share that Alisha Ukani was among the winners. Congrats Alisha! Alisha Ukani

Yizhou Shan March 4— Back-to-back defenders! Congratulations also to Yizhou Shan, who defended his dissertation today on "Distributing and Disaggregating Resources in Data Centers". Yizhou will be starting as Research Scientist at Huawei Cloud this spring.

March 3— Congratulations to Lixiang Ao, who defended his dissertation today on "Framework and Platform Support for General Purpose Serverless Computing". Lixiang will be starting at Databricks this spring. Lixiang Ao

Stewart Grant February 2— Congratulations to Stewart Grant who is one of the 2022 Meta PhD Research Fellowship winners. Stew is one of only two students selected in networking among the 37 fellows. Congrats, Stew!

January 24— More great news – Stefan Savage received a Diamond Award from the University of Washington School of Engineering, an award which honors outstanding alumni who have made significant contributions to the field of engineering. Stefan received the Distinguished Achievement in Academia award for his signature style of work that "challenges traditional investigation methods and redefines academic approaches to network security, privacy and reliability". Congratulations Stefan! Stefan Savage

Gautam Akiwate January 10— Congratulations to Gautam Akiwate (and his co-authors) for being named as a winner of the Internet Research Task Force's Applied Networking Research Prize for his work characterizing a domain hijacking risk that is an accidental byproduct of undocumented operational practices between domain registrars and registries. Gautam's award marks the second year in a row that the group has received the prize (Audrey Randall received it last year). Let's keep the streak going!
2021

December 11— Its been a long road, but after 14yrs, a bunch of jobs, founding and building up AttackIQ, the pandemic gave prodigal member Stephan Chenette the pause to finish his Masters with his master's thesis, "An Analysis Of Judgment Variability Amongst Cybersecurity Participants When Asked To Forecast Cybersecurity-related Events". A nice bit of work and proof that you can go home again. Congrats Stephan! Stephan Chenette

Alisha Ukani October 8— We just learned that our own Alisha Ukani has been named to this year's class of UCSD ACRS Foundation Fellows. Congrats Alisha!

October 6— Today, the accepted paper list for the 2021 ACM Internet Measurement Conference was announced. Of the 55 papers to appear, more than 1 in 5 have UC San Diego authors -- a record (at least for us!) Seven were submitted by authors in the systems and networking group (and appear on this page), three had CAIDA authors, 1 was co-authored by UCSD undergrad Katherine Izhikevich (along with UCSD alumnus Liz Izhikevich), and one by (then CMU undergraduate and now sysnet Ph.D. student) Rukshani Athapathu. In addition, another four papers were written by UCSD Ph.D. or postdoc alumnus (Krishna Gummadi, Damon Mccoy and Yoshi Kohno). A very productive year! Congrats everyone and, in particular, congrats to our UCSD authors: Gautam Akiwate, Rukshani Athapathu, kc Claffy, Alberto Dainotti, Alexander Gamero-Garrido, Katherine Izhikevich, Dhananjay Jagtap, Enze Liu, Alexander Marder, Ramakrishna Padmanabhan, Ariana Mirian, Ricky Mok, Audrey Randall, Stefan Savage, Aaron Schulman, Alex C. Snoeren, Alisha Ukani, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Huanlei Wu, Alex Yen, Zesen Zhang, and Hongyu Zou.

Golden Goose Award September 22— Congratulations to the all-star team of Steve Checkoway, Damon McCoy, Daniel Anderson, Hovav Shacham, Stefan Savage, and the late Brian Kantor, and their University of Washington collaborators Karl Koscher, Alexei Czeskis, Franzi Roesner, Shwetak Patel, and Yoshi Kohno! Their landmark work on security vulnerabilities in modern automobiles was just awarded a 2021 Golden Goose Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The award honors research for which the results were unforeseen at the outset, but which ultimately led to major breakthroughs that have had significant societal impact. Read about the The Fast and the Curious and watch the wonderful video! As Charlize Theron famously quipped, "Hack them all". Indeed, Charlize. Indeed. Autosec

August 18— Congrats to Alex Gamero-Garrido, who defended his dissertation today on "Transit Influence of Autonomous Systems: Country-Specific Exposure of Internet Traffic". Alex will be starting as a Future Faculty Fellow (postdoc) at Northeastern University this fall. Alex Gamero-Garrido

Gautam Akiwate July 14— Congrats to Gautam Akiwate and his collaborators for receiving the Best Paper award at the 2021 IEEE/IFP TMA Conference for their paper on characterizing Anycast adoption in DNS.

June 12— Congratulations to Priyal Suneja for receiving the CSE Department Student Award for Excellence for 2021! This award follows her other awards for Excellence in Service & Leadership in 2020 and Excellence in Contributions to Diversity in 2019, not to mention all of her leadership efforts for Women in Computing. Thanks Priyal for all of your hard work and devotion to everyone in the department! We wish you the best as you continue your journey in the Ph.D. program at the University of Washington. Priyal Suneja

Stefan Savage June 2— The awards keep on rolling in! Today it was announced that Stefan Savage has received the 2021 Academic Senate Distinguished Research Award, which is awarded "for the ground-breaking research conducted by members of the UCSD faculty". This particular award comes with work, however: Stefan has to give a university-wide lecture on his research. Congratulations Stefan, and we all look forward to your lecture!

AAAS April 22— Congratulations to Stefan Savage for being elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences! The Academy celebrates excellence across every field of human endeavor "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people." Being elected to the Academy is a tremendous honor and outstanding achievement. Way to go, Stefan! Stefan Savage

January 5— Congratulations to Audrey Randall (and her co-authors) for being named as a winner of the Internet Research Task Force's Applied Networking Research Prize for her work on the Trufflehunter DNS inference system. Audrey Randall
2020

August 16— IMC 2020 paper acceptances are now public and, of the 53 papers accepted, five are from UCSD and another five are from UCSD alumni. Congrats to Gautam Akiwate, Audrey Randall, Enze Liu, Ramakrishna Padmanabhan, Stefan Savage, Geoff Voelker and Aaron Schulman from CSE, Alexander Marder, Alberto Dainotti and kc Claffy from CAIDA, and our alumns (Chris Kanich, Yoshi Kohno, Yuvraj Agarwal, Liz Izhikievich and Damon McCoy). Particular congrats to Gautam who had three papers accepted this round!

Weiyang June 13— Congratulations to Weiyang "Frank" Wang for receiving the CSE Department Student Award for Excellence for 2020! This award follows his being named a Runner-Up for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. We wish you the best as you continue your journey in the Ph.D. program at MIT.

June 10— Congrats to Guo "Vector" Li, who defended his dissertation today on "An Empirical Analysis on Threat Intelligence: Data Characteristic and Real-World Uses". Vector will be joining Google to work on cloud security with our old collaborator, Chris Grier. Vector

Moein May 22— Congrats to Moein Khazraee! Moein defended his dissertation, "Reducing Development Cost for Customized Hardware Accleration in the Cloud Infrastructure", today and will soon start his postdoc at MIT.

HASH(0x56094c5b3cb0) May 18— Congratulations to the all-star team of Steve Checkoway, Damon McCoy, Danny Anderson, Hovav Shacham, Stefan Savage, and the late Brian Kantor, and their University of Washington collaborators Karl Koscher, Alexei Czeskis, Franzi Roesner, Shwetak Patel, and Yoshi Kohno! Their landmark study of the vulnerability of modern automobiles was awarded the 2020 IEEE Security & Privacy Test of Time Award. Read more about their efforts around their seminal work. HASH(0x56094c5b63b8)

March 12— Congratulations to Nadia Heninger and her collaborators for setting a new factoring record by being the first to factor the RSA-250 prime in the RSA factoring challenge. RSA-250 cryptographic challenge

Hedera February 25— Congratulations to Mohammad Al-Fares, Sivasankar Radhakrishnan, Barath Raghavan, Nelson Huang and Amin Vahdat for winning the the NSDI Test-of-Time award! Their paper, Hedera: Dynamic Flow Schedule for Data Center Networks, was published ten years ago and is part of the group's legacy of leading data center networking research. Ten years later, the authors are doing well. Mohammad is at Google along with Engineering Fellow and Vice President Amin Vahdat, Siva is at Forward Networks and Barath is on the faculty at USC. UCSD has quite a history with this award and four out of the last five years have seen NSDI Test-of-Time awards given to papers with one or more UCSD authors.

February 7— Congratulations to Yiying Zhang who was awarded a VMware Early Career Faculty Grant! Yiying Zhang

Alan Turing Memorial Scholarship January 8— Each year, the Center for Networked Systems (CNS) awards the Alan Turing Memorial Scholarship to one or more students for their academic commitment, particularly in networked systems, and their ongoing support for the LGBTQ community. This year the scholarship was awarded to both Giselle Mejia and another undergraduate who wishes to remain anonymous. Congrats to both winners!
2019

December 16— Congrats to Ariana Mirian who was named the campuswide student recipient of the UC San Diego Inclusive Excellence Award. The award recognizes those faculty, staff, students, departments and organizations who have made outstanding contributions in support of UC San Diego's commitment to inclusive excellence and diversity. Ariana Mirian Inclusive Excellence Award

Brian Kantor November 21— It is with great sadness that we learned today that Brian Kantor has passed away. Brian worked in the systems and networking group for the last decade before his retirement in 2018. You'll see his name on the automotive and voting security papers we published and the reality is that much of the work we did benefited from his ability to pull a rabbit out of the hat when we needed one. But CSE was only a small part of his time here at UCSD. Brian was truly an institution and had been at UCSD for 47 years. He was the University postmaster, he ran the name servers and he helped run network infrastructure. For those old enough to remember rlogin — he wrote the protocol. Ditto for the NNTP protocol that Netnews was based on. He was a nationally known ham radio operator and also co-founded and managed AMPRnet (the amateur radio packet network) which also became a critical research resource both here in CSE and at CAIDA. Brian was a unique personality and didn't naturally fit within bureaucracies, but he was eager to teach to those who wanted to learn, had a sharp wit and was an implacable advocate for doing the right thing. We were lucky to have had the time we had with him.

November 13— A while back, CSE alumni Tom Ristenpart, Hovav Shacham and Stefan Savage (and co-author Eran Tromer) published one of the first cloud security papers called "Hey You Get Off Of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third Party Clouds". Ten years and a couple thousand citations later, the paper has been named this year's winner of the ACM CCS Test of Time Award. The award recognizes papers from CCS ten years prior that have had the greatest impact on security research and practice over the past decade. Congrats to Tom, Hovav and Stefan! (and a particular congrats to Hovav who has now won TWO of these awards!) ACM CCS 2019 Test of Time Award

kc claffy September 27— kc claffy was named one of this year's 11 inductees into the Internet Hall of Fame! While formally recognized for her own "pioneering work in Internet analysis and measurement", we all know that the datasets CAIDA (which she founded in 1997 and directs to this day) produces underly a large fraction of not only SysNet's publication list, but the networking community's at large. We’re not worthy!

September 5— Congrats to Zhaomo Yang, who defended his dissertation today on "Compilers and Software Security: Opportunities and Challenges". He will be joining Google shortly. Zhaomo Yang

Nadia Heninger August 18— Today, at Crypto 2019, Nadia Heninger was named the recipient of the CRA-W's Borg Early Career Award! Congrats Nadia!

August 14— Kudos to Nishant Bhaskar, Maxwell Bland, Kirill Levchenko, and Aaron Schulman for their work on detecting card skimmers in retail gas pumps. Their app, Bluetana, is now in use by multiple law enforcement and regulatory agencies across four states and has been used to discovery dozens of card skimmers. You can read more in the press: Krebs on Security, KBPS, Gizmodo, Techcrunch or in the original paper at USENIX Security. Bluetana

Grant Ho August 14— Congrats to Geoff Voelker, Stefan Savage and their Berkeley colleagues (notably Ph.D. student Grant Ho who, was the sole student on this effort) for winning the Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security for their paper, Detecting and Characterizing Lateral Phishing at Scale.

June 14— Alex Gamero-Garrido has been awarded a Microsoft Dissertation Grant to support his work identifying nations whose Internet connectivity is particularly vulnerable to censorship, inspection, or disruption by foreign countries. Congratulations Alex! Alex Gamero-Garrido

Ariana Mirian June 7— Congratulations to Ariana Mirian for receiving the 2019 CSE Doctoral Award for Excellence in Service/Leadership, together with Ailie Fraser. Thank you for your dedication, Ariana!

May 30— Congrats to Hadi Givegchian. He and Yeswanth Guddeti won a $100k Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for their work with Aaron Schulman and Dinesh Bharadia on the Sweepsense wideband sensing system. Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship

Louis DeKoven and Brown Farinholt May 24— Congratulations to Louis Dekoven and Brown Farinholt for defending their respective dissertations today. This double header started with Brown's "Understanding the Remote Access Trojan malware ecosystem through the lens of the infamous DarkComet RAT", broke for lunch, and then concluded with Louis, "Addressing Device Compromise from the Perspective of Large Organizations". This is not their last party together however, as both are eventually headed to a new group at Facebook's DC office.

February 26— Congratulations to the authors of the Sora paper from MSR Asia, including Ph.D. alumn He "Lonnie" Liu and Geoff Voelker (who were both working at MSR Asia at the time), for winning the Test of Time award at NSDI for their work on Sora (NSDI '09) which was the first purely software-based WiFi radio platform running on a PC (something widely thought to be impossible at the time). The award is given for work at least a decade prior that has had a lasting impact on the field. Sora Authors
2018

Alex C. Snoeren December 17— The year ends on a high note with the fantastic news that Alex Snoeren has been named an ACM Fellow for his "his innovative approaches to measuring, managing and directing network traffic". He will henceforth be known as Packet Whisperer.

December 1— The fall hike was a six-mile hike in Torrey Pines. The park closed the trails, so we hiked the road to the golf course and then back down along the beach.   (Pics)   (GPS Track)   (All Hikes) Torrey Pines

Lixiang Ao November 9— In the news! GCN highlights Lixiang Ao's and Liz Izhikevich's paper at ACM SOCC on the Sprocket serverless video processing system: "Sprocket kicks video processing into high gear".

November 7— Alumna Renata Teixeira has been named an ACM Distinguished Member. Congratulations, Renata! Renata Teixeira

Alan Turing Memorial Scholarship November 1— The recipients of this year's Alan Turing Memorial Scholarship are Anton Sydorenko (senior, Computer Science) and Adrian Mendoza (junior, Computer Engineering). These scholarships mark the third consecutive year that the Center for Networked Systems has recognized students studying networked systems for their academic commitment and involvement in the LGBT community, and the first year that it has awarded the scholarship to more than one student. Congratulations Anton and Adrian!

August 21— In exciting news, Amogh Dhamdhere, Alex Gamero-Garrido, Gautam Akiwate, Alex Snoeren and their co-authors received the Best Paper award at SIGCOMM 2018 today in Budapest for their paper on inferring interdomain congestion. Congratulations to all! (Curiously, Alex was the first person to register for the conference...did he know?!?) SIGCOMM 2018 Best Paper

OSDI 2018 Best Paper October 8— Alumna Ranjita Bhagwan and her co-authors at Microsoft Research India won a Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award for their OSDI 2018 paper, "Orca: Differential Bug Localization in Large-Scale Services". Congratulations, Ranjita!

Kirill Levchenko July 27— For the last 15 years, Kirill Levchenko has been a fixture in the SysNet group. First as a Ph.D. student, then as postdoc, then as Research Scientist and Lecturer, Kirill started and then led a broad range of projects -- authoring over fifty papers while here including landmark work helping to establish the field of "evidence-based security". In addition to his research chops, Kirill was also chief instigator, undercover operative, enthusiast-in-chief and "most interesting computer scientist in the world". We wish him all the luck in his new job on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, but we will miss him and he will always be welcome here. Kirill Levchenko

July 27— Congratulations to Joe DeBlasio, who successfully defended his dissertation today on "Countering Financially-Motivated Malicious Actors on the Internet"! At the end of summer Joe will join the ever-growing UCSD contingent at Google. Joe DeBlasio

Suicide Rock May 27— The spring hike was a 6.5-mile hike to Suicide Rock near Idyllwild. The San Jacinto Wilderness ranger station had just turned on quotas for the Tahquitz Peak trail, so we did Suicide as our backup. Tahquitz next year!   (Pics)   (GPS Track)   (All Hikes)

May 8— Arjun Roy successfully defended his dissertation today on "Simplifying datacenter fault detection and localization". Congratulations, Arjun! Despite rumors to the contrary, Arjun did not write his dissertation by stapling together all of his cse-misc posts (his actual dissertation is far shorter). Also: destination Google. Arjun Roy

George Takei May 3— Sothyrak Srey, an Alan Turing Memorial Scholarship recipient, and George Porter had an opportunity to meet and talk about the Turing scholarship with George Takei and his husband, Brad Takei.

April 20— Max Mellette and Ariana Mirian are featured in "We Are CSE" on UCSD TV! We Are CSE

Danny Huang March 26— In the news! Danny Huang's paper at Financial Cryptography and Data Security on the profitability of alternative cryptocurrencies highlighted by JSOE: "On cryptocurrency exchanges, it's better to be a miner than a speculator, study finds".

March 17— The winter hike was a 8.5-mile hike in a loop from Bow Willow to Rockhouse Canyon in Anza Borrego.   (Pics)   (GPS Track)   (All Hikes) Winter Hike
2017

Renata Teixeira December 17— Alumna Renata Teixeira has been named a 2017 N2Women: Star in Computer Networking and Communications for her long-standing research on computer networks with emphasis on measurement, analysis, and management of IP networks. Congratulations, Renata!

December 15— In the news! Joe DeBlasio's Tripwire paper that he presented at IMC on remotely detecting compromised sites has been highlighted by many tech sites, including Silicon Republic, Tech Explorist, Computing, Bleeping Computer, and even the department. Congrats, Joe! Tripwire

Geoff Voelker December 14— Today Geoff Voelker was named an ACM Fellow for his "contributions to empirical measurement and analysis in systems, networking in security" which basically is a fancy way of saying that he is really good at figuring stuff out instead of just BSing.

December 2— The fall hike was the classic 3-mile San Diego hike up Cowles Mountain. Great way to begin December, and we set the record for the youngest sysnet hiker at 2.5 years!   (Pics)   (All Hikes) Fall Hike

Stefan Savage October 10— Today Stefan became a MacArthur Fellow! One of "24 Extraordinarily Creative People Who Inspire Us All", the MacArthur Foundation recognized Stefan for "identifying and addressing the technological, economic, and social vulnerabilities underlying internet security challenges and cybercrime." Clearly, there is only one word to sum it all up: Genius!

Danny Huang August 31— Good things come in pairs: Danny Huang successfully defended his dissertation today on "Using crypto-currencies to track cyber-attacks, speculative investors, and human traffickers". Congratulations, Danny! Continuing his adventures in security and privacy, Danny will be moving to Princeton as a postdoc working with Nick Feamster.

August 29— Congratulations to Tianyin Xu, who successfully defended his dissertation today on "Hardening Cloud and Datacenter Systems against Misconfigurations: Principles and Tool Support"! Tianyin will spend a year working on cloud systems in industry as a Visiting Scientist at Facebook, and then start as an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign in 2018. Tianyin Xu

May 27— The spring hike was in the Santa Ana Mountains, hiking from Highway 74 to Sitton Peak. The hike had great views of Orange County and the ocean. Delicious bonus: the hike ends at a candy shop.   (Pics)   (GPS Track)   (All Hikes)

Vector Li May 26— In the news! Vector Li, Kirill Levchenko, and their co-author's paper at IEEE Security & Privacy on diesel emission defeat devices has been highlighted by KPBS ("UC San Diego Researchers Find Volkswagen Isn’t The Only Auto Maker Deceiving Regulators"), Ars Technica ("A year of digging through code yields 'smoking gun' on VW, Fiat diesel cheats"), and UC News ("Researchers find computer code that Volkswagen used to cheat emissions tests"). Congrats, Vector and Kirill! (p.s. The KPBS article has a great pic of Kirill at the bench!)

May 2— Congratulations to XinXin Jin, who successfully defended her dissertation today on "Tooling and Language Support for Robust and Easy Network Programming of Mobile Applications"! XinXin has been working at Whova, and now will be devoting her full-time attention there. XinXin Jin

George Porter May 19— Mr. Porter goes to Washington: "UCSD Professor Takes on Congress in Fight for Funding". (Getting the grant proposal awarded is supposed to be the hard part...)

March 28— Today at NSDI, George Porter and his colleagues received the 2017 "Test-of-Time" award, which recognizes papers at least 10 years old that have had significant and lasting impact on the field. This award was for their work on X-Trace (NSDI 2007), which showed how to do correctness and performance debugging in distributed network-based applications and formed a key portion of George's dissertation. Congratulations George! George Porter

March 11— The winter hike this year was in Borrego Palm Springs. The flowers were in rare bloom and the stream in full torrent from the rains this year, and it was well worth the traffic jam to get there. We hiked up the canyon up to and beyond the palms.   (Pics)   (GPS Track)   (All Hikes)
2016

November 20— We hiked along Black's Beach for the fall hike this year. We had a record turnout for a hike, and the morning mist along the cliffs was beautiful.   (Pics)   (GPS Track)   (All Hikes)

Peng Huang September 23— Peng Huang successfully defended his dissertation today on "Understanding and Dealing with Failures in Cloud-Scale Systems". Peng is spending a year as a postdoc at MSR Redmond, and then heads to Johns Hopkins University next year to start as an Assistant Professor. Congratulations Peng!

September 15— Congratulations to Wilson Lian who defended his dissertation today, titled "JIT Spraying Threats on ARM and Defense by Diversification" (and coming soon to an NDSS near you)! Wilson Lian

Stefan Savage June 15— But wait...there's more! June has become a "Win Everything" month for Stefan, who today was named to the Irwin Mark and Joan Klein Jacobs Chair in Information and Computer Science, succeeding Ron Graham who is retiring. Congratulations yet again, Stefan!

June 13— Congratulations to Karyn Benson who defended her dissertation today, entitled "Leveraging Internet Background Radiation for Opportunistic Network Analysis"! After putting the last finishing touches on the document itself, Karyn will be taking her many talents to Boston where she will join Akamai's technical staff, as well as continue her training for future Boston Marathons. Congrats, Karyn! Karyn Benson

Stefan Savage June 11— In back-to-back awards, today Stefan Savage accepted the 2015 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences for "innovative research in network security, privacy, and reliability that has taught us to view attacks and attackers as elements of an integrated technological, societal, and economic system." Congratulations once again, Stefan! (Also congratulating Stefan at the awards ceremony was Amin, both of whom look quite distinguished in tuxedos.) Stefan and Amin

Stefan Savage June 10— Today Stefan Savage was awarded the 2016 University of Washington CSE Alumni Achievement Award, together with Albert Greenberg. Stefan receives the award for his "outstanding research in network security and efforts to fight cyber crime...tackling everything from computer worms and online scams, to distributed attacks, insidious global consumer fraud networks, and automobile systems hacking." Congratulations, Stefan! Stefan Savage

May 28— For this year's spring hike, we did a 10.7 mile one-way ridge hike along the Pacific Coast Trail in the San Gabriel Mountains. Along the way we bagged four peaks: Mt Lewis (8396'), Throop Peak (9138'), Mt Burnham (8997'), and Mt Baden Powell (9396').   (Pics)   (GPS Track)   (All Hikes)

George Porter May 15— George Porter was awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant from NSF, which kicks off officially today. With the four-year grant, George and his students will research "A Scalable Multiplane Data Center Network". Congratulations, George!

February 20— The winter hike this year was in Fossil Canyon, straight into the heart of the Coyote Mountains in Anza Borrego with views of the Carrizo Badlands – and fossils!   (Pics)   (GPS Track)   (All Hikes)
2015

Neha Chachra December 7— Congratulations to Neha Chachra, who successfully defended her dissertation today on "Understanding URL Abuse for Profit." Neha caps a long, creative career contributing to the department in many roles, from the "Learn from Peers" graduate student program to heading the graduate student association's procurement committee. In true style, she gets bonus points for her gift to her advisors on the day of her defense. Neha joins Facebook in February to make online social networks a more secure place. Bobbles

October 6— Last night Yuanyuan Zhou ("YY") was named the 2015 winner of the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, named for the legindary leader of Xerox PARC CSL. It is the highest award given by the operating systems community and is selected for "Contributions that are highly creative, innovative, and possibly high-risk, in keeping with the visionary spirit of Mark Weiser". There is no doubt that YY's work is all of these things and we are honored to have her as our friend and colleague. You can read more here.

Matt Der September 14— Matt Der successfully defended his thesis today on "Investigating Large-Scale Internet Abuse Through Web Page Classification." Matt heads back to his old stomping grounds in Virginia to join his brother's startup company, notch.io. Congratulations Matt!

August 11— It is a Corvette Summer for Ian Foster and Karl Koscher! Today at WOOT 2015 Ian presented his paper, "Fast and Vulnerable: A Story of Telematic Failures", detailing the security vulnerabilities of car insurance dongles, co-authored with Andrew Prudhomme, Karl, and Stefan. WIRED also covered their work in an article today, "Hackers Cut a Corvette's Brakes Via a Common Car Gadget", picturing Karl and Ian. Special thanks to Sid Karin for the use of his Corvette!

Tristan Halvorson July 30— Congratulations to Tristan Halvorson, who successfully defended his thesis today on "Registration Intent in the Domain Name Market." Tristan also boards the Google train, but he's taking the northern express to the Seattle office!

June 5— Today the winners of the inaugural CSE Graduate and Undergraduate awards were announced, and we are thrilled that four students in the Sysnet group were recognized with awards: Neha Chachra was awarded the Graduate Award for Service and the Viceroy of Social Hour, Gautam Akiwate was awarded the Graduate Award for Teaching, Jake Maskiewicz was awarded the Undergraduate Award for Teaching, and Louis Dekoven was a runner up for the Viceroy of Social Hour. Congratulations everyone on all of your award-winning efforts!

Keaton Mowery June 2— Keaton Mowery successfully defended his thesis today titled "Beneath the Attack Surface." He'll be heading up north to join Apple, and we wish him the best of luck. Congratulations Keaton!

May 30— This year's spring hike was a 14.25-mile journey across the breadth of Palomar Mountain, from the Boucher Fire Lookout in the east to the Observatory in the west. And not to be missed was Historic Scott's Cabin!   (Pics)   (GPS Track)   (All Hikes)

May 26— Rishi Kapoor successfully defended his thesis today on "Leveraging the End-host Stack to Meet Data Center Applications Performance Requirements." He just accepted a position at Google working on data center networking. Congratulations Rishi! Rishi Kapoor

Malveeka Tewari May 22— Malveeka Tewari successfully defended her thesis today on "Enabling Fine-grained Flow Management in Data Centers". She'll be bringing her talents in developing networked systems to Google in Mountain View starting this summer. Congratulations Malveeka!

May 22— Mike Conley successfully defended his thesis today on "Efficient I/O in Next-Generation Clusters". As part of his dissertation research, Mike helped to break numerous world records in sorting data, which is one of the oldest and most common problems in the field. Congratulations Mike! Mike Conley

April 11— This year's winter hike was an 8-mile off-trail rambling loop from Mountain Palm Springs to Indian Valley and back around through Indian Gorge in Anza Borrego, with some bouldering and scrambling up a ridge thrown in for kicks.   (Pics)   (GPS Track)   (All Hikes)

He Liu March 16— He Liu successfully defended his thesis today on "A High Performance Hybrid ToR for Data Centers". After many a sojourn across systems, security, and networking, Lonnie decided to end his graduate adventure in the data center. (And, yes, he's joining Google.) Congratulations and good luck, Lonnie!
2014

November 15— The Fall hike this year was a 5.5-mile loop on Woodson Mountain, hiking the East Approach to potato chip rock and then back down along the Fry-Koegel trail. Views were great, and we had a record number of over 30 hikers!   (Pics)   (GPS Track)   (All Hikes)

October 30— Continuing the trend, Qing Zhang successfully defended her dissertation today on "Utilizing Source Information to Detect and Prevent Online Fraud". In December, Qing also joins Google...although she will be bolstering the Southern California alumni contingent at Google Irvine. Congratulations and good luck, Qing! Qing Zhang

Jiaqi Zhang October 16— The Fall series continue as Jiaqi Zhang successfully defended his dissertation today on "Software Configuration Learning and Recommendation". Jiaqi joins local San Diego startup Whova to work with the UCSD founders on applying technical networking to professional networking. Congratulations and good luck, Jiaqi!

September 30— Today David Wang became the next student in the Fall Dissertation Series, defending his dissertation on "A Comprehensive Approach to Undermining Search Result Poisoning". Soon David will join the ranks at Google Etsy, continuing his work dealing with Internet service abuse. Congratulations and good luck, David! David Wang

Do-kyum Kim September 3— Today Do-kyum Kim successfully defended his dissertation on "Topic Modeling of Hierarchical Corpora". In a rare and unusual move, he will continue to innovate in applying machine learning to interesting applications at Google. Congratulations and good luck, Do-kyum!

August 5— Feng Lu successfully defended his thesis today on "Downclocking WiFi to Improve Energy Efficiency in Mobile Devices". Next month he embarks on the good ship Google in Mountain View to continue his adventures in improving network performance. Congratulations and good luck, Feng! Feng Lu

George Porter July 1— We are delighted to announce that after several incredibly successful years as a Research Scientist in the group, George Porter has officially joined the Computer Science and Engineering Department as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. Congratuations, George!

kc claffy June 26— kc Claffy has been named one of the two recipients of the 2015 IEEE Internet Award. She and our close collaborator, UC Berkeley's Vern Paxson, where both cited for their "For seminal contributions to the field of Internet measurement, including security and network data analysis, and for distinguished leadership in and service to the Internet community by providing open-access data and tools." Congratulations kc and Vern! Vern Paxson

May 17— Congratulations to Qing Zhang and Rick Strong as they became parents of newly arrived baby Kai, who weighed in at a healthy 8lb 6oz! Kai Strong

Sarah Meiklejohn April 28— Today Sarah Meiklejohn defended her thesis, "Flexible Models for Secure Systems". After much cryptography and bitcoin sleuthing, Sarah heads across the pond to start as an Assistant Professor at University College London in a joint appointment in the Departments of Computer Science and Security and Crime Science. (How cool is that?) Congratulations, Sarah!

March 18— Siva Radhakrishnan successfully defended his thesis today on "Network Performance Improvements For Web Services — An End-to-End View". Dr. Radhakrishnan has left us to change the world at Forward Networks. Congrats Siva and good luck! Siva Radhakrishnan
2013

Kayley Jinxin Lu December 12— Today we welcome Kayley Jinxin Lu, weighing in at 7lb 8oz! Congratulations to Feng Lu and Lijuan Geng, understandably tired but very excited parents.

September 26— Network World covers Vacha Dave's work on Viceroi, a classifier that advertising networks can use to detect click fraud. Network World

August 30— Daniel Turner defended his thesis, entitled "Opportunistically Reconstructing a Network's Failure History," today. After many years in Southern California, Danny's next stop is the Big Easy: he starts work at TurboSquid in New Orleans, Louisianna in mid September. Congratulations, Danny, and laissez les bons temps rouler!

Bitcoin August 28— Sarah Meiklejohn's recent IMC paper, "Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names" looks at some of the issues in tracking transactions in the Bitcoin payment network. Its now receiving a bunch of popular attention including on Slashdot, Vice, BusinessWeek, The Economist, MIT Technology Review, Wired and others (undoubtedly driven in part by her involvement in this story in which she helped track down an attempt to frame Brian Krebs with heroin purchased on the underground site Silk Road). Most recently she used this technique track drug purchases made by reporters at Forbes. Congrats to Sarah and all her co-authors!

August 16— In recognition of his fantastic talk, Danny Huang received the Best Student Presentation award at the 2013 ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Defined Networking (HotSDN). Danny was in Hong Kong to present his paper, "High-Fidelity Switch Models for Software-Defined Network Emulation", co-authored with Ken and Alex. Great job, Danny! Danny Huang

Kevin Webb August 8— Kevin Webb successfully defended his thesis today on "A Network Control Platform for Performance Isolation and Modular Composition". Only hours after his defense, Kevin embarked upon a cross-country journey with all his worldly possessions—including his cats—to start his new job as an Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Congratulations and good luck, Kevin!

July 11— Today represents the end of an era. Andreas Pitsillidis successfully defended his dissertation and will be escaping the gravity well of UCSD CSE. In addition to his own tremendous body of research, Andreas personally designed, created, maintained and updated the collection, storage and processing infrastructure used by most of our security measurement work. He leaves us today with a near-production scale system curating over 100TB of structured and unstructed security data — virtually all of our papers depend on his work and we thank him for it. Congrats Andreas, good luck at Google and we hope to keep working with you in the future! Andreas Pitsillidis

George Varghese July 3— George Varghese has been named the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award "for contributions to the field of network algorithmics and its applications to high-speed packet networks." The IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award is given for outstanding contributions to the integration of computers and communications. Congratulations, George! IEEE

Renata June 18— Alumna Renata Teixeira recently received two outstanding honors. She was selected to become a Director de Recherche (Senior Researcher) at INRIA, and she was just elected Vice Chair of the ACM SIGCOMM Executive Committee. Congratulations, Renata!

June 6— Radhika Niranjan Mysore defended her thesis today on "Automated Scalable Management of Data Center Networks". She now heads to the Bay Area to joins Amin's networking group at Google. Congratultations, Radhika! Radhika Niranjan Mysore

May 22— Congratulations to Gjergji Zyba who defended his dissertation today on "Mobile Malware Propagation and Defense". After stints in Stockholm, Bath, and Paris, Gjergji is finishing his collaborative work with Ericsson as he explores his next steps in the Bay Area.

April 2— Today Terry Lam successfully defended his dissertation on "Scalable Traffic Management for Data Centers and Logging Devices". Terry continues to swell the UCSD ranks at Google where he is applying his work on network traffic management. Congratulations, Terry!

March 23— A small group explored the fantastic slot canyon in Canyon Sin Nombre for the Winter sysnet hike.

March 21— The announcement was made today that Kevin Webb is a recipient of the 2012–2013 UCSD Barbara and Paul Saltman Excellent Teaching Award for Graduate Students, awarded by the UCSD Academic Senate. Among his other outstanding qualities, Kevin received the award for his tireless efforts and excellence as a teaching assistant for operating systems and distributed systems courses, as an instructor for operating systems, and his leadership as Master TA for CSE. Congratulations, Kevin!

March 11— Congratulations to Alex Rasmussen who defended his dissertation today on "I/O-Efficient Data-Intensive Computing"! After his many world records and contributions while at UCSD, Alex heads to the Bay Area to help Trifacta scale new heights.

January 22— Our own Kevin Fall (Ph.D. 1994) was named the Chief Technology Officer for Carnegie Mellon's Softare Engineering Institute (SEI). See the press release for more details.

January 19— Today Brian Kantor officially becomes a sexagenarian — join us in wishing him a happy 60th birthday! (Coincidentally, it also nearly marks the 27th anniversary of Brian's creating the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) in the mid 1980s.)

January 15— Wired Magazine covers our group's work on scale-out data center switching and our joint effort with ECE developing hybrid optical/electrical switches (notably Helios). Cool stuff, but they're two switch generations out date... if they only knew what we're building now!

January 11— NPR's Planet Money covers our Pharmaleaks paper with an interview on Morning Edition and a longer version in their bi-weekly podcast.
2012

December 21— It is with sadness that today we announce the departure of our close colleague George Varghese. After over a decade with us, family needs have taken George to the Bay Area and his new research home at Microsoft Research. We wish him the best and expect to continue to work with him there and with his new colleagues (who we've long been big fans of as well).

Cowles Mountain December 16— For the Fall sysnet hike, twenty-one souls braved wintry conditions (i.e., temps in the 50s) while reaching the summit of Cowles Mountain and were rewarded with panoramic views on San Diego. [All Hikes] Cowles Mountain

December 11— Congrats to Nathan Farrington who defended his thesis today titled, "Optics in Data Center Network Architecture". Nathan is now off to spread UCSD Data Center Networking religion to Facebook. Best of luck Nathan!

November 15— In back-to-back defenses, Xiao Ma also defended his dissertation today on "Diagnosing and Debugging Abnormal Battery Drain on Smartphones" (a condensed version of which will appear in the upcoming NSDI 2013 conference). Congratulations to Xiao, who returns to industry at Pattern Insight, the startup he helped found as a Ph.D. student.

November 15— Congratulations to Ding Yuan who defended his dissertation today on "Improving Failure Diagnosis via Better Design and Analysis of Log Messages"! Ding leaves sunny San Diego for (not as sunny) Toronto, where he begins the next stage of his career as an assistant professor at the University of Toronto.

October 28— As "an expert at revealing", Stefan Savage talks about cybercime with the San Diego Union-Tribune.

October 1— In a great tech transfer success story, the work on TCP Fast Open that Siva Radhakrishnan did at Google together with former alumns Yu-Chung Cheng and Barath Raghavan has just been released in the latest Linux 3.6 kernel distribution. Siva earlier presented the work in their 2011 CoNEXT paper.

September 25— $10 million.            

August 7— Congrats to Feng Lu and Jiaqi Zhang whose HotSec paper on the risks of adversarial composition of Web services was just covered in Technology Review. Technology Review

YY Zhou August 7— In the "transition to practice" department: congrats to YY Zhou whose company, PatternInsight, just announced the sale of their LogInsight product and team to VMware.

Hacked Speedometer August 6— The research that keeps on giving... ComputerWorld covers the joint UW/UCSD work on automotive security. Computerworld

July 13— Congratulations also to Meg Walraed-Sullivan who defended her dissertation today on "Scalable, Fault-Tolerant, and Efficient Data Center Networking". Meg heads to the Pacific Northwest to join Microsoft Research in Redmond as a postdoc working with Rich Draves.

John McCullough July 10— John McCullough defended his dissertation, "Enabling Efficiency in Data Center Systems" to a packed house today. John will be heading off to join the Google army in September, but plans to spend one last summer in San Diego soaking in the sand and sea. Congratulations, John!

Cuyamaca Peak June 23— On the longest SysNet hike to date, 16 intrepid hikers head to the Cuyamacas for an 11.5-mile double loop: first around Middle Peak, then through fields of gold, and then up Cuyamaca Peak for a panoramic view of San Diego County west to the ocean.   (All SysNet Hikes) Cuyamaca Peak

June 18— And so begins another summer as students adventure off into internships: Matt Der, Rishi Kapoor, Do-kyum Kim, and Malveeka Tewari are off to Google in the Bay Area; Wilson Lian and Andreas Pitsillidis are in Europe at Google Zurich; Tristan Halvorson and Dongcai Shen are at Yahoo! Labs; Arjun Roy is at Facebook; Bhanu Vattikonda is at Impermium; Jiaqi Zhang is at IBM T.J. Watson; Tianyin Xu is at NetApp; Feng Lu is at CMU; and Gjergji Zyba is at Ericsson Research in San Jose. Sun Icon

Amin Vahdat June 16— Congratulations again to Amin Vahdat as one of the newest ACM Fellows! Looking extremely stylish at the 2012 ACM Awards Banquet, Amin chats it up with Stuart Russell, Dave Patterson, and Ed Lazowska. Ed regales the group with funny stories of Amin when he did a grad student "sabbatical" at UW in the late 90s, while Stuart and Dave are thinking of similar stories when Amin was first an undergrad and then a grad student at Berkeley.

PCWorld June 7— Stefan Savage and Chris Grier lend their voices to a PCWorld article on the spamming ecosystem, and Stefan weighs in about malware victims in an MIT Technology Review article. Technology Review

June 4— Chris Kanich defended his dissertation, "Characterizing Internet Scams through Underground Infrastructure Infiltration", mere days after Cynthia. Also bolstering the UCSD Midwest contingent, Chris will be moving to the windy city and starting as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, in the fall. Congratulations, Chris! We will miss the drugs! Chris Kanich

Cynthia Taylor June 1— On the eve of summer, Cynthia Taylor defended her dissertation, "The Networked Device Driver Architecture: A Solution for Remote I/O". Congratulations Cynthia! We will miss the pink! She will be returning in triumph to her alma mater, Oberlin College, as an assistant professor this fall.

Moonlight Canyon April 1— An April Fool's hike for winter! This year we started at Agua Caliente Hot Springs in Anza Borrego, wound our way up through Moonlight Canyon including a short bit of scrambling, decamped into the Inner Pasture, exited via an unnamed canyon back out to the Carrizo Valley, and ended by traversing a bit of history over a couple of miles of the Old Overland Stage Road Route back to Agua Caliente. Only one cholla victim! [All Hikes] Moonlight Canyon

February 27— Mohammad Al-Fares defended his dissertation today, "A Scalable, Adaptive, and Extensible Data Center Network Architecture". Mohammad is scheduled to continue changing the world, but now at Google. Congrats! Mohammad Al-Fares

Most Influential Paper Award February 25— The ACM Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC) recently identified the 20 "most influential" papers it published over the last 20 years. Among these is "WebOS: Operating System Services for Wide Area Applications" with the lead author none other than our own Amin Vahdat! Published back in 1999, Amin and his colleagues anticipated the cloud computing services of today, describing a Web service that could dynamically replicate itself across the wide area in response to client access patterns. The application, which they called Rent-A-Server, is one that will be familiar to anyone who uses modern on-demand cloud services today such as AWS or Azure.

February 16— Today, the CCC sponsored a symposium to recognize the 20th anniversary of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program (NITRD) — the multi-agency funding program that has sponsored US computing research over the past two decades. The NITRD Symposium featured a broad range of technical speakers including Jeannette Wing, Kevin Knight, Beth Mynatt, Helen Nissenbaum, Sebastian Thrun, Shwetak Patel, Erik Brynjolfsson, Tom Lange, Vint Cerf, Bill Scherlis, Russ Altman, David Keyes, Kathy Yelick, Tom Davis, Eric Brown, Eric Horvitz, Alex Szalay, Tom Kalil, Peter Lee, Chuck Vest and our own Stefan Savage. In 15 minutes apiece, each highlighted how transformative twenty years of computing research in their field has been on the real world. Stefan Savage

CSI San Diego February 1— In his ongoing cybercrime series, Brian Krebs hunts down the operators of major botnets. In today's column he focuses on the Grum botnet and uses evidence from our previous Trajectory study to help attribute its operator. CSI here we come!

January 30— The National Research Council's study The Safety Challenge and Promise of Automotive Electronics: Insights from Unintended Acceleration was released on January 18th and, along its recommendations, argues for a more significant focus on cybersecurity issues (based largely on our joint work with University of Washington). Mainstream press coverage around this release and the issues of automotive cybersecurity include the LA Times, BusinessWeek. and MIT Technology Review. The last article suggests that industry is moving quickly and it documents a ten-fold increase in security staffing at GM's OnStar division and the development of focused automotive security tams within both research and product companies. Our thanks to NSF for their support; its nice to see a project pay off. Hacked Speedometer

Amin Vahdat January 14— Today's NY Times quotes Amin Vahdat about new research focused on using 60Ghz wireless signals to interconnect data center racks. Electrical, optical, wireless... if there's a way to do data center interconnect Amin is on it. Next up: lasers...
2011

December 15— Today YY Zhou was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist for her significant accomplishments and impact on the computing field. Go YY! YY Zhou

Fortuna Peaks December 11— The fall hike this year ventured into Mission Trails, covering roughly an 8-mile loop up and down North and South Fortuna Peaks.   (All Hikes) Fortuna Peaks

Amin Vahdat December 8— Two of our own, Keith Marzullo and Amin Vahdat, were named to the 2011 Class of ACM Fellows! Amin is cited for his "contributions to data center scalability and management", while Keith is recognized "for contributions to distributed systems and service to the computing community". Congrats all around! Amin and Keith are the 5th and 6th SysNet faculty to be so honored and the 12th and 13th in the department. Read more about their accomplishments (and about CSE architecture faculty Dean Tullsen who also joins them this year) in the UCSD press release. Keith Marzullo

BusinessWeek Spam Works December 8— Infographics rule! This week's BusinessWeek features a two page spread highlighting results from our research on spam economics. The data for these visuals are derived from two efforts: one led by Research Scientist Kirill Levchenko (spam value chain) and the other by CSE Ph.D. candidate Chris Kanich (spam revenue and demand) but both were a huge team effort (including the key help of our colleagues at ICSI as well)

December 6— Today's NY Times features a special section looking at the future of computing; nine essays written by nine computer scientists. Our own Stefan Savage penned one of these pieces, focusing on the future direction of security threats. Stefan Savage

Marti Motoyama September 19— In the final days of summer, Marti Motoyama successfully defends his dissertation after years of abuse. Marti also makes a healthy decision to join FitBit this Fall. Congratulations, Marti!

Dionysios Logothetis USENIX July 25— Dionysios Logothetis iteratively defended his dissertation today. Congratulations Dionysios! He joins Telefonica Research in enchanting Barcelona. ]]> 6/6/11 USENIX Security papers, we just heard back that both of our WOOT and both of our CSET papers were accepted. Congrats to everyone!

May 23— It must be the end of Spring Quarter! As the third sysnet defense in the last two weeks, Frank Uyeda defended his thesis today, finishing his final academic triathlon. Frank soon heads to Santa Monica to join Google. Congratulations, Frank! Frank Uyeda

Michael Vrable May 19— As a sad day for the department, Chez Bob czar Michael Vrable defended his thesis today. Gone are the days of restocking, fridge cleaning, and soda machine hacking as he joins Google in Mountain View where someone else takes care of it all. It is also an unfortunate day for the UCSD Programming Contest team as well, as Michael retires as a long-time coach and mentor for so many students over the years. Congratulations, Michael! We already miss you — the soda machine is out of Coke again...

May 19— Geoff achieves a teaching hat trick today as he receives one of the 2010-2011 UCSD Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Awards.

May 12— James Anderson defended his thesis today. James leaves California for New York City, joining Thesys Technologies to help financial companies, well, do a better job. Congratulations, James! James Anderson

Damon McCoy May 6— Damon McCoy, our CIFellow postdoc, has accepted a tenure-track faculty position in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. Congrats to both Damon and GMU!

May 5— The initial list of 2011 SIGCOMM papers is out and it includes Frank Uyeda and George Varghese's recent work on set synchronization, as well as papers co-authored by UCSD Ph.D. alumni Renata Teixeira (2 papers!) and Justin Ma, and UCSD M.S. alumnus Michael Sirivianos. Congrats everyone! SIGCOMM Logo

USENIX April 18— USENIX Security paper notifications just came out and four UCSD papers were selected! Congrats to Danny Anderson, Tristan Halvorson, Chris Kanich, Brian Kantor, Kirill Levchenko, Damon McCoy, Sarah Meiklejohn, Marti Motoyama, Keaton Mowery, Stefan Savage, Hovav Shacham, and Geoff Voelker. We'll see you all there!

La Jolla Half Marathon April 17— A strong CSE showing at the 30th annual run of the La Jolla Half Marathon. Congrats Zach, Karyn, Jenny, Ming, Brian, Ding, and Geoff! (No students were (unduly) harmed in this event.) La Jolla Half Marathon

Mountain Palm Springs March 27— The winter hike this year was a group of 24 hardy souls hiking 7.5 miles through Mountain Palm Springs and Torote Canyon in Anza Borrego.   (All Hikes) Mountain Palm Springs

March 13— Congratulations to Steve Checkoway, Damon McCoy, Brian Kantor, and Danny Anderson and their University of Washington collaborators Karl Koscher, Alexei Czeskis, and Franziska Roesner, whose study of the vulnerability of modern cars to remote compromise was picked up by the press after being presented to the National Academy of Sciences. (We understand some faculty at UCSD and UW were involved as well.) The New York Times' John Markoff broke the story; catch additional coverage in the Technology Review, PCWorld, Slashdot, Jamie Zawinski’s blog, Boing Boing, and The Volokh Conspiracy. More information at the CEASS site. Hacked Speedometer

Spamalytics February 28— WIRED Magazine explains how to calculate the gross daily proceeds of spammers, based on the work of Chris Kanich and the rest of the Spamalytics crew.

January 31— Afer two years of effort, spanning two institutions and several person decades of effort, the "Click Trajectory" paper was accepted today to IEEE Security and Privacy (Oakland). Congrats to all 15 authors! (also, congrats to UCSD alumn Justin Ma and his Berkeley colleagues on their real-time URL filtering paper which was also accepted). Spamalytics II
2010

Iron Mountain December 11— The fourth SysNet hike, a 6-mile out-and-back to the top of Iron Mountain. A great turnout with 23 people on a clear, sunny winter day. Iron Mountain

Stefan Savage December 08— Stefan "Primetime" Savage was named a 2010 ACM Fellow for his contributions to computer systems security, becoming the fourth ACM Fellow in the history of the UCSD systems and networking group and tenth in the UCSD CSE department. He received recognition for such seminal, primetime work on IP traceback (featured on Numb3rs episode "7 Men Out"), inferring denial-of-service attacks (featured on Numb3rs episode "Backscatter"), and remote key duplication from photos (featured on both CSI: Miami episode "Meltdown" and Numb3rs episode "The Fifth Man"). What other of his project ideas will be featured in future TV shows? Only time will tell. But stay tuned to the Access Hollywood SysNet page for future updates...we have a feeling that Hollywood will be unable to resist having your car 0wn3d and purchasing vitamin supplements from scam sites. (Pause) And now a word from our sponsors...

Geoff Voelker santa hat December 3— The annual department holiday party was tremendous fun. See the videos, slides, and pics! Ranjit Jhala performing

December 2— Justin Ma is selected to receive one of the two UCSD CSE dissertation awards this year. Congrats Justin and keep up the good work at Berkeley! Justin Ma

Malveeka Tewari November 29— Malveeka Tewari wins the Yahoo Random Hacks of Kindness Scholarship. Congrats Malveeka!

October 10— YY Zhou's NSF-funded work on reliable computing is featured in this latest Jacobs school release. YY Zhou

CAPTCHA August 11— Marti Motoyama's new study on CAPTCHA-solving economics (conducted with Kirill Levchenko, Chris Kanich, Damon McCoy, Geoff Voelker and Stefan Savage) was covered in Technology Review and later by Brian Krebs in his widely-read security blog. More detail on this "epic new analysis" can be found in the "seminal paper" located here. Stefan Savage discussed the work as well on NPR's Weekend Edition.

July 27— TritonSort victorious! The all-sysnet team of CSE grad students Alex Rasmussen, Radhika Niranjan and Michael Conley with visiting student Alexander Pucher, postdoc Harsha Madhyastha, research scientist George Porter and supreme commander Amin Vahdat recently set the world record for sorting in 60 seconds and tied the record for sorting one trillion records, as part of the 2010 Sorting Benchmark competition. Congrats everyone! See more at the Jacobs School press release and the ever-insightful commentary at Slashdot. TritonSort

SleepServer June 30— Yuvraj Agarwal's SleepServer project was featured in Technology Review. SleepServer is a software-only technique for saving energy by shutting down PCs while preserving the illusion of constant Internet connectivity. See also the Jacobs School press release and local coverage in the San Diego Business Journal or the 2010 USENIX paper for more details.

Mt. San Jacinto June 10— The third SysNet hike climbing Mt. San Jacinto at 10,834 ft. A wilderness hike you could get lost on. Mt. San Jacinto

June 4— Patrick Verkaik successfully defended his dissertation on "Enhancing networking protocols in widely deployed devices". After graduation, Patrick will be joining Meraki, where he will continue his quest to make wireless networks "simply work". Congrats, Patrick! Patrick Verkaik

Hacked Speedometer May 17— Steve Checkoway, Damon McCoy, Brian Kantor, Danny Anderson, Hovav Shacham, Stefan Savage, and collaborators at the University of Washington led by Yoshi Kohno (UCSD alumnus!) describe how to hack cars in their paper at the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. More information at the CEASS site and in articles in JSOE News, New York Times, New Scientist, Technology Review, and PC World.

April 05— Stefan Savage was quoted in a San Diego Daily Transcript round-table meeting on cybersecurity.

March 23— The second SysNet hike to Rockhouse Canyon in the Anza Borrego Desert. A looping, sunny hike exploring the desert. Rockhouse Canyon

Justin Ma March 21— Justin Ma, International Man of Mystery, First of the Tri-advised, Duke of Auto-Tune, Teacher of Pandas and Defender of the Web sucessfully defended his dissertation, "Learning to Detect Malicious URLs". Justin is now on the whirlwind talk circuit, but will shortly be joining UC Berkeley as a postdoc. Congrats Justin! Justin Ma

Alvin AuYoung March 10— SysNet's senior student member, Alvin AuYoung, successfully defended his thesis today. Alvin will be continuting with the group as a PostDoc beginning next quarter. Congrats, Alvin!

February 18— Alex Pucher joins the sysnet group as a visiting scholar from the University of Technology in Vienna, Austria. Welcome, Alex!

January 25— New Scientist article about the Botnet Judo paper by Andreas Pitsillidis, Kirill Levchenko, Chris Kanich, Geoff Voelker Stefan Savage, and coauthors.
2009

December 18— The 2010 NSDI notifications are out, and five papers with UCSD authors were accepted (down one from last year's record of 6). Congrats to Mohammad, Siva, Barath, Nelson, Terry, Harsha, Amin, George and all their collaborators at Washington, Harvard, Wisconsin and Microsoft!

Harsha Madhyastha December 4— Harsha Madhyastha and his co-authors were received the Best Paper award at IMC 2009 today in Chicago for their paper on optimizing CDN performance. Congrats, Harsha!

October 24— The first SysNet hike to Garnet Peak in the Laguna Mountains. A great turnout! Garnet Peak

Amin Vahdat October 7— Amin Vahdat was awarded one of the inaugural Gordon Engineering Leadership Awards. Congrats, Amin!

September 27— Stefan Savage gets featured in Voice of San Diego story. Doc Savage

Dark Cloud September 3— Press for Tom Ristenpart, Hovav Shacham and Stefan Savage for their recent paper examining placement vulnerabilities in third-party cloud computing.

September 2— Mikhail Afanasyev defended his thesis today. Mikhail leaves the group for Brisbane, Australia, furthering SysNet's globalexpansion plans; SysNet alums now inhabit four continents. Good luck, Mikhail! Mikhail Afanasyev

Delaney Grace Vahdat August 31— Hot on the heels of Colin arrives Delaney Grace Vahdat, mustering 8 lbs 8 ozs and measuring 20.25. Congrats Suzanne and Amin!

August 20— Another SIGCOMM paper getting attention, this time by UCSD alumn Ramana Kompella, along with our own Kirill Levchenko, Alex Snoeren and George Varghese. In it they describe efficient router-level techniques for measuring packet loss and latency. Read more about it in Ars Technica. Congrats everyone! Kirill Levchenko

Radhika Niranjan Mysore August 18— Congrats to the PortLand team — Radhika, Andreas, Nathan, Nelson, Pardis, Siva, Vikram, and Amin< — for all the attention they've been getting on their SIGCOMM '09 paper on L2 support for 100,000 port switches. See coverage in Network World, again in Network World (this time setting up a false battle with Microsoft), and Slashdot among others. Only 99,900 ports to go!

August 10— Stephen Checkoway, in collaboration with Hovav Shacham, Brian Kantor and their co-authors from Michigan and Princeton, recently demonstrated a practical attack against the AVC Advantage voting machine — absent any access to source code and overcoming a hardware architecture that prevents code execution from DRAM. More info can be found in the Jacobs School press release here or in their EVT'09 paper here.

Colin July 29— Christine and Alex are the delighted new parents of Colin Luis Alvarado-Snoeren, a bouncing new gadget for the home weighing in at precisely 4.00 kilos. (No instructions included.) Colin & Alex

July 27— CSE alumn and basketball star, Jeannie Albrecht, recently received an NSF CAREER award. Congrats Jeannie!

July 16— Network World magazine quotes Stefan Savage today in its story on Canadian Pharmacy spam. Canadian Pharmacy Spam

Geoff Voelker June 30— Geoff Voelker was promoted to full professor. Congrats Geoff!

June 19— Barath Raghavan filed his dissertation today—the final requirement for his Ph.D—after defending twice: once at UCSD on 5/22/09, and a second time for the rest of his committee at UC Berkeley the following week! Barath will spend next year in the Computer Science department at Williams College, where he rejoins fellow SysNet alum Jeannie Albrecht. Congrats, Dr. Raghavan, on a job well done! BarathClouds

HP June 15— SysNet members received two of sixty national HP 2009 Innovation Research grants: one to Amin Vahdat to continue his existing work on data-center switching and another to Geoff Voelker to support ongoing studies of Internet-based eCrime. Congrats everyone! More information can be found here.

May 1— Network World magazine's list of "20 kick-ass network research projects" includes three efforts with UCSD creators. In the sysnet group: Yuvraj Agarwal's Somniloquy system for power savings (NSDI '09, w/Microsoft collaborators) and Kirill Levchenko's XL routing protocol (SIGCOMM '08), and in our sister security group: Tom Ristenpart's Adeona laptop tracking service (USENIX Security '08, w/UW collaborators). Congrats to everyone for all the ass-kicking! Network World

SIGCOMM Logo April 24— SIGCOMM results came out today and our mojo continues for another year. Three papers with UCSD authors were accepted (plus another by UCSD alumn Cristian Estan). Congrats to the Portland Team, the LDA folks (including UCSD alumn Ramana Kompella) and Patrick Verkaik (helping with the the Microsoft juggernaut this year).

April 22— Congratulations to the SORA team (including our own Geoff Voelker and incoming grad student He Liu) for their NSDI Best Paper award! Geoff, you clearly should go on sabbatical more often :-) NSDI Best Paper Award

Google February 25— Google just announced their Native Client Security Contest for which Stefan Savage has agreed to be one of the judges. Good luck everyone!

February 21— Stefan Savage was quoted in Markoff's recent NYT article Do We Need a New Internet and, even more influential, the infamous CCC blog :-) Stefan Savage

Alex Snoeren February 16— Alex Snoeren has been named a Sloan Fellowship recipient for 2009 joining existing SysNet fellows Stefan Savage, Amin Vahdat and YY Zhou. Congrats Alex!
2008

December 19— The 2009 NSDI notifications are out, and six papers with UCSD authors were accepted (doubling our previous record of three in 2004). In the "hitching yourself to a juggernaut"-dept, four of these papers were collaborations with Microsoft (including one with Sysnet alumn Ranjita Bhagwan). Congrats to everyone!

December 8— Difference Engine: Harnessing Memory Redundancy in Virtual Machines was awarded the inaugural Jay Lepreau Award (pictured) for Best Paper at OSDI 2008. Congratulations to Diwaker Gupta, Sangmin Lee, Michael Vrable, and half (!) of the sysnet faculty riding on the author list. Most of us faculty knew Jay for a long time -- since we were grad students ourselves — and receiving a memorial award in his name is both bittersweet and a singular honor for us. Jay Lepreau

Marvin McNett December 4— Marvin McNett defended his thesis today, and joins Brad Calder at Microsoft working on the Windows Azure Storage service. Congratulations, Marvin!

November 19— Kirill Levchenko's work on XL has been named one of Network World's Top-10 Wicked Cool Algorithms for 2008. Wicked Algorithms

Greg Bruno November 14— Greg Bruno defended his thesis today. Predating most of the sysnet faculty, Greg wins the Ironman graduate student award. Way to rock, Greg!

November 5— Brian Krebs of the Washington Post recently wrote about our paper on spam conversion rates (joint w/ICSI). From there it snowballed a bit. Here are some pointers to derivative stories: The Register, Network World, BBC News, Slashdot, Arstechnica, Schneier's blog, etc. Spamalytics

Diwaker Gupta October 31— Diwaker Gupta defended his thesis today, and will be starting at Aster Data early next year. Congrats Diwaker!

October 30— Our recent paper on duplicating house keys from photos has received a bit of press (e.g., MSNBC, Scientific American, Popular Science, Discover, CNET, CNET [again], The Register, Dark Reading, and others).

October 27— Erik Buchanan and Ryan Roemer were written up in both Information Week and Dark Reading for their work on generalizing return-oriented programming. Ryan and Erik

Kirill Levchenko September 3— Kirill Levchenko defended his thesis today. "XL"ent work, Dr. Levchenko. Kirill continues on as a postdoc with the group.

September 1— Harsha Madhyastha joins the group as a postdoc after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Washington. Welcome, Harsha! Harsha Madhyastha

Christian Finn Yocum August 30— Christian Finn Yocum arrived as a red-eye delivery for Ken and Cal Yocum, weighing in at 8lbs 6ozs. Welcome Christian!

August 19— Amin Vahdat, with students Mohammad Al-Fares and Alex Loukissas, also made a splash at SIGCOMM this week. Their paper on building scalable data-center switches is the most downloaded paper from the on-line 2008 SIGCOMM repository and has garnered attention from the technical press ranging from Network World to StorageMojo. Amin Vahdat in Blue

Kirill Analyzing August 18— UCSD ran a press release today about Kirill Levchenko's work improving routing efficiency via approximate link-state (XL) routing (appearing this week at SIGCOMM). The story has also been picked up by Network World, Slashdot and ZDnet among others.

June 10— Kashi Vishwanath has accepted a position at Microsoft Research in Redmond. Congrats Kashi! Kashi

Imi June 6— Congratulations to Marvin and Karin McNett for ushering in Imogen Kate McNett (Imi)! Imi was born early this morning, weighing in at 8lb 9oz. Welcome Imi!

May 29— Amin Vahdat has been named the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) Chair of Computer Science and Engineering. Congrats Amin! Amin

Chip May 05— Chip Killian has accepted a tenure-track position at Purdue's Department of Computer Science. Chip joins sysnet alumnus Ramana Kompella who started there this year. Congrats Chip!

May 02— David Moore and Colleen Shannon welcomed Meghan Josephine Shannon Moore this morning, the newest elf weighing in at 7lb 1oz. Congrations David and Colleen, and welcome Meghan! Meghan
2007

BarathClouds August 27— Cloud Control with Distributed Rate Limiting has been selected as the winner of this year's ACM SIGCOMM best student paper award! Congratulations to Barath Raghavan, Kashi Vishwanath, Sriram Ramabhadran, Ken Yocum, and Alex Snoeren who co-authored the paper. The JSOE press release can be found here.

July 27— Eric Weigle defended his thesis today and will shortly be starting at Google. Congrats Eric! Eric Weigle

Priya July 17— Priya Mahadevan defended her thesis today and will be soon starting at HP Labs. Congrats Priya!

July 16— Alper Mizrak defended his thesis today and will be starting at VMware in October. Congrats Alper! Alper

Yu-Chung May 30— Yu-Chung Cheng defended his thesis today and will be starting at Google in October. Congrats Yu-Chung!

May 16— Ramana Rao Kompella has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position in the Computer Science department at Purdue University. Congrats, Ramana! Update: Ramana defended his thesis on 7/20/07. Congrats again! Ramana

May 3— Three papers accepted at this year's SIGCOMM! Congrats everyone!

Chip April 11— Chip Killian, James Anderson, Ranjit Jhala and Amin Vahdat have won the best paper award at NSDI for their paper Life, Death and the Critical Transition: Finding Liveness Bugs in Systems Code. Congrats everyone!

February 19— Jeannie Albrecht has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position in the Computer Science department at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. Congrats, Jeannie, and don't forget to pack the snow shovel! Update: Jeanne defended her thesis on 5/30/07. Congrats! Jeannie

Justin Ma February 07— Justin Ma was named one of three recipients of Symantec's new Research Labs Graduate Fellowship. Congrats Justin!

January 1— We have a bunch of our SysNet students who will be hitting the job market this year. At the Ph.D. level this includes: Jeannie Albrecht, Yu-Chung Cheng, Ramana Kompella, Priya Mahadevan, Alper Mizrak, Sriram Ramabhadran and Eric Weigle. At the M.S. level we have: David Anderson and Chris Fleizach. If you're looking to hire great systems builders, researchers and educators check these folks out!
2006

December 14— David Oppenheimer will be taking a position at Google. Congrats David!

November 28— Xianan Zhang successfully defended her thesis today. She returns to VMware, where she already started over the summer. Congratulations, Xianan! Xianan

Kiran November 21— Kiran Tati successfully defended his thesis and will be joining VMware in January. Congratulations, Kiran!

September 21— Huaxia Xia successfully defended his thesis today. Huaxia will soon be starting at Google. Congratulations, Huaxia! Huaxia

Allie September 11— Marvin and Karin McNett accepted delivery of 7.5 lb, 21 inch Alana Cristina McNett (Allie) early this morning. Congrats Marvin and Karin, and welcome Allie!

September 8— Sumeet Singh has been named one of the top 35 innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review magazine. Read the full release here. Congrats Summeet!

September 1— Flavio Junqueira has been awarded the UCSD Departmental Dissertation award. Congrats Flavio!

July 27— John Bellardo sucessfully defended his dissertation research today -- exchanging his black hat for a tassel. Doctor Bellardo will be starting a tenure-track position at Cal Poly starting in September. Congrats John! John

Renata July 7— Renata Teixeira accepted a prestigious position as a tenured researcher for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). She will remain located at the Laboratoire d'informatique de Paris 6. Congratulations, Renata!

June 27— David Anderson was awarded an AFCEA Lockheed Martin Graduate Scholarship for Science and Technology. Congratulations, David! David

June 25— Flavio Junqueira was awarded a Marie Curie Incoming International Fellowship. Congratulations, Flavio! Barath images/barath.jpg 6/9/06 Barath Raghavan has been awarded a Woolley Graduate Leadership Fellowship by the Jacobs School recognizing his academic achievements and service to the department. Congrats Barath!

Flavio May 15— Flavio Junqueira sucessfully defended his thesis and will be leaving us to join Yahoo Research in Barcelona. Congrants Flavio! (expect visitors)

May 5— The May 6th episode of the primetime CBS series Numb3rs featured aspects of our 2001 Inferring Internet Denial of Service Activity paper. The title of the episode, "Backscatter", is a reference to the backscatter analysis technique we developed and the student activities for the episode directly reference our results.

May 1— SIGCOMM notifications are out and five UCSD-authored papers were accepted (breaking our previous record of four papers from '03). Congrats to everyone and see you this Septmeber in Pisa!

April 1— Again, in the confirming-what-we-already-know department, U.S. News and World Report today released their reputation rankings of graduate programs in computer science (last ranked in 2002). UCSD's Systems specialty rose to 9th nationally (UCSD was ranked in the top 20 in all CS specialties) and the department as a whole rose to 13th. UCSD's rapid rise in the rankings over the last decade is unmatched among departments in the top 30. Congrats everyone — keep up the good work!

March 31— NSF announced today the results of the 2006 NSF Graduate Fellowship competition. Michael Vrable was recognized as a fellow and Justin Ma was awarded an honorable mention. Congrats to Michael and Justin!

February 15— UCSD recently acknowledged what the rest of us already know: that Geoff Voelker is one of the top teachers around. Geoff was named to receive the Chancellor's Associates Faculty Award for "excellence in undergraduate teaching" — one of only three Engineering faculty to receive the award in its 16 year history (and the only recipient ever from Computer Science). Congrats Geoff! Geoff Voelker

Kiera February 13— Colleen Shannon and David Moore are joined by the 20-inch Kiera Beth Shannon Moore. Congrats to both!
2005

December 22— Amin Vahdat has been named director of the UCSD Center for Networked Systems. Congrats Amin! Amin Vahdat

December 8— Intel has recently named our own Andrew Chien to be its next Director of Research. We congratulate Andrew and wish him the best of luck at Intel. Intel's announcement can be found here.

Renata Teixeira September 1— Renata Teixeira has been awarded the UCSD Departmental Dissertation award. Congrats Renata!

August 30— Congrats to James Anderson who won one of 13 Summer of Code awards from Google for his work on Tsync. James W. Anderson

Leeann Bent July 11— Leeann Bent successfully defended her thesis today. Dr. Bent will be leaving us to change the world at Google. Congrats Leeann and good luck!

June 28— Alper Mizrak is the recipient of this year's IEEE William C. Carter Award, which is presented annually to recognize individuals who have made significant contributions to dependable computing through their dissertation research. The award is attached to this year's DSN paper, Fatih: Detecting and Isolating Malicious Routers, with Yu-Chung Cheng and their advisors. Congrats! Alper Mizrak receiving William C. Carter Award

Netsift, Inc June 27— Cisco has announced plans to acquire Netsift, Inc today. Congrats to George Varghese, Sumeet Singh, and the whole Netsift team! The UCSD press release can be found here.

June 22— Dejan Kostić has accepted a faculty position at EPFL's School of Computer and Communications Sciences in Switzerland. Dejan is officially a Duke CS grad, but he's been here so long that he's an honorary San Diegan. Congrats Dejan and good luck! Dejan Kostic

May 1— Ishwar Ramani's SyncScan paper is covered in the May issue of MIT Technology Review. Also see the UCSD press release.

April 15— Stefan Savage is profiled in the San Diego Union-Tribune where he describes his life as a catherder.

Jack Alexander Semanko March 9— The pre-K division of the systems & networking group continues to grow by leaps and bounds. We welcome Jack Alexander Semanko (left) born on February 25th and Julie Jane Bellardo (right) born on March 9th. Congrats to Leeann and John and both of their families! Julie Jane Bellardo

February 22— Michelle Panik jumps out of an airplane and lives! Here's the after picture.
2004

December 27— kc claffy has been named one of the 50 most powerful people in networking by Network World magazine. Go kc!

Network Algorithmics December 15— George Varghese's new book Network Algorithmics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Designing Fast Networked Devices was just published by Morgan Kauffman.

December 1— Andrew Chien has been named an ACM Fellow for his "contributions to high-performance computing systems". Congrats Andrew!

September 21— The Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses (CIED) has been selected by the National Science Foundation as one of two large-scale projects in its new CyberTrust program. The CIED effort, a collaboration between our group and the International Computer Science Institute's Center for Internet Research, will receive $6.2M over five years in addition to industrial support from Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and the UCSD Center for Networked Systems (a $10M research center supported by AT&T, Alcatel, Hewlett-Packard, Qualcomm and Sun Microsystems). CIED will study large-scale Internet-based pathogens -- such as worms and viruses -- analyze their behaviors, develop early-warning and forensic capabilities and design automated defense technologies. CIED is led by Stefan Savage at UCSD and Vern Paxson at ICSI with co-PI's including Geoff Voelker, George Varghese, and Nick Weaver.

Officially announcing the award are NSF's press release and a joint press release from UCSD and ICSI. Media coverage of the center's founding can be found at MSNBC, InternetWeek, the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Christian Science Monitor.

Collaborate Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses

September 1— Cristian Estan has been awarded the UCSD Departmental Dissertation award. Congrats Cristi!

Danielle Hope Vahdat July 29— The Systems & Networking group had an unusually productive week and welcomes both Danielle Hope Vahdat (left) born at 9:54am on 7/26 and Kaia Blue Savage (right) born at 8:29am on 7/29. Both families are tired, but doing well. Kaia Blue Savage

July 23— The UCSD Center for Network Systems formally launched today. Supporting research at the intersection of distributed systems, networking and network elements, CNS is sponsored by four initial industrial partners, AT&T, Alcatel, Hewlett Packard and Qualcomm, with commitments totalling $9 million over the next three years. CNS is populated by our group's faculty as well as our peers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA). A formal press release can be found here.

Dmitrii Zagorodnov July 17— Dmitrii Zagorodnov has accepted a postdoc position with Dag Johansen at the University of Tromso in Norway. Congrats Dmitrii and good luck!

June 23— Ranjita Bhagwan has accepted a position at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. Congrats Ranjita and good luck! Ranjita Bhagwan

Cristian Estan May 31— Cristian Estan has accepted a tenure-track position from the University of Wisconsin's Computer Science Department. Congrats Cristi and good luck!

May 22— Leeann Bent received the best student paper award at the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW). The paper, Characterization of a Large Web Site Population with Implications for Content Delivery, was joint with her advisor, Geoff Voelker, and Misha Rabinovich and Zhen Xiao from AT&T Research (this effort was initiated as part of a Center for Networked Systems (CNS) sponsored internship). Congrats Leeann! Leeann Bent

April 2— The systems and networking research seminar (CSE 294) is covering a variety of papers from NSDI and the USENIX Technical Conference in the spring quarter. The schedule is on the CSE 294 class web page.

March 31— Three of our graduate students were recognized in the 2004 NSF Graduate Fellowship competition. Current student Barath Raghavan was selected as a fellow, while Chris Tuttle was awarded an honorable mention. As well, Lisa Cowan, who will be joining us in Fall 2004 was also sected as a fellow. Congratulations to Barath, Chris and Lisa!

Stefan Savage February 23— Stefan Savage has been awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation faculty research fellowship for 2004. These fellowships recognize young faculty "who show the most outstanding promise of making fundamental contributions to new knowledge." Stefan is the second in the Systems and Networking group to receive this honor — Amin Vahdat received a Sloan Fellowship in 2003. More information on UCSD Sloan recipeints for 2004 can be found here.

January 5— The systems and networking research seminar (CSE 294) is covering a variety of papers from SOSP, MOBICOM, NDSS and elsewhere for the winter quarter. The schedule is on the CSE 294 class web page.
2003

September 29— In Fall Quarter, the systems and networking research seminar (CSE 294) will cover selected papers from SOSP. The schedule is on the CSE 294 course web page.

August 29— The National Science Foundation recently awarded a $1.8 million Research Infrastructure grant to UCSD CSE. The award will fund a five-year project to build a high-speed wired and wireless communications, computation and storage grid in the department. Andrew Chien led the proposal, with co-PI's Joesph Pasquale, Stefan Savage and David Kriegman (Vision). More information can be found here.

August 12— We are excited to announce that Amin Vahdat has accepted an offer to join our faculty starting in January of 2004! Amin received his PhD from UC Berkeley, by way of University of Washington, and is most recently an associate professor at Duke. We are honored to have him and his students join our group. Amin Vadat

August 8— John Bellardo's recent presentation at the USENIX Security Symposium included a live demonstration of shutting down all wireless communications using a pocket PC. See descriptions of the event in Government Computer News and Techworld. This work was fully described in his paper 802.11 Denial-of-Service Attacks: Real Vulnerabilities and Practical Solutions, jointly authored with Stefan Savage.

May 12— Anand Balachandran has accepted a full-time research position at Intel Research in Seattle. Congrats Anand!

April 28— Four UCSD papers were accepted to ACM SIGCOMM this year. In addition, two UCSD CSE Systems alumni (Harrick Vin, PhD 1993, now at UT Austin, and Kevin Fall, PhD 1994, now at Intel Research in Berkeley) also had papers accepted. Congrats everyone!

April 11— In Spring Quarter, the systems and networking research seminar (CSE 294) will cover selected papers from SIGMETRICS, FAST, the Oakland conference and IMW. The schedule is on the CSE 294 course web page.

April 8— Alvin Auyoung has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Congrats Alvin!

Joe Pasquale April 8— Joe Pasquale has been awarded the UCSD Distinguished Teaching Award for his exceptional teaching record. Way to go Joe!

February 7— David Moore and Stefan Savage were part of a team that recently analyzed the spread of the Sapphire/Slammer worm. They showed that the worm compromised 90 percent of its victims within the first 10 minutes, reaching a peak probing rate of over 50 million probes per second. The results were widely reported (including CNN, the Washington Post, and InfoWorld). The full report can be found here. 05:29 UTC to 06:00 UTC

January 3— In Winter Quarter, the systems and networking research seminar (CSE 294) will cover selected papers from OSDI and USITS. The schedule is on the CSE 294 course web page.

Alex Looking Cool January 3— The systems and networking group enthusiastically welcomes Alex Snoeren, who joins us as a new Assistant Professor. Alex recently completed his PhD defense at MIT on "A Session-based Approach to Internet Mobility".
2002

December 19— George Varghese was honored as an ACM Fellow for his contributions in efficient, scalable algorithms. Congratulations, George!

January 10— Acting Professor Stefan Savage finally defended his thesis. He received the University of Washington's William Chan Memorial Dissertation Award for this work.
2001

September 1— International fashionplates David Moore, Geoff Voelker and Stefan Savage grace the cover of this month's Information Security Magazine for their analysis of denial-of-service attacks. Sure to be a collector's item! :-) David Moore, Stefan Savage, Geoff Voelker

August 13— David Moore, Geoff Voelker and Stefan Savage received the best paper award award at the USENIX Security Symposium for their paper Inferring Internet Denial of Service Activity. Congrats guys!

May 25— There has been considerable press around the previous denial-of-service report, including stories or mentions in The New York Times, CNN , Wired and New Scientist. A more complete listing can be found here.

May 22— Geoff Voelker received the Tau Beta Pi Outstanding Engineering Teaching Award. Great going Geoff!

May 21— Group members David Moore, Geoff Voelker and Stefan Savage recently completed the first empirical study of world-wide denial-of-service attack activity. They found roughly 4000 attacks active per week against over 5,000 distinct targets. More information can be found here.