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.
Category: <span>Current Interest</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.
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.
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.)