Over the last few years we have witnessed the phenomenal growth of the Internet and our society's increased reliance on the connectivity it provides and the systems that build upon it.
In the last decade alone, the estimated Internet user population has grown 5 times to include more than 3 billion people in most every corner of the world. Concurrently, our distributed systems have evolved from small-scale, basic communication services to Internet-wide systems that bring us together, store our data safe and at reach, keep us informed and entertained, and search for our neighbors in the universe.
These staggering trends are exposing the limits in our understanding of how to build systems, what the underlying network looks like, how people interact in these environments, and even the research model we should apply to explore these issues. My work is motivated by these challenges.
I am particularly interested in the measurement, analysis and design of Internet-scale distributed systems and their supporting infrastructure. My research approach is primarily experimental -- building and evaluating ideas in working systems. Much of my work focuses on improving the visibility of measurement of networked systems and leveraging this visibility to characterize distributed systems, networks and their interactions, and design new and improved systems based on the gained insight.
The uniqueness of my work lies in applying an experimental approach to the study of Internet-scale distributed systems, running in end user's devices , and developing system solutions that can be readily deployed and adopted.
My research group is one of the few in the world for which ``impact'' is measured from thousands to million of users of our technologies. We have released over 15 software artifacts and datasets, many of which have gained large, world-wide adoption. For instance, our popular Ono software, a realization of the work presented at SIGCOMM 2008, has nearly 1.5 million users as of December, 2014. Dasu, a more recent released aimed at broadband characterization and network experimentation presented at NSDI 2013, was adopted by more than 100k users in just over a year. One of our latest software release -- namehelp, an end-host solution to the problematic interaction between public DNS services and content distribution problem (IMC 2012), has been installed by over 144k users since October 2012. Our latest release is Scale Up a Chrome extension to characterize and improve your Web quality of experience in-flight.