March 2009 - talks - lists.cs.princeton.edu

3pm talk today on content distribution and network evolution (room 402 in CS building)
by Jennifer Rexford 30 Mar '09

30 Mar '09

Speaker: Kobus van der Merwe, AT&T Lab--Research Title: It's the Content, Stupid. How Content is driving Network Evolution. Date/time: 3:00-4:00pm on Monday March 30 Location: room 402 in the CS building Abstract: Security and robustness, operational complexity and dealing with demand growth are arguably the most significant challenges facing large scale networks. In this talk I will show how Internet growth is driven by significant increases in content related traffic. Efficiently dealing with the distribution of this content presents a significant challenge to service providers. I will present our work on load-aware anycast which offers a cross-layer approach to content distribution (considering both content and network layers) . This work is currently being readied for trial in the AT&T network and directly builds on our earlier work on Closed-loop Route Control where route selection is informed by network intelligence. As such the work presents a successful case study on the transition from research concept to production. However, this work also serves to illustrate how difficult it is to make this transition, or indeed more generally, how difficult it is to effect any change in a provider network. In the second part of my talk I will present our recent work on a platform called ShadowNet. With ShadowNet we aim to address this fundamental challenge of network change by introducing an operational trial/test network which "sits between" a lab testbed and the production network. Specifically, each ShadowNet node is composed of a collection of carrier-grade equipment (routers, switches and servers). Each node is connected to both the Internet and other ShadowNet nodes via a (virtual) backbone. ShadowNet exploits the strong separation between logical functionality and physical realization that if offered by modern equipment. As such ShadowNet is a sharable, programmable and composable infrastructure, that allows multiple technology and service trials to be executed in parallel in a realistic operational setting. I will describe the ShadowNet control framework, our prototype implementation and deployment plans. Bio: Kobus Van der Merwe is a Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Internet and Networking Systems Research Center at AT&T Labs - Research, where he is fortunate to be doing networking systems research that are both forward looking and sometimes find application in the AT&T network. His current research interests include network management, control and operation, network security and content distribution.

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3pm talk today on enterprise networks in CS 402
by Jennifer Rexford 26 Mar '09

26 Mar '09

Professor Aditya Akella is visiting from U. Wisconsin-Madison on Thursday March 26, and giving a talk at 3-4pm in room 402 -- see title and abstract below. Speaker: Aditya Akella, U. Wisconsin-Madison Title: Managing the Complexity of Modern Enterprise Networks Place/time: 3-4pm Thu Mar 26 in CS 402 Abstract: Operator interviews and anecdotal evidence suggest that an operator's ability to manage a network decreases as the network becomes more complex. Today, there is no way to quantify how complex a network's design is, nor how complexity may impact network management activities. In this talk, I will present a suite of "complexity models" that describe the routing design and configuration of a network in a succinct fashion, abstracting away details of the underlying configuration languages. Our models, and the complexity metrics arising from them, capture the difficulty of configuring control and data plane behaviors on routers. They also measure the inherent complexity of the reachability constraints that a network implements via its routing design. Our models simplify network design and management by facilitating comparison between alternative designs for a network. We tested our models on seven networks, including four universities and three enterprises. We validated the results through systematic interviews with the operators of five of the networks. We found the metrics to be predictive of the issues operators face when reconfiguring their networks. A surprising result of our study was uncovering the reasons for operators choosing the designs they did. Given the frequency with which configuration errors are responsible for major outages, we believe that creating techniques to quantify the complexity of a network's design is an important first step to reducing that complexity. In databases, software engineering and other fields, metrics and benchmarks have driven the direction of the field by defining what is desirable and what is not. In proposing these metrics, we hope to start a similar conversation for network design. I will end the talk with a brief description of our recent work on WAN optimization.

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Talk Today - Computer Science
by Ginny Hogan 25 Mar '09

25 Mar '09

Michelle Girvan, University of Maryland, will present her talk "Unveiling Isolated and Layered Communities in Complex Networks , at 4:15pm today Computer Science Room 105.

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3pm Mon Mar 30 talk on "how content is driving network evolution" in room 402
by Jennifer Rexford 25 Mar '09

25 Mar '09

Kobus van der Merwe is visiting Monday from AT&T -- talk details below. If you'd like to visit with Kobus in the afternoon, please let me know. He has a few slots. Speaker: Kobus van der Merwe, AT&T Lab--Research Title: It's the Content, Stupid. How Content is driving Network Evolution. Location: room 402 in the CS building Date/time: 3:00-4:00pm on Monday March 30 Abstract: Security and robustness, operational complexity and dealing with demand growth are arguably the most significant challenges facing large scale networks. In this talk I will show how Internet growth is driven by significant increases in content related traffic. Efficiently dealing with the distribution of this content presents a significant challenge to service providers. I will present our work on load-aware anycast which offers a cross-layer approach to content distribution (considering both content and network layers) . This work is currently being readied for trial in the AT&T network and directly builds on our earlier work on Closed-loop Route Control where route selection is informed by network intelligence. As such the work presents a successful case study on the transition from research concept to production. However, this work also serves to illustrate how difficult it is to make this transition, or indeed more generally, how difficult it is to effect any change in a provider network. In the second part of my talk I will present our recent work on a platform called ShadowNet. With ShadowNet we aim to address this fundamental challenge of network change by introducing an operational trial/test network which "sits between" a lab testbed and the production network. Specifically, each ShadowNet node is composed of a collection of carrier-grade equipment (routers, switches and servers). Each node is connected to both the Internet and other ShadowNet nodes via a (virtual) backbone. ShadowNet exploits the strong separation between logical functionality and physical realization that if offered by modern equipment. As such ShadowNet is a sharable, programmable and composable infrastructure, that allows multiple technology and service trials to be executed in parallel in a realistic operational setting. I will describe the ShadowNet control framework, our prototype implementation and deployment plans. Bio: Kobus Van der Merwe is a Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Internet and Networking Systems Research Center at AT&T Labs - Research, where he is fortunate to be doing networking systems research that are both forward looking and sometimes find application in the AT&T network. His current research interests include network management, control and operation, network security and content distribution.

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talk today @ 1:30, Gen. William Lord
by Ed Felten 25 Mar '09

25 Mar '09

General William Lord, commander of the Air Force Cyber Command, will speak today at 1:30, in the third floor open space in Sherrerd Hall. ===== Revolutions in Warfare—The Air Force’s Way Ahead When: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 - 1:30 PM Where: Sherrerd Hall, 3rd Floor Open Space Who: Major General William Lord In today’s conflicted cyber frontier, the Department of Defense and the Air Force struggle with the ways to leverage cyber for military advantage. Traditionally relegated to an Information Technology support role, cyberspace has recently emerged as a stand-alone domain, similar to land, air, sea, and space. Cyber can be viewed as an integrating domain, bringing synergy across the domains and multiplying effects in ways never before seen. Our nation’s enemies are already taking advantage of these benefits, as our nation seeks to find new ways to recruit the best and brightest to counter their actions. Amidst this backdrop, the Air Force–in partnership with other DoD and National Agencies–is forging a way forward to capitalize on these characteristics, enhancing enterprise network security and posturing capabilities to launch us into the coming decades. Bio: Maj. Gen. William T. Lord is Commander, Air Force Cyberspace Command (Provisional), Barksdale Air Force Base, La. He is responsible for establishing cyberspace as a domain in and through which the Air Force flies and fights. In his current duty, he is responsible for establishing a new numbered Air Force under Air Force Space Command which will be responsible for the organization, training and equipping of combat forces to operate in cyberspace. General Lord is a 1977 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy. He holds a bachelor’s degree in biological and life sciences, and master’s degrees in business administration and national resource strategy. General Lord held various duties with tours in Europe, U.S. Central Command and the White House. He has had multiple staff assignments, including two major air commands as Director of Communications and Information Systems. General Lord has commanded at the detachment, squadron, group, wing and joint levels. Prior to his current position, General Lord was Director, Cyberspace Transformation and Strategy, Secretary of the Air Force Office of Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer, the Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

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Michelle Girvan [UMD, IAS] talk on Wednesday, 3/25, 4:15pm
by Michael J. Freedman 23 Mar '09

23 Mar '09

Hi all, Our colloquia speaker this week, Michelle Girvan, will be talking about clustering and networks. Beyond being a high school and college friend of mine, Michelle is a statistical physicist by training (her PhD at Cornell was with Steve Strogatz and postdoc at the Sante Fe Institute), but has been venturing into problems of interest to computer scientists, applied mathematicians, and sociologists. Michelle is an assistant professor at University of Maryland, but has been visiting IAS for the past year. The colloquia will be help at 4:15pm in the small lecture room (105). --mike ---- Unveiling Isolated and Layered Communities in Complex Networks Michelle Girvan, University of Maryland, IAS In the past decade, a number of studies have focused on the statistical properties of networked systems such as social networks and the World-Wide Web. Researchers have focused on properties common to many real-world networks such as small-world properties, power-law degree distributions and network transitivity. In this talk, I will focus on another property found in many networks, that of community structure, in which network nodes are joined together in tightly knit groups, between which there are only looser connections. I will discuss algorithms for discovering community structure in networks, beginning with methods that strictly partition the nodes into non-overlapping groups. These methods work by detecting the boundaries between communities and do not require the user to input the number of desired communities a priori. I will also discuss methods for finding highly overlapping or "layered" community structure in networks. In this case, using a combination of the aforementioned techniques, simulated annealing, and other tools borrowed from statistical physics, it is possible to find multiple possible divisions of the network into different communities. I'll demonstrate that the algorithms are highly effective at discovering community structure in both computer-generated and real-world network data, and show how they can be used to shed light on the sometimes dauntingly complex structure of networked systems.

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11am Tue Mar 31 talk on information assurance research at the NSA
by Jennifer Rexford 18 Mar '09

18 Mar '09

Title: The Information Assurance Mission and Research at National Security Agency (NSA) Speakers: Mr. Richard George, Dr. Robert Runser, and Ms. Christine Coldwell Date/time: 11am Tuesday March 31 Location: 101 Friend Center Mr. Richard George, the Information Assurance Technical Director at NSA, will discuss the information assurance mission at NSA, the historical context for this mission, and the pillars necessary to ensure information security in today's ever-changing world of technology and threats. Dr. Robert Runser *01, a Research Scientist at NSA, will present a brief overview of research at NSA and discuss results from a forward-looking project investigating the potential of fiber-optic quantum key distribution (QKD) as a means to secure future networks. Ms. Christine Coldwell '99 *00, a Senior Technical Development Program Analyst, will describe her career path in industry and government, how a Princeton education has prepared her, and why she is inspired by her career at the National Security Agency. Hosted by Professor Paul Prucnal CNSA Center for Networks Science and Applications

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Talk today - 4:20pm COS 105
by Ginny Hogan 18 Mar '09

18 Mar '09

Moni Naor, Weizmann Institute, talk "Leakage Resistant Public key Cryptography" will be today at 4:20pm -Computer Science Room 105 -

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3pm Thu Mar 26 talk on enterprise networks in CS 402
by Jennifer Rexford 11 Mar '09

11 Mar '09

Professor Aditya Akella is visiting from U. Wisconsin-Madison on Thursday March 26, and giving a talk 3-4pm in room 402 -- see title and abstract below. Please let me know if you would like to meet with Aditya and if you would like to join for lunch/dinner: Speaker: Aditya Akella, U. Wisconsin-Madison Title: Managing the Complexity of Modern Enterprise Networks Place/time: 3-4pm Thu Mar 26 in CS 402 Abstract: Operator interviews and anecdotal evidence suggest that an operator's ability to manage a network decreases as the network becomes more complex. Today, there is no way to quantify how complex a network's design is, nor how complexity may impact network management activities. In this talk, I will present a suite of "complexity models" that describe the routing design and configuration of a network in a succinct fashion, abstracting away details of the underlying configuration languages. Our models, and the complexity metrics arising from them, capture the difficulty of configuring control and data plane behaviors on routers. They also measure the inherent complexity of the reachability constraints that a network implements via its routing design. Our models simplify network design and management by facilitating comparison between alternative designs for a network. We tested our models on seven networks, including four universities and three enterprises. We validated the results through systematic interviews with the operators of five of the networks. We found the metrics to be predictive of the issues operators face when reconfiguring their networks. A surprising result of our study was uncovering the reasons for operators choosing the designs they did. Given the frequency with which configuration errors are responsible for major outages, we believe that creating techniques to quantify the complexity of a network's design is an important first step to reducing that complexity. In databases, software engineering and other fields, metrics and benchmarks have driven the direction of the field by defining what is desirable and what is not. In proposing these metrics, we hope to start a similar conversation for network design. I will end the talk with a brief description of our recent work on WAN optimization.

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Talk Today Computer Science Dept.
by Ginny Hogan 04 Mar '09

04 Mar '09

Bjarne Stroustrup, Texas A&M, will present his talk, "50 Years of C++", at 4:15pm today Computer Science Room 105 -

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