Article analysis

Today we're looking at an article on Path splicing that appears in Proc. ACM SIGCOMM [more on that later] in August of '08. This is one of the articles that is available through Nick Feamster's website.

This article was written with Mutaza Motiwala, Megan Elmore, and Santosh Vempala. Motiwala and Elmore are students of his while Santosh Vempala is a fellow professor at Georgia Tech's College of Computing/School of Computer Science. Vempala is the Director of the Algorithms and Randomness Center and Think tank. The article is on the design and evaluation of path splicing and on where this can be applied.

Looking at the References for the article they are predominantly conference and symposium works. There are a few Internet drafts [Internet drafts are exactly that- drafts of articles that appear on the Internet. They are not necessarily in final form and have not been formerly published, work may still be ongoing]. Also used are a few white papers [a marketing tool used to explain a new product. They could contain how the product/technology was developed, evaluated, and where the product can be best used. White papers may include or accompany FAQs and Spec sheets].

I was surprised by the presence of a few works from early in the decade. In the rapidly changing technology field I would think that anything over a year old would be outdated. This would explain the heavy use of conference papers and the use of Internet drafts and white papers. These would be the sources for the latest work and developments. The older works were mentioned in the Related work section, where they surveyed "related work in three areas- multihoming and mulitpath routing, fast recovery schemes, and overlay networks" (Section 3). So the older works were used to evaluate ideas that had already come up.

the homepage

The amount of information found on Nick Feamster's web page is almost staggering. Along with the basics (contact and school information) he has provided links to his curriculum vitae (CV), published works (with links to most of the articles), and lists of students and courses (with links to the syllabus) taught. Also included are his bookmarks, through Delicious the social bookmarking site, and Twitter. Today I took a look at his research statement also available through his web page.

Nick Feamster's research is in real-world solutions to network problems and issues using a principled approach. Meaning finding applications to current hassles and headaches with "provable properties and solid theoretical backing".

According to his research statement there are 3 themes to his work:

1) "Designing inherently robust and resilient networks", referring to work on improving network accountability (reasons for failure or performance loss) and reliability (keeping it running well).

2) "Defending against unwanted traffic", referring to Spam filtering. Who wants spam? The approach here is rather than trying to filter the contents of an email, filter on how the email was sent. "In other words, examine the network-level behavior of the email sender and classify the spam based on whether the observed sending behavior likely corresponds to a legitimate spammer."

3) "Improving fault detection and diagnosis" by analyzing configurations before going live. After deployment, improve the data operators use to pinpoint problem areas.

Next we'll take a look at a published work.

Who is Nicholas Feamster?

Nick Feamster is an Assistant Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He recently won one of the 2007 National Science Foundation's Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). His work involves several aspects of computer networking.

What is this?

This Blog is set up to study the research methodology of Nick Feamster.
Why?
To find out how he and his team find the information used in their research and what they do with it. The idea is to study the research methods of someone working in the field so people entering the field or just curious about it can learn where or how to find information in it.