In Spring, 2025, I will be teaching the undergraduate networking practicum. As of this administration, this course is being revamped and restructured, to be more timely, and more software-oriented for better relevance to Computer Science students. Rather than focus on specific hardware switch or router models from any commercial vendor, the practicum will now focus on a fully software-realized switch, on the ubiquitous Linux platform. This will not only allow students to work on a virtual environment that can be accessed from anywhere (instead of requiring physical presence at a lab), it will also familiarize students with a software system that is much more likely to be useful as a building block for the increasingly softwarized and software-defined network systems of the near future. This course will not require or provide CCNA or any similar other certification. Interested students can refer to the syllabus attached.
Author: <span>rdutta</span>
Congrats to Sonali Chaudhari for passing the Oral Preliminary Exam in Fall, 2024. For her homestretch of the PhD journey, she will continue to work on trajectory optimization of autonomous drones, and also work on integrating this work with an O-RAN based architecture to allow cooperative trajectory control between drones and basestations.
Congrats to Tristan Mullins for passing the Written Preliminary Exam in Fall, 2024. Tristan will work on a research area he has articulated, related to the general problem of detecting consistency and agreement in observations of the same physical environment by multiple unrelated IoT agents, and converting that to bootstrap trust among such agents.
The paper Open RAN testbeds with controlled air mobility, recently accepted for publication in Elsevier Computer Communications, explores the requirements for experimental demonstration and verification of facilities to study O-RAN wireless and autonomous UASs jointly. We look at over 25 testbed facilities in the light of these requirements, including our own AERPAW. The paper is published as part of the “Large-scale Experimental Platforms for Computer and Networking Research: Recent Advances and Challenges” Special Issue, which will be available in print in December 2024. The paper is available for free download here till November 13th, 2024.
Tripti defended her thesis, entitled “A Trust Model for IoT Systems Using Physical Capabilities”, in April, 2024. Her thesis work articulated the essential problem in creating trust in IoT and cyberphysical networks, and showed that information-security mechanisms (such as crypto and blockchain) were not sufficient in generating foundational trust among agents in a multi-agent IoT network, since no amount of information security mechanisms could verify the truthfulness of an agent a priori – but since agents were embedded in a common physical context, the shared physical space could be used to verify the truth of assertions made by agents, using a framework she built. Tripti goes on to employment at NetApp.
Many students email me, and other faculty members, to request funding in the form of Research or Teaching Assistantships, or as hourly graders. I quite understand such requests, but sadly, my response is always that I have none to offer. This is not a reflection on your resume, but due to factors explained below (if you are interested). The bottomline is that I can do no more than mail you back the same information as below. Given how constrained my time and availability is, I often have to choose not to respond to you at all; I hope you understand the situation, and take this post as my blanket response.
TA positions are assigned by the department (specifically the Graduate Office of the department), not by individual instructors. The department uses our available TA slots mainly to fund PhD students; it is our primary means of supporting PhD students early in their career, when they typically do not have any research funding. Once the Graduate Office has decided the list of TAs, individual instructors such as myself can indeed express preference for some available TA for some course through the GradWatch system – but we cannot ask for somebody that has not been awarded TA funding to be awarded TA funding.
RA funding does become available from time to time, but like many other faculty I would only consider awarding such funding to research students after working with them initially for some time (while they are supported by TA positions), if such work is going well. And I tend to work exclusively with PhD students, not Master’s students (see further comments in the “Prospective Students” section).
Sometimes hourly grader slots do open up, and then they are indeed up to individual instructors to award. When I have any such available, I post them here, and invite interested students to submit resumes. At this time there is no such post, because I do not have any grader hours assigned to my courses for Fall 2023.
Rarely I have development jobs open in support for my research projects that carry an hourly pay appointment. Again, I would post them here and other university forums; if you do not see any, that is because I have none open at the moment.
All the best to you in your academic endeavors; unfortunately I cannot offer you any funding.
In Fall, 2024, I will be teaching a section of CSC/ECE 573. For more information about this and other courses, please see the “Teaching” page. For registered students, initial information will become available through the Moodle locker for the course during the week preceding the beginning of classes on August 19th. The syllabus is also attached here.
Please note that this is NOT a course that focuses on TCP and IP. While those topics (and a few other protocols) are covered in the first part of the course, that is considered a recap. The main focus of the course is in gaining an appreciation of the forwarding plane of the Internet, and the various aspects of its operation.
This section will be taught entirely as a flipped class. Slides and video lectures will be provided beforehand, and students will be responsible for going through those ahead of time. Lecture periods will be spent exclusively in doing quizzes, working on homework questions, and discussing any questions that come up as a result.
I continue to serve as MSCN advisor for students in registered in the Computer Science department. if you are a CSC student enrolled in the MSCN program, you should bring advising issues to me. (ECE students in the program should go to the ECE coordinator, as always.)
How do you start on the process of PhD research, if you have never done research before? What are the processes you will be expected to follow, and tasks you will be expected to perform, without necessarily being told how to? How do you know when you have become ready to “do research”?? Is P=NP?!?
We can’t tell you that last one, but we hope to help you with the others! We will go over the life cycle of research projects, the anatomy of research papers, how to read and write reviews, how to develop research ideas, and how to present and communicate research. This course is only open for CSC PhD students. If you are a first-year PhD student, you can also earning a full course credit toward your degree.
Since 2016, Dr. Dutta has taught this seminar every Fall on preparing for academic research, targeted at incoming Ph.D. students, and intended to smooth their entry into the research life. The students who take it learn and practice the processes of academic research, in preparation of working with their advisors. Incoming Ph.D. students will also be able to count this seminar as a full course toward their Ph.D. degree, and make contact with other faculty through this course.
In Fall, 2023, Dr. Dutta taught this course for the eighth and last time. Starting Fall, 2024, it will be administered by other CSC faculty, and eventually is planned to be absorbed in a more comprehensive sequence of courses and credits for incoming PhD students.
Will successfully defended his doctoral thesis in October, 2022! He has been working full time as a Network Engineer and Architect at Duke University, but managed to make progress on research, and publishing, even while doing so. His work focused on the evolutionary use of Software Defined Networking techniques in real enterprise networks, by studying the pros and cons of such deployments in real-world environments, and identifying optimal factoring and placement of network policy, from the level of individual tables within Network Elements, to enterprise-wide views. In the final stretch of his doctoral work, Will focused on the large-scale end of such deployments.
Rob successfully defended his doctoral thesis in April, 2021, in the videoconference format that became the norm during the Covid-19 pandemic! He was interested in network architecture in general, and worked on both the ChoiceNet project, and the JUNO Optical ChoiceNet project, and designed service representation, negotiation, purchasing, and provisioning methods in those frameworks. The bulk of this thesis research went toward a comprehensive study of the effects of interaction of customer and provider strategies in hybrid optical packet-circuit networks, and designing strategies that result in collaborative optimization of network performance, for a win-win scenario. He published over a dozen papers during his PhD. For the last few years of his PhD, he has been also working full time at NetApp, where he continued immediately following his doctoral defense.