About me

I am currently an assistant professor in computer science at UC Santa Barbara. At UCSB, I co-direct the Systems and Networking Lab (SNL). I received my Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University.

As a systems researcher, I design and build flexible, scalable, and trustworthy systems that solve the real-world problems at the intersection of networking, security, and machine learning. Specifically, I am interested in developing self-driving networks that use programmable data planes and machine learning to provide highly available, reliable, performant and secure network connectivity at lower costs to under-served communities.

I regularly work with different industry partners, such as Microsoft Research, Verizon, ViaSat, ATT, Intel, Ookla, etc., on problems related to development and deployment of ML-based artifacts for networking.

Please find more details about my current research here.

Prospective Students

If you are interested in learning how to develop and deploy production-ready ML-based solutions for networking, come work with us.

🆕 I am actively looking for Ph.D. students and post-docs for my group.

I also actively work with undergraduate students at UCSB through different programs (DIMAP, ERSP, etc.). I mentor students outside UCSB on their undergraduate thesis projects and regularly host visiting students.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Selected Publications

• AI/ML for Network Security: The Emperor has no Clothes, ACM CCS, 2022.
• The Importance of Contextualization of Crowdsourced Active Speed Test Measurements, ACM IMC, 2022.
• Detecting Ephemeral Optical Events with OpTel, USENIX NSDI, 2022
• (How Much) Does a Private WAN Improve Cloud Performance?, IEEE INFOCOM 2020
• Sonata: Query-Driven Streaming Network Telemetry, ACM SIGCOMM 2018
• iSDX: An Industrial-Scale Software Defined Internet Exchange Point, USENIX NSDI 2016
• SDX: A Software Defined Internet Exchange, ACM SIGCOMM 2014

Recognition

• Honorable Mention, SIGCOMM Dissertation Award, 2018
• Best Paper Award winner, ACM SOSR, 2017
• USENIX Best of the Rest Paper Award for Best Paper in all USENIX Conferences, 2016
• USENIX Community Contribution Award, USENIX NSDI, 2016
• Internet-2 Innovation Award winner, 2013

Services

• Organized workshops for NSF
  • NSF Workshop on Internet Frontiers & Opportunities, Nov 2021
  • NSF Workshop on NextG Security, Oct 2020
  • NSF Workshop on Measurements for Self-driving Networks, Apr 2019
• Program Committee Member
  • ACM SIGCOMM: 2021, 2020
  • USENIX NSDI: 2023, 2021, 2020
  • ACM SOSR: 2021, 2019
  • ACM CoNEXT: 2019

News

• June 2022: Sanjay Chandrasekaran received the Computer Science Outstanding Graduate Research Award.
• June 2022: Rohan Bhatia received the Computer Science Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.
• June 2022: Chaofan Shuo received the prestigious Computer Science Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award.
• Apr 2022: Congcong Miao (Tencent) will present our work on detecting ephemeral network events in optical transport network at NSDI 2022.
• Feb 2022: I talked about our efforts to democratize networking research at Google’s Networking Research Summit.
• Jan 2022: Sanjay Chandrasekaran received M-Lab’s Research Fellowship 2022. Sanjay will be using the programmable research infrastructure at UCSB to study the relationship between the quality of experience (QoE) for applications and various QoS metrics from the network.